I love finding unusual wildlife facts, so instead of having random tweets scattered I thought I’ll conveniently bundle them all here:

https://twitter.com/rxmchls/status/1251608645068087301?s=21 https://twitter.com/rxmchls/status/1251608645068087301

Lionesses do about 90% of the hunting for their pride. Male lions do roughly a max of 20 kills a year.

Gentoo penguins are the fastest of all penguins, they can reach speeds of 22mph.

Compare this to most of their other species, which swim at around 4-7mph.

Should you ever need to tamper with a crime scene (???), bring a koala. Their fingerprints are extremely similar to a humans loops and arches.

In Australia the police have actually feared that investigations have been tampered by their prints.

The worlds fastest punch belongs to the mantis shrimp. Their punch travels at about 50mph, “accelerating faster than a .22 bullet”.

Apparently, it’s not only humans that have accents specific to their home regions. Research has shown that sperm whales in the Caribbean have a different “accent” to whales in other oceans.

Incase you didn’t know, there are glow in the dark sharks (& fish)!

Researchers discovered there are two species which emit a biofluorescent green glow - chain catsharks and swell sharks.

Dolphins give each other “names”. Research shows that they use a unique whistle to identify each other.

A cockroach can live up to a week without its head, after which it will only die due to starvation.

They can also fit through gaps as small as a quarter of their body height by flattening their exoskeletons.

Japanese honeybees swarm an intruder but rather than stinging they will vibrate their bodies, collectively raising their body to temperatures of 80 degrees. Basically, they cook their enemies alive.

Dolphins get high on the toxic secretion of puffer fish by licking/chewing it. They even treat it like a spliff and take turns by passing the fish around to each other.

Otters are necrophiliac, serial killing, raping little fur monsters. They prey on harbour seal pups, cause deep wounds and then rape them until they die.

They also like to drown female otters and drag their dead carcass around to repeatedly rape.

Axolotl salamanders are the masters of regeneration. They can regrow limbs, front portion of their brain, spinal cords, testes and 1/3 of their heart.

When male honeybees orgasm, their testicles explode and they die.

Horses can’t vomit. Rabbits too, nor can they burp. If they have too much gas and get bloated their stomachs can rupture causing them to die.

Sharks (450+ million years) have been around longer than trees (350 million years) and are dubbed as living fossils. They’ve survived all 5 global mass extinctions that wiped 80 of the planets megafauna.

Kangaroos can’t hop backwards.

Despite their name, killer whales (orcas) belong to the dolphin family, of which they are the largest member.

Female ferrets die if they go too long without sex.

Cows have best friends and they panic when they are separated from them.

When turned upside down, sharks enter a state of tonic immobility. Effectively they are paralysed and if in position long enough will die.

Orcas have figured this out and have been seen holding sharks upside down, often to chomp on their livers.

The mantis shrimp can detect 12 color wavelengths. Humans are only able to see 3.

Contrary to popular belief, the color red does not make Bulls angry.

They are color blind. Not completely but they lack the red retina receptor, as do other cattle. Movement is what gets them angry.

Koalas are stupid as f*ck. They feed primarily on eucalyptus leaves which were, and still are to the babies, originally poisonous to them.

If you took the leaves off the branches and laid them around a koala, they wouldn’t know to eat them and would literally starve.

Baby koalas are too young to digest the plant as they don’t have matured digestive systems. Adult koalas eat the plant & then pretty much sh*t out the digested plant for the babies consumption.

This could all have been avoided if they weren’t so dumb and ate a different plant.

Rhino horns are made out of keratin - the same protein that makes nails and hair.

Here’s a Himalayan Griffon vulture in battle mode! It is an “Old World” vulture, which do not have a good sense of smell - this normal for raptors.

They rely exclusively on their eyesight to locate food & when soaring can spot a 3-foot animal carcass from 4 miles away.

Alligators have an average bite force of 2100 pounds PSI, enough to bite through steel. Minor compared to the saltwater crocodile who slam their jaws shut at 3700PSI.

This is mad considering they have almost no jaw-opening muscles, you can hold their mouth shut with your hands.

There’s an immortal jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii, that literally can live forever.

In short, once they reach a certain age it pretty much turns itself inside out and reverts back to its juvenile state, which normally happens after they reproduce.

Desert ants have an internal pedometer and they “count” the amount of steps they have taken to find their way back home.

