The Trivia Barn

Animals And Insects

 

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A normal cow's stomach has four compartments: the rumen, the recticulum (storage area), the omasum (where water is absorbed), and the abomasum ( the only compartment with digestive juices).

A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.

Brown eggs come from hens with red feathers and red ear lobes; white eggs come from hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Shell color is determined by the breed of hen and has no effect on its quality, nutrients or flavor.

Cats in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have a very high probability of having six toes.

A cat's jaws can not move sideways.

Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.

Armadillos can be house broken.

Armadillos have four babies at a time, always all the same sex. They are perfect quadruplets, the fertilized cell split into quarters, resulting in four identical armadillos.

Armadillos get an average of 18.5 hours of sleep per day.

Armadillos can walk underwater. Fun animal facts.

Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.

Police dogs are trained to react to commands in a foreign language; commonly German but more recently Hungarian or some other Slavic tongue.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

Reindeer like to eat bananas.

The Pug dog is thought to have gotten it's name from looking like the pug monkey.

The newest dog breed is the Bull Boxer, first bred in the United states in 1990-91.

The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.

A bear has 42 teeth.

A cat has four rows of whiskers.

When angered, the ears of Tazmanian devils turn a pinkish-red.

Porcupines float in water.

Giraffes have no vocal cords.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

Mice, whales, elephants, giraffes and man all have seven neck vertebra.

Goat's eyes have rectangular pupils.

Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.

Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.

Hamsters love to eat crickets.

In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

Camel's milk does not curdle.

There are only two animals with blue tongues, the Black Bear and the Chow dog.

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A polecat is not a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.

A zebra is white with black stripes.

All pet hamsters are descended from a single female wild golden hamster found with a litter of 12 young in Syria in 1930.

An adult lion's roar can be heard up to five miles away, and warns off intruders or reunites scattered members of the pride.

Beaver teeth are so sharp that Native Americans once used them as knife blades.

Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.

Catnip can affect lions and tigers as well as house cats. It excites them because it contains a chemical that resembles an excretion of the dominant female's urine.

Cheetahs make a chirping sound that is much like a bird's chirp or a dog's yelp. The sound is so an intense, it can be heard a mile away.

Despite its reputation for being finicky, the average cat consumes about 127,750 calories a year, nearly 28 times its own weight in food and the same amount again in liquids. In case you were wondering, cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.

Developed in Egypt about 5,000 years ago, the greyhound breed was known before the ninth century in England, where it was bred by aristocrats to hunt such small game as hares.

Dolphins sleep at night just below the surface of the water. They frequently rise to the surface for air.

During World War II, the very first bomb dropped on Berlin by the Allies killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

Elephant tusks grow throughout an elephant's life and can weigh more than 200 pounds. Among Asian elephants, only the males have tusks. Both sexes of African elephants have tusks.

A one-day old baby cockroach, about the size of a spec of dust, can run almost as fast as its parents. 

More human deaths have been attributed to fleas than all the wars ever fought. As carriers of the bubonic plague, fleas were responsible for killing one-third of the population of Europe in the 14th century. 

Bees must collect the nectar from two thousand flowers to make one tablespoonful of honey.

A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours. 

Ants cannot chew their food, they move their jaws sideways, like scissors, to obtain the juices from the food.

There are more beetles than any other kind of creature in the world.

Crickets hear through their knees. 

Most spiders belong to the orb weaver spider family, Family Aranidae. This is pronounced "A Rainy Day."

It is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly -- so says City Ordinance No. 352 in Pacific Grove, California.

A flea expert is a pullicologist. 

Dragonflies are one of the fastest insects, flying 50 to 60 mph.

The Madagascan Hissing Cockroach is one of the few insects who give birth to live young, rather than laying eggs.

In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.

Tapeworms range in size from about 0.04 inch to more than 50 feet in length.

Megaphragma caribea from Guadeloupe, measuring out at a huge 0.17 mm long, is now probably the smallest known insect in the world.

