Page 4 - Animal Facts

Blanket octopuses rip Portuguese man o’ war poisonous tentacles to use as defensive weapons!

The Tremoctopus, also known as the blanket octopus, is a species of cephalopods that inhabits the surface and mid-water of subtropical and tropical oceans. They are best known for the long transparent webs that connect the dorsal and dorsolateral arms of adult females.

They exhibit an extreme degree of sexual dimorphism. Females can reach 2m in length, while males are at most a few centimeters long. Because of this smaller size, males (and also young females) have to resort to interesting defensive techniques.

Particularly, they are immune to the poison of the Portuguese man o’ war. They rip off it's tentacles and use it as a deadly defensive weapon. By contrast, the females are able to spread out their membranes and appear much larger than it actually is.

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Gay swan couples lure females into a threesome to steal an egg from her!

An estimated one-quarter of all black swans pairings are of homosexual males. They steal nests, or form temporary threesomes with females to obtain eggs, driving away the female after she lays the eggs.

More of their cygnets survive to adulthood than those of different-sex pairs, possibly due to their superior ability to defend large portions of land. The same reasoning has been applied to male flamingo pairs raising chicks. Studies have shown that 10 to 15 percent of female western gulls in some populations in the wild exhibit homosexual behavior.

Research has shown that the environmental pollutant methylmercury can increase the prevalence of homosexual behavior in male American White Ibis. The study involved exposing chicks in varying dosages to the chemical and measuring the degree of homosexual behavior in adulthood. The results discovered was that as the dosage was increased the likelihood of homosexual behavior also increased.

The endocrine blocking feature of mercury has been suggested as a possible cause of sexual disruption in other bird species. Mallards form male-female pairs only until the female lays eggs, at which time the male leaves the female. Mallards have rates of male-male sexual activity that are unusually high for birds, in some cases, as high as 19 percent of all pairs in a population.

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The Mayor of an Alaskan town is a cat!

Stubbs (born Saturday, April 12, 1997) is a cat who was elected mayor of the town of Talkeetna, Alaska in July 1997, as a write-in candidate. It seems the field of human candidates was pretty weak and the town residents wanted to send a message with their votes.

So how can a cat fulfill mayoral duties? Well, Talkeetna is described as a 'historical district,' and the mayoral post is more symbolic than funcitonal. His main function is to be a tourist attraction. However, in typical cat fashion, the mayor is a little prickly and shuns too much human contact.

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Scientists are trying to de-evolve a chicken into a dinosaur!

It's widely accepted now that dinosaurs didn't quite all die off when a meteorite hit the Gulf of Mexico. Some survived and evolved into modern day birds. This genetic lineage might be the way that Jurassic Park could finally be possible.

For example, scientist think that dinosaurs and birds lay eggs the same way and have similar bone anatomy. Modern day birds, scientists agree, are closely related to two-legged meat eating theropods like T-rexes and velociraptors.

The key to reverse engineering a dinosaur from a chicken lies in the fact that many of the DNA instructions on how to build a dinosaur are still present in a modern day bird. The genetic traits are either recessive or turned off.

What scientists need to do is find a way to fire the dinosaur traits and suppress the bird traits during the embryonic development, and presto, you got a dinosaur. Of course, that is much easier said than done. Check out the source if you want more info.

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The Mall of America is using 72,000 ladybugs as pest control!

We've had facts before about how big the Mall of America is. To recap: It's huge. It's so big, it has a full theme park inside and 7 Yankee stadiums could fit inside. The Mall has over 30,000 live plants, including 400 trees. As a result, the Mall also has pests that affect plants.

Aphids feed on plants and are generally a gardener's bad news. To keep the aphid population down, the Mall of America groundskeepers recently released about 72,000 ladybugs in the mall. Ladybugs prey on Aphids and will hopefully keep the mall's plants green and happy.

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