The Book of Useless Information Read online

  There are seven distinctive types of combs on chickens: rose, strawberry, single, cushion, buttercup, pea, and V shaped.

  There are more than 450 species of finches throughout the world.

  The emu is Australia’s largest bird at a height of seven feet tall. It can’t fly, but it can swim and has the ability to run up to forty miles per hour.

  The female condor lays a single egg once every two years.

  The pelican breathes through its mouth because it has no nostrils.

  Male cockatoos can be taught to speak, but females can only chirp and sing.

  SWAN SONG

  The queen (or more precisely the Royal Household) owns all swans in England. The post of Royal Swankeeper is a post that has been around since 1215, and he and his staff are responsible for keeping accurate statistics about the number and whereabouts of the royal swans.

  During the 1800s, swan skins were used to make European ladies’ powder puffs and swan feathers were used to adorn fashionable hats.

  Many seabirds that swallow fishes too large for immediate digestion go about with the esophagus filled. Apparently without discomfort, the tail of the fish sticks out of the bird’s mouth.

  Seabirds have salt-excreting organs above their eyes that enable them to drink saltwater; sea snakes have a similar filter at the base of their tongues.

  The grebe, an aquatic bird, has an effective means of escaping danger while protecting its young. At the first sign of danger, it will sink into the water until its back is level with the surface. This allows its offspring to swim over and quickly climb on to its back. The parent grebe then rises up to its swimming position and ferries the chicks across the water to safety.

  The albatross can glide on air currents for several days and can even sleep while in flight.

  The albatross drinks sea water. It has a special desalinization apparatus that strains out and excretes all excess salt.

  In Miami, Florida, roosting vultures have taken to snatching poodles from rooftop patios.

  The Egyptian vulture, a white bird about the size of a raven, throws stones with its beak to open ostrich eggs to eat. This bird is one of the very few animals that, like man, manipulates objects as tools.

  There are more than three hundred species of parrots.

  Macaws are the largest and most colorful species of the parrot family.

  The nest of the African Grey Parrot is a hole in a large tree. The bird uses no nesting material. It lays its eggs in the wood dust at the bottom of the nest holes, which are about two to six feet deep.

  The owl parrot can’t fly and builds its nest under tree roots.

  The horned owl is not horned. Two tufts of feathers were mistaken for horns.

  The owl is the only bird to drop its upper eyelid to wink. All other birds raise their lower eyelids.

  To see at night as well as an owl, you would need eyeballs as big as grapefruits.

  The great horned owl can turn its head 270 degrees.

  The European eagle owl is the largest owl in the world. It can measure twenty-eight inches tall with a wingspan of five feet wide.

  Ducks will lay eggs only in the early morning.

  A duck has three eyelids.

  A sheep, a duck, and a rooster were the first passengers in a hot air balloon.

  The largest bird egg in the world today is that of the ostrich. Ostrich eggs are from six to eight inches long. Because of their size and the thickness of their shells, they take forty minutes to hard-boil.

  There is just one known species of ostrich in the world—it is in the order of Struthioniformes.

  The ostrich has only two toes, unlike most birds, which have three or four.

  The ostrich has four eyelids. The inner lids are for blinking and keeping the eyeballs moist, the outer lids for casting come-hither glances at potential mates.

  An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

  To keep cool, ostriches urinate on their legs; it then evaporates like sweat.

  Eagles can live in captivity for up to forty-six years.

  South America’s harpy eagles eat monkeys. The birds build twig platforms in the treetops where they lay their eggs.

  The African eagle, swooping at more than one hundred miles per hour, can brake to a halt in twenty feet.

  The nest of the bald eagle can weigh well over a ton.

  Eagles mate while airborne.

  The hum of a hummingbird comes from the super-fast beat of the wings. The smallest ones beat their wings the fastest—up to eighty times per second. Even the slower beat of bigger hummingbirds’ wings is so fast you can only see a blur.

  The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backward.

  It would require an average of eighteen hummingbirds to weigh in at one ounce. The hummingbird’s tiny brain, 4.2 percent of its body weight, is proportionately the largest in the bird kingdom.

  Flamingos are pink because they consume vast quantities of algae.

  Flamingos can live up to eighty years.

  Flamingos can only eat with their heads upside down.

  MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

  The penguin is the only bird that can swim but not fly. It is also the only bird that walks upright. Earlier penguins were capable of flight.

  Penguins do not tip over when an airplane flies over them.

  The deepest penguin dive was 1,261 feet under the water.

  The emperor penguin is the largest type of penguin. It is also the deepest diver, reaching depths of 870 feet and staying there for up to 18 minutes.

  The Adélie penguin bears the name of French explorer Dumont d’Urville’s beloved wife.

  There are no penguins at the North Pole. In fact, there are no penguins anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere (outside of zoos). All seventeen varieties of the bird are found below the equator, primarily in Antarctica.

