Animal Facts

A porcupine can swallow considerable amounts of prussic acid and remain none the worse for the experience. The same quantity of the acid would be enough to poison 100 humans.

Baby Mink are born blind and can't see until they're a month old. The mating of two minks has been known to last eight hours.

The male Darwin's frog from Chile swallows the eggs its mate lays and keeps them in a sac under its chin. Able to accommodate up to seventeen tadpoles, it waits until they are big enough, then opens its mouth and releases them to the outside world.

Measuring less than an inch long and weighing just one tenth of an ounce, every autumn the ruby-throated hummingbird propels its tiny body on a non-stop 500 mile flight from the United States across the Gulf of Mexico to South America.

The Common wood frog is able to withstand the Arctic winter by turning itself into an ice cube. The frog allows two-thirds of its body water to freeze, thereby stopping its heart, brain and breathing functions and slowing its metabolism to a crawl. As long as the frogs body temperature doesn't drop below about minus seven degrees C, it will survive on the glucose in its systems until the spring thaws.

The Blue Whale's blood vessels are so large a child could crawl through them.

The size of a female Baboon's bottom signals how good she is as a mother. The bigger the backside, the greater the baboon's physical stature as a child-bearer.

Crickets love salt. Studies have shown that their desire for salty snacks- such as earth - soaked in urine - is a key influence in the way it drives swarms of them to march. They are also partial to protein snacks, such as seed pods, flowers and mammal faeces.

(11-06-2013 19:54 )4evadionne Wrote:  The size of a female Baboon's bottom signals how good she is as a mother. The bigger the backside, the greater the baboon's physical stature as a child-bearer.

Blimey didn't realise how many baboons I see around town with their children in tow.

To mate with their much bigger females, male Cobweb Spiders have two giant sex organs called pedipalps. The organs are so big they account for 20% of their total weight and slow them down. By the time they reach adulthood the spiders have had enough of hauling these monsters around, so they amputate one of them.

The Fruit Fly produces sperm that is almost twenty times as long as its body length. This is the equivalent of a human producing sperm more than 30 metres (100 feet) long.

The Male Honey Bee certainly goes out with a bang! When it ejaculates it explodes. While its body is obliterated, its genitals remain inside the female to prevent her from mating again, acting like a form of insect chastity belt.

Capuchin Monkeys have their own form of insect repellent. They smear themselves with body cream containing toxic chemicals from Millipedes, which they catch, crush and then mash into a paste.

The greater sac-winged bat is so named because of the perfume carrying sacs it has on its wings.

The male of the species makes the perfume himself, mixing urine with a glandular secretion he obtains by rubbing his throat against his penis.

He then inserts it into his wing sacs, heads off into in the air, and begins hovering over potential females who find the heady smell irresistible.


Box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes, four brains, and sixty anuses.

Tree- dwelling sloths store their waste for a week at a time during the dry season, due to the fear of attracting predators.

When they eventually climb down, the sloths deposit up to 900 grams (2pounds) of dung, around one-fifth of their total body weight.

The rainy season makes all this hard work seem unnecessary, as the downpours mask the smell of their faeces, so the sloths defecate from high up in the trees raining faeces on the world below.

The Southern Right Whale has a Penis measuring 8 feet (2,5 metres) long, the biggest relative to it's body size of any whale.

It's most impressive assets though are it's testicles. They weigh 1,000 kilograms (over 157 stone) and are believed to be the largest in the entire animal world.

Marine biologists believe the right whale carries so much sperm, so that when it comes to mate, the immense force of the semen unleashed will wash out and replace any residual sperm from previous mating's.