ErebusFact library / Trivia
25 nature facts, each paired with a strange little scene and a hook for the hard word.
The blue whale is the largest animal ever known to have lived, and it feeds mainly on tiny krill.
Picture it
A creature longer than three buses glides past, its heart the size of a small car. It eats nothing bigger than a paperclip: tiny shrimp-like krill, by the tonne.
Memory hooks
The cheetah is the fastest land animal, reaching about 110 km/h in short bursts.
Picture it
A spotted cat with black tear marks on its face streaks across the savanna faster than cars on a motorway, about 110 km/h, but can only keep it up for a few hundred metres. It cheats the gazelle: cheetah.
Memory hooks
The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal, diving at over 300 km/h.
Picture it
A falcon folds its wings and drops out of the sky onto a pigeon at over 300 km/h, faster than a Formula One car. It's a wanderer (in Latin, peregrinus).
Memory hooks
Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards.
Picture it
A tiny bird hovers at a flower like a helicopter, wings beating so fast they hum, then zips backwards out of the bloom. It's the only bird that can fly in reverse.
Memory hooks
The platypus is one of the few mammals that lay eggs, a group called monotremes, along with echidnas.
Picture it
When British scientists first see a stuffed platypus in 1798, with a duck's bill, beaver's tail and otter's body, they look for stitches, sure it's a hoax. It also lays eggs.
Memory hooks
Advertisement
Koalas eat almost nothing but eucalyptus leaves and sleep up to 20 hours a day.
Picture it
A koala clings to a branch, chewing tough, slightly poisonous leaves that give it so little energy it sleeps up to 20 hours a day. The leaves smell like cough sweets: eucalyptus.
Memory hooks
Flamingos are pink because of carotenoid pigments in the shrimp and algae they eat.
Picture it
A flamingo chick hatches grey. As it grows, it eats pink shrimp and algae full of the same pigment that makes carrots orange, carotenoids, and slowly turns pink.
Memory hooks
Male emperor penguins keep their egg warm on their feet through the Antarctic winter, fasting for about two months.
Picture it
In the Antarctic winter, thousands of male penguins huddle in the dark for two months, each balancing an egg on its feet under a fold of belly skin, eating nothing while the mothers go fishing.
Memory hooks
The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal, flying between the Arctic and Antarctic every year.
Picture it
A small white seabird flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back every year, chasing endless summer. Over its life it flies the distance to the Moon and back three times.
Memory hooks
Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of kilometres from North America to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico.
Picture it
Every autumn, millions of orange-and-black butterflies fly thousands of kilometres from Canada to the same fir forests in the mountains of Mexico, covering the trees so thickly the branches bend.
Memory hooks
Some species of bamboo, a giant grass, can grow almost a metre in a day, making it the fastest-growing plant.
Picture it
In a grove in China, a shoot shoots up nearly a metre in a single day. A panda munches at the bottom. It's not a tree but a giant grass: bamboo.
Memory hooks
General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California, is the largest single tree on Earth by volume.
Picture it
In a Californian forest, a giant sequoia so wide it would take 20 people holding hands to circle it is named after a Civil War general: General Sherman.
Memory hooks
Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine in California, is over 4,800 years old.
Picture it
High in California's White Mountains, a twisted, half-dead tree has been growing for over 4,800 years, since before the Great Pyramid. It's named after the oldest man in the Bible: Methuselah.
Memory hooks
The Venus flytrap grows wild only in North and South Carolina, and its trap shuts when trigger hairs are touched twice.
Picture it
A fly lands on a pair of red, toothed leaves and brushes a hair. Nothing. It brushes a second hair within 20 seconds: SNAP. This plant grows wild only in the boggy Carolinas.
Memory hooks
Rafflesia arnoldii, the world's largest single flower, smells of rotting meat and lives as a parasite on vines.
Picture it
In the rainforest of Sumatra, a red-and-white spotted flower a metre wide opens, smelling of rotting meat to attract flies. It has no leaves, stem or roots of its own. A raffle prize nobody wants: Rafflesia.
Memory hooks
A giraffe's neck has seven vertebrae, the same number as a human's.
Picture it
A giraffe bends down to drink and its neck stretches like a crane. Yet it has the same number of neck bones as you: just seven, each about the length of a ruler.
Memory hooks
African elephants have the longest pregnancy of any land mammal, about 22 months.
Picture it
A mother elephant waits nearly two years, about 22 months, for her calf to be born. The baby arrives weighing as much as a grown man and stands within an hour.
Memory hooks
Sharks' skeletons are made of cartilage, not bone.
Picture it
A great white shark glides past, but if you could see inside, there'd be no bone at all. Its skeleton is made of the same bendy stuff as your ears and nose: cartilage.
Memory hooks
The Komodo dragon of Indonesia is the world's largest living lizard.
Picture it
On an Indonesian island, a three-metre lizard flicks its yellow forked tongue, tasting the air for a deer kilometres away. It's the largest lizard alive, named after its island: Komodo.
Memory hooks
The kākāpō of New Zealand is a flightless, nocturnal parrot and the heaviest parrot in the world.
Picture it
In a New Zealand forest at night, a plump green parrot that can't fly waddles along, smelling of honey. It's the world's heaviest parrot, and every one alive has a name: the kākāpō.
Memory hooks
Advertisement
The dodo, a flightless bird related to pigeons, lived only on Mauritius and was extinct by the late 1600s.
Picture it
Dutch sailors land on an island in the Indian Ocean and find a big, trusting, flightless pigeon that walks right up to them. Within about 80 years, it's gone for ever. The island: Mauritius.
Memory hooks
Honeybees tell each other where to find food with a waggle dance, decoded by Karl von Frisch.
Picture it
A honeybee comes home and wiggles in a figure-of-eight on the honeycomb. The angle points to the flowers; the length of the waggle tells the distance. An Austrian scientist decodes it and wins a Nobel Prize.
Memory hooks
Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight; their wings are skin stretched over long finger bones.
Picture it
At dusk, a cloud of mammals pours out of a cave, flapping wings made of skin stretched over long finger bones. Squirrels glide, but only these truly fly: bats.
Memory hooks
The coelacanth, a fish thought extinct for 66 million years, was found alive off South Africa in 1938.
Picture it
In 1938, a museum curator in South Africa spots a strange blue fish with fleshy, leg-like fins in a fisherman's catch. Scientists thought it had died out with the dinosaurs. It's a coelacanth: "see-la-canth".
Memory hooks
The narwhal's long spiral tusk is actually an overgrown tooth.
Picture it
In medieval Europe, merchants sell long spiral horns as unicorn horns for more than their weight in gold. They really come from an Arctic whale, and the "horn" is a giant tooth.
Memory hooks