  UNDER THE SEA

  There are more species of fish than mammals, reptiles, and birds combined.

  The pair of fins at the back of a fish’s body are called pelvic fins.

  More species of fish live in a single tributary of the Amazon River than in all the rivers in North America combined.

  Sturgeon can live as long as one hundred years, reaching sexual maturity in the wild at around fifteen to twenty years of age. Mature females will produce millions of eggs every two to three years.

  The garfish has green bones.

  The longest fish is the oarfish, which is shaped like an eel. On average, it grows to more than twenty feet in length, but oarfish of forty-six feet have been found.

  The African lungfish can live without water for up to four years. When a drought occurs, it digs a pit and encloses itself in a capsule of slime and earth, leaving a small opening for breathing. The capsule dries and hardens, but the fish is protected. When rain comes, the capsule dissolves and the lungfish swims away.

  Minnows have teeth in their throats.

  The candlefish is so oily that it was once burned for fuel.

  The flounder swims sideways.

  The mudskipper fish can actually walk on land.

  Many types of fish—called mouthbrooders—carry their eggs in their mouths until the babies hatch and can care for themselves.

  The Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, lays up to five million eggs at one time.

  Walking catfish of Florida can stay out of water for eighty days.

  Lungless salamanders are the largest group of salamanders. They have no lungs or gills and breathe through their skin, which must be kept damp to allow in oxygen. If they dry out, they will die of suffocation.

  The gurnard, a fish found in Florida, grunts when a thunderstorm is brewing. It’s said to be more reliable than meteorologists.

  Sea sponges are used in drugs for treating asthma and cancer.

  The glue of a barnacle cannot be dissolved with strong acids or temperatures set as high as 440 degrees Fahrenheit.

  A four-inch-long abalone can grip a rock with a force of four hundred pounds. Two grown
men are incapable of prying it loose.

  A winkle is an edible sea snail.

  Only 30 percent of the famous Maryland blue crab are actually from Maryland; the rest are from North Carolina and Virginia.

  A scallop has a total of thirty-five eyes, which are all blue.

  The largest species of seahorse measures eight inches.

  A shrimp has more than a hundred pairs of chromosomes in each cell nucleus. The shrimp’s heart is in its head.

  Shrimp swim backward.

  The minuscule krill shrimp has eleven pairs of legs.

  The pistol shrimp makes a noise so loud it can shatter glass.

  Some mantis shrimp travel by doing backward somersaults.

  Tuna swim at a steady rate of nine miles per hour for an indefinite period of time—and they never stop moving. Estimates indicate that a fifteen-year-old tuna travels one million miles in its lifetime.

  Tuna will suffocate if they ever stop swimming. They need a continual flow of water across their gills to breathe, even while they rest.

  FREE WILLY

  The killer whale, or orca, is the fastest sea mammal. It can reach speeds up to thirty-four miles per hour in pursuit of prey.

  Measuring about eight feet at birth, killer whale bulls can grow to twenty-five feet and weigh as much as six tons.

  It seems to biologists that, unlike their humpback whale relatives, whose underwater song evolves from year to year, killer whales retain individual dialects unchanged over long periods, possibly even for life.

  The humpback whale’s flippers grow to a maximum of 31 percent of its body length—that’s a potential maximum length of about eighteen feet. Because of these enormous flippers, the whale’s Latin name translates to “big-winged New Englander.”

  A forty-two-foot sperm whale has about seven tons of oil in it.

  The gray whale is not really gray. It is black and just appears gray from a distance. It has a series of up to 180 fringed overlapping plates hanging from each side of its upper jaw. This is where teeth would be located if the creature had any.

  Electric eels are not really eels but a kind of fish. Although they look like eels, their internal organs are arranged differently. Unlike most fish, electric eels cannot get enough oxygen from water. Approximately every five minutes, they must surface to breathe or they will drown. Unlike most fish, they can swim both backward and forward.

  The electric eel has thousands of electric cells running up and down its tail. Vital body organs, such as the heart, are packed into a small space behind the head. They use their electric sense to “see.” Their electric sensors act like radar, sending out weak impulses that bounce off objects.

  The electric eel is the most shocking animal on Earth—no other animal packs such a big charge. If attacking large prey, a nine-foot-long eel can discharge about eight hundred volts. One zap could stun a human. The larger the eel, the bigger the charge.

  The electric organs in an electric eel make up four-fifths of its body.

  The adult electric eel has enough electrical power in it to power a house of about twelve hundred square feet. The average discharge is four hundred volts.

  Some species of freshwater eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean to mate. After laying up to twenty million eggs, the female eel dies. The baby eels hatched from the eggs then make their way back to fresh water.