If you made some of the ants’ legs shorter, they’d take same amount of steps but wouldn’t be able to find their way because the distance is less.

Rabbits can scream - but only when they feel they’re about to die or are fearful of a predator.

Do not piss off a crow. They can recognise and memorise your face - they also hold grudges!

They will also still remember to attack you even 5 years after the initial incident.

3% of the glacier ice in Antarctica is composed of penguin urine.

Some octopus females will consume a male after mating. To combat this the males will detach their penis, which is basically a sperm ball, and throw it at the female so she has the option of using it as a dildo.

This is the ultimate “go fuck yourself”.

There aren’t many creatures with actual blue pigment - most blue animals trick us into appearing blue by reflecting blue and violet light.

True blue is rare, the only ones known to create actual blue pigment is a genus of Nessaea butterflies.

Male barnacles have the largest penis in proportion to its body size in the animal kingdom, reaching up to 50 times the length of the barnacles body.

Baby elephants tend to suck their trunks to comfort themselves the same way human children suck their thumbs.

Do not drink sea water. The average blue whale produces over 400 gallons of sperm when it ejaculates, but only 10% of that will reach a female.

That’s 360 gallons of sperm entering the sea. Per whale.

Hummingbirds are incredible flyers, beating their wings 80 times per SECOND.

They’re also the only known birds that can fly backwards.

Wombats poop is cube-shaped.

Sperm whales are loudest mammals on the planet & very chatty. Their clicks reach an incredible 230 decibels. They can very easily burst your eardrums & vibrate you to death.

For reference: a jet engine 100ft away, 140 decibels. Eardrums bursting 150dcb, death is 180-200dcb.

Orcas experience menopause. Pods are matriarchal & the elder females stop reproducing in order to focus their attention on the survival of their pod and not compete with their own children.

When pursued by a predator, quokka mums will dash their baby out of their pouch as a sacrifice.

The babies make noise and thus attract the predators attention so that the mum can escape.

Some scorpions can hold their breath for 6 days.

However they have nothing on a tiny arachnid called the northern pseudoscorpion, which can survive without breathing for 17 days.

Anybody ever wonder where white sand beaches, like those in Hawaii, got their colour from? Majority of the sand grains are actually parrotfish poop.

That’s what you get when your diet consists of coral.

Polar bears don’t have white fur - it’s actually transparent and their skin is black. The fur looks white due to light refraction in the hair.

Both features are meant to maximise the suns energy - the fur has a 95% efficiency in converting UV rays into useable heat.

Lions have the loudest roar of all the big cats. Their vocal chords form a square shape, which stabilises them and enables better response to passing air.

Roars can reach 114 decibels (even to someone standing a few feet away) and can be heard from 5 miles away.

For reference:

- a turbo-fan aircraft at takeoff power at 200ft = 118 decibels.
- live rock concert = 114 decibels
- thunderclap = 120 decibels.

Long story short, lions are fucking loud. Can you imagine the fear of being anywhere near a single animal capable of that sound?

Sadly estimated that only 1 in 1000 to 10,000 sea turtles will survive to adulthood.

A narwhal tusk is actually an enlarged tooth with sensory capability & 10 million nerve endings inside. They can grow as long as 10ft.

False myth: elephants are the only mammals that can't jump. They can never get all 4 feet off the ground at once - even when running at full speed.

They are joined by sloths, rhinos and hippos in not being able to "jump" but these lot can get all 4 feet off ground at once.

No matter what height you drop a squirrel from, it will most likely survive.

They have stretchy bodies, a puffy tail and experience a lot of drag, meaning they have low terminal velocity and hence can survive such impacts.

Penguins are genetically kinda always squatting. Their legs are longer than you think and they actually have knees, which are just always tucked in.

The population of kangaroos in Australia is double the humans. Their meat isn’t unpopular to consume & is a healthy option - high protein, low fat.

80% of animals hit by cars are kangaroos - majority of rental insurance won’t cover you there if you drive in the outback in dark.

Moray eels have a second set of jaws that they “shoot” at the prey they have just captured in their oral jaw.

Onto my favourite, the tiger :

They have one of the best memories of any animal and stronger brain synapses means better short term memory than even humans. It lasts approximately 30 seconds longer than ours.

