Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts

Monday, March 14, 2011

An extinct variety of zebra only had stripes on its head and neck.

The last Quagga died in a zoo in 1883. At the time no one realized that this actually meant the animal was extinct. Their wild population dwindled in their native South African grasslands with the introduction of non-native sheep and goats. Because they competed with the Quagga for grass to graze on, settlers hunted them to extinction.


Monday, February 21, 2011

Elephants are afraid of mice. (Watch the video!)

...or at least they are very careful to avoid them. The guys on Mythbusters proved this myth to be plausible - check it out in the video below!

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Dogs do NOT see in black-and-white.

Yes, dogs are partially colorblind, but that does not mean they do not see any color at all! Man’s best friend suffers from a kind of colorblindness that is called deuteranopia in humans. Both people and dogs have three different varieties of color receptors in their eyes: one for red, one for green, and one for blue. Deuteranopes, and similarly all canines, do not have the green color receptor and therefore cannot tell the difference between shades of green and other colors!


Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Squirrels plant trees. ON ACCIDENT.

Despite the fact that they've yet to learn to look both ways before crossing the street, squirrels are actually pretty smart. They have an elaborate system for preserving their food. This includes burying nuts and acorns underground so that they can get to them much later. Sometimes if they don't get around to eating their buried treasure, the nuts grow into trees. This is actually really important because it allows for trees to grow farther away from other trees so that forests can spread.

Squirrels know exactly how well the nuts and acorns they find can stay preserved, which means that when they find nuts they know which ones to bury at which time and where. They also have a process to make acorns last longer: taking out the embryo!

They're also really sneaky. Give a squirrel some nuts and he'll dig several "dummy" holes for each actual nut that he buries. This throws off other animals watching them who would try to steal their food. Sometimes they even pretend to bury nuts to send their competition on a wild goose chase.


Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Slave-Maker ant is a species of ants that enslaves other ants!

The whole process is really complex. The slave-maker queen fakes her own death and gets carried to the host colony. She then wakes up, and then kills and impersonates the queen. The fake queen will then start making her own offspring, who eventually take over the nest and enslave the previous inhabitants. The slave ants will unknowingly feed the fake queen and its offspring, not realizing that they are impostors.
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