World ANIMAL Day 2024

The world is their home too!

World Animal Day is an annual event on the 4th of October, celebrating animal rights and welfare across the globe. It’s an important day and has been marked since 1925, with a growing international community striving to end the needless suffering of all animals.

By increasing awareness and improving education worldwide, those involved are helping to create a space recognising wild and farmed animals as sentient beings with thoughts, feelings, and individual personalities. Their welfare and treatment must reflect this.

More than one million known animal species coexist on Earth with us, each representing an ancient tome of biological trivia. How much do we know about them, let’s find out.

Octopuses have three hearts. One pumps blood around the body, while the other two pump it to the gills. Oh, and that blood is blue, thanks to high copper levels!

Owls don’t have eyeballs. They have eye tubes.

Polar bears have black skin, which helps them absorb heat from the sun to stay warm in an Arctic climate, and it likely protects the bears from harmful UV rays.

Butterflies can taste with their feet, using something called chemoreceptors to help them identify plants. Females select the correct leaf on which to lay eggs by “drumming” it with their feet to release juices.

Animals with smaller bodies and faster metabolism see in slow motion.

Dogs’ sense of smell is about 100,000 times stronger than humans’, but they have just one-sixth our number of taste buds.

Reindeer eyeballs turn blue in winter to help them see at lower light levels. (They’re golden coloured in summer.) No other mammals are known to have this ability.

A single strand of spider silk is thinner than a human hair but also five times stronger than steel of the same width. A rope just 2 inches thick could reportedly stop a Boeing 747.

The claws of a mantis shrimp can accelerate as quickly as a .22-caliber bullet. Scientists must keep them in thick plastic tanks because their punches can break glass.

A sea lion is the first nonhuman mammal with a proven ability to keep a beat. Scientists trained a female sea lion named Ronan to do it, and she then showed she could transfer that skill to a song with a different beat that she had not heard before.

Squirrels can’t burp or vomit, nor can any other rodent, which is why rat poison is so effective; other mammals tend to expel any toxic substance they ingest.

Honeybees can flap their wings 200 times every second.

A type of “immortal” jellyfish can cheat death indefinitely.

Cats and horses are highly susceptible to black widow venom, but dogs are relatively resistant. Sheep and rabbits are apparently immune.

Sharks kill fewer than 10 people per year. Humans kill about 100 million sharks per year. They should be much more scared of us than we are of them.

Tardigrades are extremely durable microscopic animals that exist all over Earth. They can survive any of the following: 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 Celsius), -458 degrees F (-272 C), the vacuum of space, pressure six times stronger than the ocean floor, and more than a decade without food.

Wild dolphins call each other by name. They let out a unique whistle to identify each other and will respond if they hear their call played back.

Young goats pick up accents from each other, joining humans, bats, and whales as mammals known to adjust their vocal sounds to fit into a new social group.

Humpback whale songs spread like “cultural ripples from one population to another.”

Elephants have a specific alarm call that means “human.”

There’s a place on Earth where seagulls prey on right whales. They dive-bomb the calves coming up to breathe air and take bites of blubber from their backs. The calves’ skin is thinner than adults’, and they have to come up for air more frequently, making them more exposed and vulnerable to attack.

Horses use facial expressions to communicate with each other. Researchers have identified 17 discrete facial movements in horses.

Azara’s owl monkeys are more monogamous than humans. They live together as families, with two parents and offspring, for up to nine years or when one of the parents dies. Fathers are highly involved in caring for their young.

Male gentoo and Adelie penguins “propose” to females by giving them a pebble. These are precious because the penguins use them to build their nests, and they can be hard to find along the barren Antarctic shoreline. If the female accepts the pebble, the pair bonds and mates for life.

Barn owls are generally monogamous, but about 25% of mated pairs “divorce.” They do so if breeding is unsuccessful.

African buffalo herds display voting behaviour, in which individuals register their travel preference by standing up, looking in one direction, and then lying back down. Only adult females can vote.

If a honeybee keeps waggle-dancing in favour of an unpopular nesting site, other workers headbutt her to help the colony reach a consensus.

The bone-house wasp stuffs the walls of its nest with dead ants.

Animals have some unusual group names. For instance, a group of parrots is known as a pandemonium. Buffalo form an “obstinacy” and rhinoceroses a “crash.” You may have heard of a “murder” of crows, but what about an “exaltation” of larks?

Warmer weather causes more turtles to be born female than male.

A super colony of invasive Argentine ants, known as the “California large,” covers 560 miles of the U.S. west coast. It’s currently engaged in a turf war with a nearby super colony in Mexico.

Fourteen new species of dancing frogs were discovered in 2014, bringing the global number of known dancing frog species to 24.

Source: https://www.treehugger.com/random-animal-facts-that-may-surprise-you-4868818