Page 2 - Animal Facts

A man was swallowed by a hippo and managed to escape alive!

Paul Templer was 27-years-old and working as a river guide doing tours down the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe. During those tours, he had experienced many 'half-hearted' attacks from a territorial male hippo. However, one day the hippo attacked viciously out of nowhere.

The attack first killed an apprentice guide, and then turned to Templer when he approached to help his coworker. Templer said he felt no pain or transition, just like he had suddenly gone blind and deaf. He was trapped head-in up to his waist inside the hippo!

He described it as slimy, that it smelled like rotten eggs and had a tremendous pressure in his chest. He managed to wriggle free once, but the hippo attacked again. The hippo eventually spat him out and he managed to live.

The attack left him with 40 puncture wounds. Some were so deep, you could see his lungs. He also lost an arm because it got crushed by the animal. Templer eventually returned to his job as a guide.

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If you wear this cologne during a safari, you might be attacked tigers or cougars!

I guess you could say that this cologne works all the time, 100% of the time. For some reason, the smell of Calvin Klein's Obsession for men makes wild cats go wild. Jaguars, cheetahs, ocelots, pumas, cougars, snow leopards and tigers all seem to be drawn to the cologne's smell.

Scientists actually use objects sprayed with the stuff to lure cats from wildlife reserves to a place where they can be photographed and counted. For example, in the Maya Biosphere Reserve of Guatemala, scientists have been able to estimate the jaguar population more easily thanks to Calvin Klein.

The attraction was discovered by a zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo, who went through several trials and finally discovered that Obsession for men (but not for women) drives big cats insane.

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Weak male cuttlefish disguise as female to get past other males and mate with the females!

The cuttlefish, like many undersea animals, is quite odd. They belong to the same class as squids and octopi and can rapidly change the color pattern on their bodies. Sometimes, this color change is used to camouflage them against predators and sometimes, it is used to attract a mate.

Cuttlefish populations are male-biased, which means there is a lot of competition between males, especially for access to females. Once a male identifies a female he would like to mate with, he has to convince her. In order to do so, he often displays an impressive array of colors.

However, this display, while impressing the female, also often attracts other males. Basically, the males have to pretend that they haven’t found a female and at the same time, convince her to mate. Tough.

In some cases, a weaker male will display an attractive range of color patterns on one side of his body toward the female and on the other side, a camouflage. Often this camouflage side can be mistaken for a female. The male is then able to mate unobtrusively mate with the female.

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The Blanket Octopus rips off the Portuguese Man O'War's tentacles and uses them for defensive purposes

The blanket octopus is a type of octopus that occupies shallow waters in subtropical and tropical oceans. They are called this because of the long, transparent webs that connect the dorsal and dorsolateral arms of the adult females.

Unlike most species of animals, the females are much larger than the males. They can reach 2 meters in length while the males are only a few centimeters long. The male dies shortly after mating and the female carries nearly 100,000 eggs at the base of her dorsal arm.

The blanket octopus is immune to the poison of the Portuguese Man O’War. This allows the males and immature females to rip off the man o’war’s tentacles and use them for defensive purposes. The females also unfurl their net-like membranes to increase their apparent size.

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There's a wasp that cocoons and grows inside cockroaches! The larva eats them alive from the inside!

This seemingly harmless looking parasite, called the Jewel Wasp, actually has a very creepy birthing ritual. It will poison and paralyze a cockroach with a few quick stings, and drag it into a burrow. Once it's there, the wasp will lay an egg on the wasp, and the egg will develop inside the roach!

The wasp mostly lives in the tropical regions of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands. The weird reproductive method doesn't end there, however. The wasp will sting a cockroach twice. The first sting will paralyze the cockroach so it can't defend itself.The second sting turns the roach into a zombie, basically, as the cockroach is unable to walk spontaneously or of its own will.

The eggs hatch about 3 days after the sting. Then, the larva feed for 4-5 days on the roach. Mind you, the roach is still alive. In fact the larva will strategically eat the roach's internal organs to maximize the chances that the roach stays alive until the larva can develop into a cocoon!

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