My Science School

The smallest mammal in the world is the bumblebee bat or Kitti's hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), with a body no bigger than a large bumble-bee. It has a head-body length of only 29-33 mm (1.14-1.29 in), a wingspan of approximately 130-145 mm (5.1-5.7 in), and a weight of 1.7-2 g (0.05-0.07 oz). The tiny bat can be found only in a few select limestone caves on the Khwae Noi River, Kanchanaburi Province, south-west Thailand.

The smallest non-flyng mammal is Savi's white-toothed pygmy shrew, also called the Etruscan shrew (Suncus etruscus), which has a head and body length of 35-48 mm (1.3-1.8 in), a tail length of 25-30 mm (0.98-1.17 in) and weighs 1.5-2.5 g (0.05-0.09 oz). It is found along the Mediterranean coast and southwards to Western Cape province, South Africa.

Kitti's hog-nosed bat is 80 million times lighter than the largest mammal, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)!

Credit : Guinness World Records 

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Most prominent among these in western North America are ice worms. Measuring about a half-inch in length and thin as threads of dental floss, ice worms (Mesenchytraeus solifugus) dot glaciers throughout the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska. Vast numbers of the tiny black worms emerge on summer afternoons and evenings to feed on algae, microbes, and other detritus on the surface. Then they burrow back into the ice at dawn—and during the winter, disappear into the frozen depths.

These distant relatives of earthworms survive in layers of ice-cold water within the snow and ice, thriving at water’s freezing point. This would be impossible for most creatures, especially cold-blooded ones without any insulation, like worms. So how do ice worms do it? Scientists have discovered some of the worms’ tricks, noting that understanding these biological oddballs is surprisingly relevant—and urgent.

Learning more about how these animals tolerate extremes can help us understand the limits of life on Earth and beyond, says Daniel Shain, a Rutgers University researcher who has studied the animals for 25 years.

But as glaciers are vanishing, so are ice worms. “We want to find out as much about the worms as we can before they disappear,” says Shirley Lang, a biologist at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “And I have little doubt they will disappear one day,” if glaciers continue to melt at their current rate.

Credit :  National Geographic

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Orangutans share at least 28 physical traits with humans; that’s 26 more than chimps and 21 more than gorillas. Inside our mouths, we’ve both got flat molars that are covered with a thick layer of enamel. And, according to researcher Schwartz, “A hole in the roof of the mouth that was supposedly unique to humans is also present in organs.”

Orangutans, as well as other great apes, age similarly to humans, found researchers publishing in Veterinary Pathology. Humans live longer than all other great apes, but other than that, we all suffer from tooth, bone, and muscle mass loss; sensory impairment; cardiovascular disease; hair loss and graying; frailty; and arthritis, a condition that can take on 100 different forms in humans.

Other tell-tale features that link orangutans to humans, to the exclusion of chimps, bonobos, and gorillas? According to National Geographic, they have “greater asymmetries between the left and right side of the brain, an increased cartilage-to-bone ratio in the forearm, and similarly shaped shoulder blades.”

“Probably only humans have a more intensive relationship with their mothers,” according to Orangutan Foundation International. “Primatologists believe that orangutans have such long ‘childhoods’ because there is so much that they need to learn before they can live alone successfully.” Juvenile orangutans hang with mom till they’re about 8 years old, and nurse for pretty much the whole time.

Credit : Reader’s Digest  

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The willowy praying mantis, or mantid, can be beautiful as it folds its legs, tilts its head and looks at the world through huge eyes. But the praying mantis anatomy is designed to be a predator. Praying mantis are built to locate, hunt and subdue its prey before making short work of devouring it. With all the tools it has at its disposal, if the praying mantis were as large as a dog it would be a very dangerous creature indeed. Like most insects the body parts of a praying mantis consist of a head, abdomen, thorax, six legs and antennae with an exoskeleton.

The head of the praying mantis is an amazing construction. Praying mantises can rotate their triangular heads in almost a full circle – a feature not shared by other insects. Two antennae, or feelers, sit on top of the head and help the mantis search for food when it tilts its head or turns it from side to side. The praying mantis has five eyes total: three simple eyes that probably see only light and dark, lined along the middle of its forehead; and two compound eyes for seeing colors and images, comprising many panes aligned on either side of its head. With its ability to sense its prey, move its multi-directional head, use its excellent eyesight and move quickly and easily, the praying mantis is a very efficient and lethal predator.

The praying mantis abdomen is rounded and elongated, making up the primary part of the insect's body. It is connected to the thorax and supports the wings and hind legs of the mantis. Like the rest of the insect, the praying mantis' abdomen is covered with an exoskeleton, a sort of hard-shell suit of armor that provides protection, support and form.