Scientist have recorded the otherwise inconspicuous Springtails at densities as high 100,000,000 per square meter in the ordinary farm soil of Iowa U.S.A.

In Africa swarms of Orthoptera ( Desert Locusts Schistocerca gregaria) may contain as many as 28,000,000,000 individuals.

The highest sustained ground speed recorded is that of the black cutworm (Agrotis ipsilon) which flies at speeds of between 97 and 113 km/h (60-70 mph)

The dehydrated larvae of the African chironomid Polypedilum vanderplanki were able to withstand exposure to liquid helium (-270 C) for up to 5 min. with a 100% survival rate

The "long-tailed" South African Scorpion (Hadogenes troglodytes) reaches a length of over 8 inches, and is probably the longest scorpion in the world.

The average scorpion probably lives three to five years, but some species undoubtedly live at least 10-15 years.

The world's largest roach (which lives in South America) is six inches long with a one-foot wingspan.

A cockroach can live a week without its head. The roach only dies because without a mouth, it can't drink water and dies of thirst.

Roaches can live without food for a month, but will only survive a week without water.

The House Fly is often a carrier of diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and anthrax.

The complete life-cycle of a house fly takes from 10 to 21 days.

A baby dolphin can swim and keep up with adults an hour after it’s born.

The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infra-red and ultra-violet light.

.The Mola Mola, or Ocean Sunfish, lays up to 5,000,000 eggs at one time.

It takes a lobster approximately seven years to grow to be one pound.

Ninety-nine percent of all lobsters die a few weeks after hatching. In fact, the odds are 10,000 to 1 against any larval lobster living long enough to end up as a lobster dinner.

A dolphin's hearing is so acute that it can pick up an underwater sound from fifteen miles away.  

A group of whales is called a pod.  Free fish trivia facts.

The embryos of tiger sharks fight each other while in their mother's womb, the survivor being the baby shark that is born.

The eye of the giant squid is fifteen inches in diameter -- the size of a basketball.

The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.

A baby eel is called an elver, a baby oyster is called a spat.

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

Starfish don't have brains.

Shrimps' hearts are in their heads.

Shrimp can only swim backwards.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

Scientists found a whole new phylum of animal on a lobster's lip.

The only way to stop the pain of the sting of the flathead fish is by rubbing the slime of the belly of the same fish that you were stung by on the wound that it inflicted upon you.

Only one in one thousand animals born in the sea survives to maturity

Female orcas live twice as long as male orcas. The larger numbers of female orcas in a pod are because of the female's longer lifespan, not because the males have collected a harem.

Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.

Octopi have gardens.

A type of jellyfish found off the coast of England is the longest animal in the world.

A whale's penis is called a dork.

A barnacle has the largest penis of any other animal in the world in relation to its size.

One way to tell seals and sea lions apart is that, sea lions have external ears and testicles.

The sea wasp is half an inch long at best and more poisonous than any other jellyfish known to man.

The difference between male and female blue crabs is the design located on their apron (belly.) The male blue crab has the Washington Monument while the female apron is shaped like the U.S. Capitol.

The pupil of an octupus' eye is rectangular.

A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. He will not eat until his young are born, which may take several weeks.

Farm animal trivia facts.

The first bird domesticated by man was the goose.

There are more chickens in the world than people.

Chickens absorb vitamin-D through their combs from sunshine.

The average hen will lay 227 eggs a year

Roosters can't crow if they can't fully extend their necks.

A group of geese on the ground is gaggle, a group of geese in the air is skein.

A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

Chickens that lay brown eggs have red ear lobes. There is a genetic link between the two.

The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.

The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times.

It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs, because a cows' knees can't bend properly to walk back down.

A female swine, or a sow, will always have a even number of teats or nipples, usually twelve.

Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink."

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.

A Holstein's spots are like fingerprints -- no two cows have the same pattern of spots.

A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

A pig's penis is shaped like a corkscrew.

It is physically impossible for pigs to lookup into the sky.

A pig's skin is thickest at the back -- 1/6 of an inch.

The "wild" horses of western North America are actually feral, not wild.

Over the average lifespan of 11 years, a dog will cost you $13,350.00.

When a female horse and male donkey mate, the offspring is called a mule, but when a male horse and female donkey mate, the offspring is called a hinny.

The way to get more mules is to mate a male donkey with a female horse.

A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule won't.

Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.

Today's cattle are descended from two species: wild aurochs -- fierce and agile herd animals that populated Asia, North Africa and Europe -- and eotragus -- anantelope-like, Asian forest creature.

Horses cannot vomit.

Goat's eyes have rectangular pupils.

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it's own weight each year.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A Holstein's spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A normal cow's stomach has four compartments: the rumen, the recticulum (storage area), the omasum (where water is absorbed), and the abomasum ( the only compartment with digestive juices).

A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.

Brown eggs come from hens with red feathers and red ear lobes; white eggs come from hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Shell color is determined by the breed of hen and has no effect on its quality, nutrients or flavor.

By feeding hens certain dyes they can be made to lay eggs with varicolored yolks.

Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.

Female chickens, or hens, need about 24 to 26 hours to produce one egg. Thirty minutes later they start the process all over again. In addition to the half-hour rests, some hens rest every three to five days and others rest every 10 days.

Hummingbirds are the smallest birds - so tiny that one of their enemies is an insect, the praying mantis.

In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.

On average, pigs live for about 15 years.

Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.

Prairie dogs are not dogs. A prairie dog is a kind of rodent.

Mammals are the only animals with flaps around the ears.

African elephants only have four teeth to chew their food with.

There are about one billion cattle in the world of which 200 million are in India.

A house fly lives only 14 days.

A dog was the first in space and a sheep, a duck and a rooster the first to fly in a hot air balloon.

The oldest breed of dog is the Saluki.

The bee hummingbird of Cuba is the smallest bird in the world.

An ostrich can run up to 70 km/h (43mph).

An annoyed camel will spit at a person.

The world's smallest dog is the Chihuahua, which means "tiny dog in the sky."

Pea crabs (the size of a pea) are the smallest crabs in the world.

75% of wild birds die before they are 6 months old.

The pig is rated the fourth most intelligent animal but are mentioned only twice in the Bible

Sheep are mentioned 45 times and goats 88 times in the Bible.

Pork is the world's most widely-eaten meat.

In Denmark there are twice as many pigs as people.

Dinosaurs did not eat grass: there weren't any at that time.

The coyote is a member of the dog family and its scientific name, "canis latrans" means barking dog.

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 50cm (20 in) tongue.

A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle - a group of geese in the air is a skein.

The South American giant anteater eats more than 30,000 ants a day.

It is impossible to out-swim a shark - sharks reach speeds of 70 km/h (44 mph). Humans can run about 35 km/h (21 mph).

The sailfish is the fastest swimmer, reaching 109 km/h (68 mph).

The slowest fish is the Sea Horse, which moves along at about 0.016 km/h (0.01 mph).

Dolphins can reach 60 km/h (37 mph).

Of the 650 types of leeches, only the Hirudo medicinalis is used for medical treatments.

The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.

The tongue of a blue whale is as long as an elephant.

The scales of a crocodile are made of ceratin, the same substance that hooves and fingernails are made of.

A crocodile's tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth and cannot move it.

A snail has two pairs of tentacles on its head. One pair is longer than the other and houses the eyes. The shorter pair is used for smelling and feeling its way around.

The heaviest crustacean ever found was a lobster weighing 19 kg (42 lb), caught in 1934.

The largest jellyfish ever caught measured 2,3 m (7'6") across the bell with a tentacle of 36 m (120 ft) long.

The largest giant squid ever recorded was captured in the North Atlantic in 1878. It weighed 4 tons. Its tentacles measured 10 m (35 ft) long.

The giant squid has the biggest eyes of any animal: its eyes measure 40 cm (16 in) in diameter.

Domestic cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.

Sharks are immune to all known diseases.

Sharks and rays also share the same kind of skin: instead of scales, they have small tooth-like spikes called denticles. The spikes are so sharp that shark skin has long been used as sandpaper.

Animals also are either right-handed or left-handed. Polar bears are left-handed - and so is Kermit the Frog.

There are 701 types of pure breed dogs.

There are about 53 million dogs in the US, and Paris is said to have more dogs than people.

Some bird species, usually flightless birds, have only a lower eyelid, whereas pigeons use upper and lower lids to blink.

Fish and insects do not have eyelids - their eyes are protected by a hardened lens.

Measured in straight flight, the spine-tailed swift is the fastest bird. It flies 170 km/h (106 mph). Second fastest is the Frigate, which reaches 150 km/h (94 mph).

Millions of trees are accidentally planted by squirrels who bury nuts and then forget where they hid them.

There are more than 150 million sheep in Australia, a nation of 17 million people.

New Zealand is home to 4 million people and 70 million sheep.

The natural diet of Lady Beetles consists of soft bodied insects such as aphids, spider mites, and young caterpillars. Adults can consume up to 100 aphids a day.

Certain species of male butterflies produce scents that serve in attracting females during courtship.

The Giant cricket of Africa enjoys eating human hair.

A nest in which insects or spiders deposit their eggs is called a "nidus".

Honeybees have hair on their eyes.

The only insect that can turn its head 360 degrees is the praying mantis.

Scientists have identified more than 300 viruses capable of bringing fatal diseases to insects. The organisms are believed to be entirely different than those that cause disease in humans, and are thus harmless to man.

The average airspeed of the common housefly is 4 1/2 mph. A housefly beats its wings about 20,000 times per minute.

Small cockroaches are more likely to die on their backs than large cockroaches.

There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.

Fleas can jump more than 200 times their body length.

Crickets don't chirp by rubbing their legs together, they make the noise by rubbing their wings together.

The social life in ants and termites has been accompanied by an extraordinary royal perk: a 100-fold increase among queen ants in average maximum lifespan, with some queens surviving for almost 30 years. This longevity can be attributed in part to the sheltered and pampered life of the royal egg layer.

Between 20,000 and 60,000 bees live in a single hive. The queen bee lays nearly 1,500 eggs a day and lives for up to 2 years. The drone, whose only job is to mate with the queen bee, has a lifespan of around 24 days—he has no sting. Worker bees - all sterile females - usually work themselves to death within 40 days, collecting pollen and nectar. Worker bees will fly p to 9 miles to find pollen and nectar, flying at speeds as fast as 15 mph.

There are 4,300 known species of ladybugs in the world.

You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day that in any other weather.

The tarantula spends most of its life within its burrow, which is an 18-inch vertical hole with an inch-wide opening. When male tarantulas are between the ages of 5 to 7 years, they leave the burrow in search of a female, usually in the early fall. This migration actually signals the end of their life cycle. The males mate with as many females as they can, and then they die around mid-November.

Until very recently, no centipede was found that did not have an ODD number of leg pairs. Usually the number varies from 15 to 191 pairs, all odd. No one knows why. However, Chris Kettle, a doctoral student in ecology, recently found a centipede with 48 pairs of legs, an even number. The remarkable discovery was presented to the International Congress of Myriapodology in Poland and featured in the science journal Trends in Genetics. Mr. Kettle suspects a genetic mutation is responsible for the even number of leg pairs.

62 degrees Fahrenheit is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able to hop.

Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.

Spiders have transparent blood.

There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are humans on the entire earth.

