Did you know?
There are 1,318,000 different kinds of animals (and most of them are insects).
All the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere has come from plants and algae.
Most birds have a poor sense of smell (but turkey vultures can smell for miles).
Turkey vultures’ digestive juices kill all germs that might be in the carrion (dead stuff) they eat. You could say these birds stop disease in its tracks.
The decomposition of dead matter is handled by the FBI (fungus, bacteria, and invertebrates).
If it weren’t for insects, we’d be knee deep in dead plants.
If it weren’t for spiders, we’d be knee deep in insects.
There are no recorded deaths from tarantula bites.
Only two families of animals are warm-blooded (endothermic): mammals and birds.
Humans are 1 out of 4,640 species of mammals (the largest proportion of the rest are rodents and bats).
Amphibians (represented today by frogs, toads, and salamanders) were the first animals to move from the ocean onto land—and therefore the first to have lungs.
Only about 10% of the world’s snake species are venomous.
Vampire bats are very small, do not like human blood, raise orphans of other vampire bats, and share their daily food if some bats come home hungry.
Ants can have huge underground colonies (where all the ants recognize each other—by smell—and cooperate together). There is one colony in California that extends approximately 500 miles, from San Francisco to San Diego.