Credit : Sciencing 

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Unlike other animals' eyelids, snakes' spectacles are transparent, like a window in their skin, allowing them to see out through their always-closed eyelids. Just before a snake sheds its skin, a layer of fluid builds up between the new inner skin and the old outer layer, clouding the spectacle and causing the other scales to have a faded, milky appearance. This period usually lasts a few days, during which snakes have difficulty seeing and usually will not eat. People who keep snakes as pets have observed that they may become particularly ornery during this period, perhaps as a result of not being able to see clearly.

Frogs, lizards and snakes all use their third eyelids to protect their eyes from dust, mud and injury. Because they spend their lives so close to the ground, their eyes have developed nictitating membranes to clear away any debris that may cause irritation. Amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders, use their third eyelids as goggles when underwater; they draw them up to protect their eyes from the H2O and dive in. Their third eyelids not only protect their eyes but also allow them to see as clearly underwater as they do on land.

Another obstacle to snake vision that has been long known but little studied is that snakes' spectacles are vascularized, meaning that they have blood vessels running through them. It is very unusual for tetrapods to have blood vessels in a place that might interrupt their field of vision. First noticed in 1852, these vessels are small but symmetrically distributed across the optically transmissive region of the eye in most species, although the arrangement is radial in basal snakes, acrochordids, and vipers but vertical in colubrids and elapids. In one visually-oriented species, the Asian vine snake (Ahaetulla nasuta), these blood vessels are less dense in the region of the field of vision known as the fovea, where the maximum sharpness is achieved. Most snakes don't have foveas, suggesting that the unusual arrangement of blood vessels in the eyes of Ahaetulla is an adaptation to minimize visual disturbance in this region of highest visual acuity.

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Porcupines are also known as quill-pig. They are considered as slowly moving rodents with sharp quills on their backs. These quill pigs are found in every part of the world and are classified into old-world porcupines and new world porcupines. 

The old-world porcupines are found in regions like Africa, Europe, and Asia. The new world porcupines are found in North, Central, and South America. The North American porcupines are the only species found in the United States and Canada. Mostly all the porcupines have some similarities, and all the porcupines float in water.

Quill pigs are buoyant due to the hollow structure of their quills, which help the porcupine to float in water easily. But not all porcupines are fond of water. North American brush-tailed porcupines are keen swimmers.

Porcupines have sharp quills about 30 centimeters long which cover all over their body and they use their quills as a defense by shooting them back into their predators. Once their quill is lost they will grow back in overtime. Some quills will have scales and barbs that are hard to remove. Each porcupine has about 30,000 quills, and it varies depending on its species.

Porcupine can grow up to 36 inches long, and the largest porcupine in the North African crested porcupine and the smallest is Bahia hairy dwarf porcupine. They can grow up to 15 inches long. Depending on their species, their tails can grow up to 8 to 12 inches, and they can weigh up to 2.5 to 7.7 lbs. 

Credit : Trivia Sharp

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While bull sharks are commonly found along coastlines, bays, and harbors, they also frequent a most uncommon shark habitat—freshwater rivers.

The species has been spotted 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) up the Amazon River in South America and dwell in Lake Nicaragua, a freshwater lake in Central America. Bull sharks have traveled up the Mississippi River as far north as Illinois and are regularly spotted in India's Ganges.

Their ability to tolerate freshwater is rooted in salt retention.

Sharks must retain salt inside their bodies. Without it, their cells will rupture and cause bloating and death. Given this requirement, most sharks cannot enter fresh water, because their internal salt levels would become diluted.

But bull sharks have special physiological adaptations that enable them to live in fresh water. Their kidneys recycle the salt within their bodies and special glands, located near their tails, also aid in salt retention.

While scientists have learned how the animals survive in fresh water, it is less clear why bull sharks, almost exclusively, developed this amazing ability.

Heithaus, of Florida International University, speculates that "probably the biggest reason is that [freshwater tolerance] allows the juveniles, the little guys, to be in a place that's relatively safe from being eaten by other sharks."

Adult bull sharks likely gain their own competitive advantages from salt retention. However, scientists have yet to uncover precisely what those advantages may be.

Heithaus said a big question for him is what bull sharks gave up to acquire their unique ability to survive in fresh water. "If they were a master of all trades, in both fresh and saltwater, we should see bull sharks dominating coastal waters," the marine biologist said. "There must be some cost to having that amazing ability."

Freshwater tolerance could be rooted in competition for saltwater food resources, where perhaps bull sharks suffered and needed to develop an edge. The ability might also be tied to disease susceptibility or other unknown and unstudied issues.