  The Portuguese man-of-war is found most commonly in the Gulf Stream of the northern Atlantic Ocean and in the tropical and subtropical regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is sometimes found floating in groups numbering in the thousands. Its “jellyfish” tentacles have been known to grow a mile in length, catching anything in its path by stinging its prey.

  The lethal Lion’s Mane jellyfish has a bell reaching up to eight feet in diameter and tentacles longer than a blue whale—up to two hundred feet long. Juveniles are pink, turning red as they mature, and then becoming brownish purple when adults.

  The beautiful but deadly Australian sea wasp (Chironex fleckeri) is the most venomous jellyfish in the world. Its cardiotoxic venom has caused the deaths of sixty-six people off the coast of Queensland since 1880, with victims dying within one to three minutes if medical aid is not available.

  Jellyfish are comprised of more than 95 percent water and have no brain, heart, or bones and no actual eyes.

  Coral are closely related to jellyfish.

  The leather coral, which is softer than the stony coral, may attack and eat one of its own kind if subjected to crowded conditions.

  Schools of South American (Pacific) Humboldt squid, which reach twelve feet in length, have been known to strip five-hundred-pound marlins to the bone.

  Scientists still know very little about the giant squid, except what can be gleaned from the carcasses of about one hundred beached squid dating back to 1639. Despite centuries of myths and exciting tales of sightings of giant squid, more information is known about dinosaurs.

  Scientists do know that giant squid have eyes as big as watermelons.

  To a human, one giant octopus looks virtually the same as any other of the same size and species. This explains why divers claim to have seen the same octopus occupy a den for ten or more years. But an octopus seldom lives longer than four years.

  An octopus will eat its own arms if it gets really hungry.

  The octopus’s testicles are located in its head. The pupil of an octopus’s eye is rectangular.

  Using its web—the skin between its arms—an octopus can carry up to a dozen crabs back to its den.

  The oyster is usually ambisexual. It begins life as a male, becomes a female, then changes back to a male, then back to a female. It may go back and forth many times.

  No pearls of value are ever found in North American oysters.

  It can take a deep-sea clam up to one hundred years to reach a third of an inch in length. The clam is among the slowest-growing yet longest-living species on the planet. The quahog, a marine clam, can live for up to two hundred years, making it the longest-living ocean creature in the world. Second place goes to the killer whale at ninety years; third is the blue whale at eighty years; fourth is the sea turtle at fifty years; and fifth is the tiger shark at forty years.

  Lobsters, like grasshoppers, feel no pain. They have a decentralized nervous system with no cerebral cortex, which in humans is where a reaction to painful stimuli proceeds.

  Lobsters molt twenty to thirty times before reaching the one-pound market size. This takes approximately seven years.

  You can cut up a starfish into pieces, and each piece will grow into a completely new starfish.

  Some species of starfish have as many as fifty appendages.

  Starfish feed on mollusks and crustaceans. In some areas, they are a serious threat to oyster and clam beds.

  Starfish have eyespots at the tip of each arm. These act as light sensors and contain a red pigment that changes chemically in the presence of light. The eyespots are believed to influence the starfish’s behavior, particularly movement.

  Dolphins do not breathe automatically, as humans do, and so they do not sleep as humans do. If they became unconscious, they would sink to the bottom of the sea. Without the oxygen they need to take in periodically, they would die.

  Dolphins swim in circles while they sleep, with the eye on the outside of the circle open to keep watch for predators. After a certain amount of time, they reverse and swim in the opposite direction with the opposite eye open.

  Dolphins jump out of the water to conserve energy. It is easier to move through the air than through the water.

  Dolphins have killed sharks by ramming them with their snouts.

  JAWS!

  Sharks’ fossil records date back more than twice as far as those of the dinosaurs.

  Sharks can travel up to forty miles per hour.

  Sharks have a sixth sense that enables them to detect bioelectrical fields radiated by other sea creatures and to navigate by sensing changes in the earth’s magne
tic field.

  Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that cannot succumb to cancer. Scientists believe this is related to the fact that they have no bone, only cartilage.

  Some sharks swim in a figure eight when frightened.

  Sharks can be dangerous even before they are born. Scientist Stewart Springer was bitten by a sand tiger shark embryo while he was examining its pregnant mother.

  The enormous livers of basking sharks, which can account for up to one-third of their body weight, produce valuable oil used to lubricate engines and manufacture cosmetics.

  The largest great white shark ever caught measured thirty-seven feet and weighed twenty-four thousand pounds. It was found in a herring weir in New Brunswick in 1930.

  The great distance between the eyes and nostrils of the hammerhead shark may allow the animal to detect its prey’s direction more accurately. They are experts at catching the stingrays on which they feed.

  The nurse shark spends much of its time in caves. It leaves the security of its cave to feed on prey such as lobsters, squid, and crabs. The sucking sound of its powerful throat muscles is probably the origin of the animal’s common name.