Tigers sometimes feed on bears due to overlapping territories - Bengal tigers on sloth bears, Siberian tigers on black & brown bears.

They’re great impressionists and in order to lure the bears in will imitate the sounds of their prey.

Apparently every day is leg day. Tigers’ back legs are so strong that they’ve been known to be shot, bleed out and eventually die but still remain standing.

Allegedly if you look a tiger in the eye it’s less likely to kill you - they hunt by ambush, losing of element of surprise means they’ll likely find another prey.

Men in India often wear masks on the back of their head with a second face as a counteractive measure.

Tigers stripes help break up the outline of its body, making it hard to see and they appear as shadows stalking through long grass in moonlight.

The stripes are like fingerprints - no 2 have the same pattern. Their skin is also striped not just their fur.

The only marking that is similar in them all is the one on their forehead, which closely resembles the Chinese symbol of ‘wang’ meaning king. Very fitting if you ask me.

Tigers have been known to jump as high as 15ft in the air, can apparently leap distance of 20ft & can reach speeds of 40mph.

They’re also adept swimmers and unlike the other big cats, enjoy bathing and playing in water. They can swim several km to hunt/cross rivers.

Of the once-9 subspecies of tigers:
3 are extinct, 1 is extinct in the wild and the rest are endangered.

We’ve lost 97% of the wild tiger population in the last century and it’s been estimated the last remaining subspecies will become in extinct in as little as 15 years.

Apparently tiger wee smells like buttered popcorn. Do with that as you wish.

Tiger roars will paralyse you. It can be heard from 2 miles away and they produce extremely low-pitched infrasound growls that are so deep we can’t hear but will definitely feel.

Tigers have antiseptic saliva. Their tongues have small, sharp, rear-facing projections called papillae which give it the rough texture.

It’s designed to strip the skin, feathers, fur and meat off prey. They’ve been known to lick the paint off the walls of their zoo enclosures.

They’re solitary creatures and it’s quite rare to find them group together in the wild.

They also have better manners than lions. Rather than fight to the death over a kill, tigers often share their meals with others that cross paths.

On the topic of them having better manners than lions, tiger males have often been observed in the wild to allow the females and cubs to eat first before divulging themselves.

A lot of speculation but tigers can’t really purr. Their throats hyoid bone is flexible, unlike a house cats which is rigid and thus they aren’t capable of the same purr noise.

Instead they often show happiness, comfort and calmness by squinting/closing their eyes.

Only female mosquitos bite and suck blood in order to use the protein to produce eggs.

Both males and females live off consuming sugary substances such as flower and honeydew nectar.

Green woodpeckers tongues are freakishly long.

So long, in fact, that it coils behind the skull, over the eyes and into the right nostril in order to fit inside its head.

Turns out roosters, the little fuckers, bother everybody but themselves with their nonsensical wake up call.

When they open their beaks, their ear canal partly closes up and covers 50% of their eardrum. Literal, built-in earplugs.

Disney lied to y’all. I’m not sure how many people are aware but, there’s no such thing as a black panther (as a species of its own).

What you call a panther varies but they’re normally melanic big cats e.g leopards/jaguars. Genetic mutation makes their furs black.

An ostrich may not be able to fly but they have amazing legs. They can sprint at 43mph and run over distances at 31mph. They cover 10-16feet in one stride.

They also double up as formidable weapons. Their kicks can kill a human or potential predators such as lions.

It used to be thought that Komodo dragons had toxic bacteria in their saliva. Turns out they had venom glands all along!

They kill with a grip, rip & drip tactic. When they bite, they pull back resulting in huge gaping wounds. Venom quickens loss of blood&sends prey into shock.

Armadillos can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes under water.

They can also delay their pregnancy. Yep. If they mate and decide nahhh I’m not ready for this, they can literally put pregnancy on hold for up to 2 years.

They always birth identical quadruplets too.

In captivity, giraffes sleep about 4.5 hours a day.

In the wild, their daily sleep total doesn’t exceed 40 minutes. They sleep fully standing and in short bursts, no more than 5 minutes at a time.

It used to be thought that they didn’t sleep at all.

Hyenas have very complex societal pack structures based on strict matriarchy. The girls are favoured over the boys, who usually emigrate the clan.

The females also have pseudo-penis’ (a 7” clitoris) through which they urinate&give birth, often resulting in death. For visuals: