10 AMAZING Things you didnt know about animals

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10 AMAZING THINGS you didnt know about animals
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Crocodiles Swallow Stones for Swimming
Crocodiles Swallow Stones for Swimming Reptiles
swallow large stones that stay permanently in
their bellies. It's been suggested these are used
for ballast in diving.
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Whale Milk Not On Low-Fat Diets
Nursing a newborn is no "small" feat for the
whale, whose calf emerges, after 10 to 12 months
in the womb, about a third the mother's length.
Mother squirts milk into the newborn's mouth
using muscles around the mammary gland while the
baby holds tight to a nipple At nearly 50 percent
fat, whale milk has around 10 times the fat
content of human milk, which helps calves achieve
some serious growth spurt seas much as 200 pounds
per day
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Birds Use Landmarks to Navigate Long
Journeys
Pigeons can fly thousands of miles to find the
same roosting spot with no navigational
difficulties. Some species of birds, like the
Arctic tern, make a 25,000 mile round-trip
journey every year. Many species use built-in
Ferro magnets to detect their orientation with
respect to the Earth's magnetic field.
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For Beavers, Days Get Longer in Winter
Beavers become near shut-ins during winter,
living off of previously stored food or the
deposits of fat in their distinctive tails. They
conserve energy by avoiding the cold outdoors,
opting instead to remain in dark lodgings inside
their pile of wood and mud. As a result these
rodents, which normally emerge at sunset and turn
in at sunrise, have no light cues to entrain
their sleep cycle.
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Mole-Rats aren't Blind
With their puny eyes and underground lifestyle,
African mole-rats have long been considered the
Mr. Magoos of rodents, detecting little light
and, it has been suggested, using their eyes more
for sensing changes in air currents than for
actual vision. But findings of the past few years
have shown that African mole-rats have a keen, if
limited, sense of sight. And they don't like what
they see, according to a report in the November
2006 Animal Behavior.
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Baby Chicks and Brotherhood
Altruism abounds in cases where a helping hand
will encourage the survival of genetic material
similar to one's own. Baby chicks practice this
"kin selection" by making a special chirp while
feeding. This call announces the food find to
nearby chicks, who are probably close relations
and so share many of the chick's genes. The key
to natural selection isn't survival of the
fittest animal. It's survival of the fittest
genetic material, and so brotherly behavior that
favors close relations will thrive.
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The stately giraffe, whose head sits some 16 feet
up atop an unlikely pedestal, adapted his long
neck to compete for foliage with other grazers.
Heart pump twice as hard as a cow's to get blood
up to the brain, and a complex blood vessel
system is needed to ensure that blood doesn't
rush to the head when bent over. Six feet below
the heart, the skin of the legs must then be
extremely tight to prevent blood from pooling at
the hooves.
Giraffes Compensate for Height with Unique Blood
Flow
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Elephants have the largest brain nearly 11
pounds on average of any mammal that ever walked
the earth. Do they use that gray matter to the
fullest? Intelligence is hard to quantify in
humans or animals, but the encephalization
quotient (EQ), a ratio of an animal's observed
brain size to the expected brain size given the
animal's mass, correlates well with an ability to
navigate novel challenges and obstacles. The
average elephant EQ is 1.88. (Humans range from
7.33 to 7.69, chimpanzees average 2.45, pigs
0.27.) Intelligence and memory are thought to go
hand in hand, suggesting that elephant memories,
while not infallible, are quite good.
Elephants Do Forget, but They're Not Dumb
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Our avian friends can solve certain linguistic
processing tasks as deftly as 4-6 year-old
children. Parrots appear to grasp concepts like
"same" and "different", "bigger" and "smaller",
"none" and numbers. Perhaps most interestingly,
they can combine labels and phrases in novel
ways. A January 2007 study in Language Sciences
suggests using patterns of parrot speech learning
to develop artificial speech skills in robots.  
Parrots engage in much more than mere mimicry.