Tell me your favourite animal fun fact!

Peregrine falcons are highly territorial and will protect their nests at all costs. When nesting alongside the California coast they will go after the California brown pelicans who happen to fly too close to a falcon nest. The falcons will go after the pelicans head and bill, causing the pelican to lose its flight momentum and plummet to the ground.

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The female Tussock Moth doesn’t have wings and is flightless. Their only purpose is to lay eggs.

Foxes have retractable claws and can climb trees. Foxes are more like cats even though they are in the dog family. They grin when scared.

Rabbits groom themselves like cats. Baby bunnies are called kittens.

Squirrels can turn their ankles 180 degrees while climbing. The hind legs of squirrels are double jointed.

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Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the bird, I think it was some kind of sandpiper maybe.
When you put them in front of a mirror, e.g. they are seeing an identically strong opponent, they don’t know what to do, whether to fight or flee, so they fall asleep instead.
I can heavily relate :smile:

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I’ve got one more!
Drepanosaurs were a diverse group of very strange reptiles that lived during the Triassic. The majority were adapted for arboreal environments, and are pretty similar to animals like tamanduas in general body shape and proportions.

A particular drepanosaur, Megalancosaurus, is known to have a prehensile digit only on the front hands of some individuals (alongside a lot of other really alien features). It is therefore suggested that the prehensile digit was a form of sexual dimorphism, allowing one sex to better hold onto a branch during copulation.

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What happened? We need to know if the firefly and your 3D pen ended up finding true love.

(Poor misguided firefly, though)

In addition to water from food, rattlesnakes will wrap themselves up into little pancakes to collect water during rain and drink it off of their body. Their scales are hydrophobic and channeled to aid in collecting water this way.

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I’m always amazed by small animals punching way above their weight. A few days ago I saw common terns repeatedly divebomb an egret that got too close to their nesting spot. The egret decided that discretion is the better part of valour.

I can’t really remember, but I think we got him to go outside to find his true love where there were more fireflies X-D

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I’m always fascinated by insect mating habits. It’s almost like watching those reality TV dating shows with all the drama, but instead of the drama being the hook, its the weirdness. Like one of my favourites is the fact that craneflies attract females by essentially drumming on their you-know-whats.

Another romantic one is with termite queens and kings. Rather than mating and dying, like most eusocial insects, the termite king stays with the queen until he dies. They also take care of their first brood together until they grow into adults and can start to care for their siblings. Termites are just fascinating in themselves.

The way which mother centipedes curl around their brood is way too cute. Like:

But one which I have learned recently that even I didn’t know is that polar bears have hollow fur, which is what makes them white, but also makes them weigh less so they stay more buoyant in the water.

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OHMIGOSH these are all so cool! And the mother centipede!!! I love it! Lokk at her with her tiny babies!

One of my favourite animal fun facts has got to be the insane sexual dimorphism found in anglerfish. It blows peoples minds whenever i show them the little potatoes that are male anglers.

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This is honestly very cute! Thank you for sharing this picture, I had no idea!

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The wierdest one I know is that a disease called canine transmissible tumor is, in fact, the original dog who first developed the disease. It was discussed on the forums here: Where do Transmissible Tumors fall in the tree of life (if at all)? - Nature Talk - iNaturalist Community Forum

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypodium_hydriforme

Polypodium and the SCANDAL hypothesis are wild. I love having a few crazy facts on tap to show people that life is weirder and wilder than they can possibly imagine

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My favorite is my cat

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Adult T. rex bit down with somewhere around 10,000 pounds of force and the tips exerting roughly 400,000 psi.

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• Ostriches only have two toes (they’re weird in general)
• Barn owls have asymmetrical ears to hear better
• Cinereous mourner (it’s a bird) chicks have bright orange colouring similar to the colours of a local poisonous caterpillar so the chick isn’t threatened

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Yes they are… the often strike me as very dinosaurier-y… seeing them lets me imagine a bit how life waaaaay back then could have been :-D

Other fun-fact: each of their eyes is larger then their brain… in fact, they have the largest eyes of al terrestrial vertebrates… not much space for anything else in their cute little heads :laughing:

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Not my favorite, but roaches can breathe underwater and live more than a week without their heads

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