Credit : National Geographic

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A camel's hump stores fat, not water. As he eats and drinks, he builds hump fat reserves that sustain him through lean times. A camel's water intake varies according to his environment, his exertion level and the amount of fat in his hump. A thirsty camel can drink more than 30 gallons of water in less than 15 minutes.

Bactrian camels live in central and eastern Asia; dromedaries, or Arabian camels, live in northern Africa and the Middle East. The two types of camels are distinguished by their humps -- the dromedary has a single large hump, while the Bactrian camel is dual-humped. Though their humps are shaped differently, they function the same way, serving as fat stores to get camels through times of limited resources.

The number of humps doesn't affect the humps' purpose; both types can hold up to 80 pounds of fat. The humps change as the camels draw upon the fat in their humps for energy if they don't have food to eat or water to drink. As the fat is used, the bactrian camel's humps will lean over and droop. The dromedary's more elastic hump shrinks in size.

The amount of water a camel drinks depends on many things, including the kind of work he's doing, the environmental conditions and how much he currently has in his hump. A very thirsty camel may drink up to 32 gallons of water in approximately 13 minutes. The camel's diet also provides hydration opportunities; when the vegetation the camel eats is higher in water content, such as during colder months, he may forgo drinking because he gets what he needs from green plants.

Credit : Pets on Mom.com 

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Leatherback sea turtles are the biggest turtles on Earth. An adult leatherback sea turtle is generally longer than an average-size man is tall. Unlike other species of sea turtles, which have hard shells, the leatherback's shell is leathery; it feels almost rubbery. The shell is black, often speckled with white or yellow spots. These huge reptiles lived 100 million years ago—during the age of dinosaurs—but their future is uncertain.

Leatherbacks are one of the more endangered creatures on Earth. They are often caught by accident in fishing nets. Stuck underwater, they drown. Sea turtle nesting habitats are also being destroyed, and the eggs they do lay are illegally collected by people for food.

Newly hatched sea turtles instinctively head from the nest to the sea, but in areas where people live, the hatchlings often become confused by lights from houses built along shore. Instead of heading to sea, they head toward the lights. Another hazard for sea turtles is floating plastic trash, which they often mistake for jellyfish, their main food. Leatherbacks must breathe air at the surface, but can stay underwater for up to 35 minutes at a time. Only females ever leave the ocean.

During nesting season, the female comes ashore on a sandy beach, where she digs a hole. She lays about 100 eggs in the hole, covers them with sand, and heads back to sea. Sea turtles do not guard their nests, so the babies are on their own. The eggs take about two months to hatch. The tiny hatchlings are only 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 centimeters) long.

As soon as they hatch, they dig their way out of the sandy nest and scurry across the beach to the sea. Gulls and other birds often scoop up the hatchlings before they make it to the water. Other predators, such as large fish, await those lucky enough to make it into the sea.

Credit : National Geographic 

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On hatching, the larvae immediately eat the egg shell before feeding on the host plant. The larvae eat the seeds, developing seed pods and flower-heads.

Almost all caterpillars eat the leaves of plants, and a few can eat enough to damage trees or crops. They have evolved along with their foodplants. Most foodplants don't want to be eaten, so they have chemicals in their leaves to discourage caterpillars. Often these chemicals make them useful to humans as herbs and spices -- basil, for example, or peppermint. While a butterfly or moth will take nectar from almost any kind of flower, their caterpillars often will only eat one kind of plant. Some caterpillars do eat other insects, but very few.

Caterpillars have small but strong jaws that bite like pincers. They get the edge of a leaf between those jaws and just start biting. The tiny bites go into the caterpillar's gut where they're dissolved and turned into energy or fat. Eventually the waste material is ejected as poo (which look like little hand-grenades!).

Caterpillar mouth parts are really tiny and designed to eat leaves. Some caterpillars will try to scare you by acting like they're about to bite -- they rear up on their hind feet and might even make a faint clicking sound, but it's all for show. Since moth caterpillars are often larger than butterfly caterpillars, they are often the ones that try to appear scary.

There is one caterpillar, however, that has been known to nip people with its jaws. It's the huge striped caterpillar of a tropical hawkmoth (family Sphingidae). I have found these caterpillars in Panama, and they do look like they could give you a pretty good pinch!

Credit : Owlcation 

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The number “1 million billion” may sound made up or incalculable, but you’ll reach it trying to count all the ants on the planet. We share the Earth with an estimated 1 quadrillion ants spread out over more than 12,000 ant species. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 of these insects. This outnumbers all other living species on Earth, excluding bacteria. The next time you’re feeling stressed about the sight of a few dozen ants in your home, take a breath and be thankful that all the ants on the planet aren’t working together.

Enthusiastically social insects, ants typically live in structured nest communities that may be located underground, in ground-level mounds, or in trees. Carpenter ants nest in wood and can be destructive to buildings. Some species, such as army ants, defy the norm and do not have permanent homes, instead seeking out food for their enormous colonies during periods of migration.

One Amazon species (Allomerus decemarticulatus) cooperatively builds extensive traps from plant fiber. These traps have many holes and, when an insect steps on one, hundreds of ants inside use the openings to seize it with their jaws.

Another species, the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes), is capable of forming so-called supercolonies that house multiple queens. On Australia’s Christmas Island, the accidental introduction of yellow crazy ants in the early 20th century has led to a destructive infestation. The ants are a significant threat to the island’s endemic population of red crabs, which are displaced by the ants from their burrows or killed as they pass through ant nest sites during the crabs' large-scale annual migration from the forest to the coast.

Credit : National Geographic

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Cockroaches are infamous for their tenacity, and are often cited as the most likely survivors of a nuclear war. Some even claim that they can live without their heads. It turns out that these armchair exterminators (and their professional brethren) are right. Headless roaches are capable of living for weeks.

Cockroaches do in fact have brains. And they use them. It’s just that cockroaches don’t really need them that much.

In addition to brains, they have nerve tissues that control reflexes throughout their bodies, and these are distributed within each body segment. If a cockroach loses its head and brain, the nerve tissues (known as nerve tissue agglomerations) continue doing their job, providing the strange headless creature a fairly normal life. It can stand, react to touch, and move around. Cockroaches do in fact have brains. And they use them. It’s just that cockroaches don’t really need them that much.

In addition to brains, they have nerve tissues that control reflexes throughout their bodies, and these are distributed within each body segment. If a cockroach loses its head and brain, the nerve tissues (known as nerve tissue agglomerations) continue doing their job, providing the strange headless creature a fairly normal life. It can stand, react to touch, and move around.

A headless cockroach isn’t going to die from bleeding and it’s not going to die from being unable to breathe. It’s also not going to die from the relatively minor event (for it) of losing its brain.

But it is going to die from being unable to eat. And well before that, it’s going to die from thirst. A headless cockroach has no mouth to drink with and will be dead from dehydration in less than a week.

Credit : Cockroach Facts 

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Typically only a few inches in length, some members of this species have been known to grow to a serpentine 14 inches. Earthworms’ bodies are made up of ring-like segments called annuli. These segments are covered in setae, or small bristles, which the worm uses to move and burrow.

Night crawlers are so named because they are usually seen feeding above ground at night. They burrow during the day—typically keeping close to the surface—capable of digging down as deep as 6.5 feet.

The worm’s first segment contains its mouth. As they burrow, they consume soil, extracting nutrients from decomposing organic matter like leaves and roots. Earthworms are vital to soil health because they transport nutrients and minerals from below to the surface via their waste, and their tunnels aerate the ground. An earthworm can eat up to one third its body weight in a day.

Night crawlers also mate on the surface. They are hermaphroditic but do not self-fertilize. Following mating, each worm forms a tiny, lemon-shaped cocoon out of a liquid secreted from its clitellum, the familiar-looking bulge seen near the first third of the earthworm’s body. The sperm and egg cells are deposited inside the cocoon, and it is buried. After a two- to four-week gestation period, the baby worms emerge.

Earthworms are a source of food for numerous animals, like birds, rats, and toads, and are frequently used in residential composting and as bait in commercial and recreational fishing. Their numbers are strong throughout their range—they’re even considered agricultural pests in some areas—and they have no special status.

Credit : National Geographic

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Grasshoppers, crickets and locusts all have knee-ears that, at just a fraction of a millimetre long, are among the tiniest ears in the animal kingdom. Even though countless numbers of these insects had been dissected, no one had really understood the structures of these ears.

Like most animals, a grasshopper hears by receiving and processing sound waves. When the sound waves are received by the grasshopper, they act both on the external tympanum and the internal chambers. The interaction between these two pressures and the tympanal membrane results in the grasshopper’s ability to hear. This mechanism is so sophisticated, that a grasshopper’s ability to identify the direction of a sound source rivals that of a human.

Aside from locating and avoiding predators, acoustic communication in grasshoppers is mainly used for the attraction of mates. The male initiates a call, often a whirring or snapping noise, which is heard by the female. The male then listens for her response, and due to his sensitive hearing, is able to pinpoint her location with relative ease. Thus, a grasshopper’s ability to hear helps ensure the survival of the species.

Credit : National Geographic

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