A spiders web is made of two types of silk, one sticky and the other not. The spider begins the web with the non sticky silk and forms the "spokes". After the frame is constructed and secure, the spider goes back with the sticky silk and completes the web design we are so familiar with, connecting spoke to spoke. They will also add rows connecting the spokes to allow them access for web maintenance.
Spend time watching a spider and you will see that they painstakingly avoid the sticky silk and walk on the spokes. Should the spider be startled and walk in the sticky silk it will affix to the spider the same as it would you or any thing else.
Spiders recycle their webbing, so a spider that gets stuck in its own web may eat its way out.

Some crickets burrow megaphone-like tunnels that help transport the sound of their chirps as far as 2,000 feet away.

A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 liters) of nectar.

A dragonfly flaps its wings 20 to 40 times a second, bees and houseflies 200 times, some mosquitoes 600 times, and a tiny gnat 1,000 times.

A fly can react to something it sees and change direction in 30 milliseconds.

A housefly can transport germs as far as 15 miles away from the original source of contamination.

A mature, well-established termite colony with as many as 60,000 members will eat only about one-fifth of an ounce of wood a day.

The silkworm's silk comes out of its mouth as a thread of gooey liquid, so that nice silk blouse you spent a fortune on is really just worm spit.

Some spiders have as many as eight eyes.

The monarch butterfly's sense of taste is about 12,000 times more sensitive than a human's.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the best time to spray household insects is 4:00 p.m. Insects are most vulnerable at this time.

After mating, the female black widow spider turns on her partner and devours him. The female may dispatch as many as twenty-five suitors a day in this manner.

An ant can survive for up to two weeks underwater.

Ants stretch when they wake up. They also appear to yawn in a very human manner before taking up the tasks of the day.

On an average day, a queen bee lays about 1,500 eggs.

Bees have been known to cure rheumatism.

A mosquito has 47 teeth.

Tarantulas do not use muscles to move their legs. They control the amount of blood pumped into them to extend and retract their legs.

Any Female bee in a beehive could have been the queen if she had been fed the necessary royal jelly. All female bees in a given hive are sisters.

The longest species of centipede is the giant scolopender (Scolopendra gigantea), found in the rain forests of Central and South America. It has 23 segments (46 legs) and specimens have been measured up to 10.5 inches long and 1" in diameter.

Female mosquitos will obtain blood from humans and animals, but only to nourish their eggs. Their food actually consists of nectar and other plant juices.

Ladybugs bleed to protect themselves. When alarmed, they release drops of a reddish or yellowish bitter tasting liquid from their mouths and from the pores at their joints. This repels prospective attackers.

Certain kinds of insects can live as long as a year after having their head severed. What's more, the insects can still react to stimuli, such as light and temperature.

March 14 is "Save a spider day."

The beautiful but deadly Australian sea wasp (Chironex fleckeri) is the most venomous jellyfish in the world. Its cardiotoxic venom has caused the deaths of 66 people off the coast of Queensland since 1880, with victims dying within 1-3 minutes if medical aid is not available.

The leaf bug of ceylon (phyllum sicci folium) has legs and antennae the color and shape of leaves, has indentations on its body like the vein marks on a leaf, and hangs from branches, swaying in the breeze exactly like a leaf.

The black widow spider can devour as many as twenty 'mates' in a single day.

Tarantulas are poisonous, but the concentration of the venom in those found in North America is low enough that they're usually not a threat to human life. In fact, some people keep them as pets.

Certain fireflies emit a light so penetrating that it can pass through flesh and wood.

Tropical ants, when a flood sweeps down on them, roll themselves into a huge living ball which drifts upon the water, with the young safe and dry at the core.

Scientists turn up as many as 10,000 new species of insects every year.

Worms can have up to ten hearts.

The dragonfly has about 30,000 lenses covering the retina of its eye, and thus sees many, many images where we see only one.

Fleas can accelerate 50 times faster than the space shuttle.

Male bees will try to attract sex partners with orchid fragrance.

If two flies were left to reproduce without predators or other limitations for one year, the resulting mass of flies would be the size of the Earth.

Maggots were once used to treat a bone infection called osteomyelitis.

Butterflies taste with their hind feet.