Natural Science Fun Facts!
January 9, 2016 8:52 AM   Subscribe

I'm working on a project for which I need to compile a series of amazing/exciting/mind-blowing facts and stories about the natural world - and I'm hoping you can help. Think "ants can lift 100x their own weight" or "that bird that mimics cellphone ringtones" - but less well known. Areas of inquiry that I could dig into would be great too. Thanks!
posted by JPDD to Science & Nature (18 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
This may seem like cheating but you could reverse engineer old The Straight Dope columns.
posted by cleroy at 9:41 AM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: Dolphin sleep
posted by RobotHero at 9:51 AM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: You can't get rabies from a possum. Their body temperature is too low to keep it alive.
posted by sexyrobot at 9:53 AM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Birds in Japan use crosswalks to get into their food. Carrion crows place nuts on crosswalks. Traffic starts again. Cars run over nuts, then the crows run into the crosswalks to eat the insides...without being run over themselves.
posted by Guess What at 10:02 AM on January 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Some types of ants are fungi farmers
posted by DoubleLune at 10:05 AM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The humble tardigrade, aka "water bear," aka "moss piglet," is a microscopic animal that can survive the vacuum of space, absurd amounts of radiation, and being totally dehydrated.
posted by zchyrs at 10:17 AM on January 9, 2016 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Armadillos can carry and transmit leprosy.
posted by workerant at 10:25 AM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Some sharks can reproduce parthenogenetically!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:38 AM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: The bite of the lone star tick can vaccinate you against red meat.

It injects a protein sufficiently similar to a protein in red meat, and can stimulate your immune system to latch on to that protein and build an immunity. Of course, an immune response to a food is a called an allergy. So the tick can make you allergic to red meat.
posted by anonymisc at 10:40 AM on January 9, 2016 [2 favorites]


I don't know if anecdotes are of worth to you but I once heard a mocking bird do the full car alarm sequence. it was really impressive.
posted by supermedusa at 12:15 PM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Metafilter's own Rosin Cerate blog is full of neat stuff like this!
posted by moonmilk at 1:13 PM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: A new update to an old factoid:

It's often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That's a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate.

A 'reference man' contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.

Those numbers are approximate — another person might have half as many or twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10:1 ratio commonly assumed.

“The numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favour human cells over bacteria,” they delicately conclude in a manuscript posted to the preprint server bioRxiv

posted by Jakey at 1:22 PM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.

Nine-banded armadillos (the species found in the US) almost always give birth to identical quadruplets.

I suggest doing some research to confirm each of these facts before you pass them on. I see that one of the ones you've marked best is incorrect.
posted by Redstart at 3:15 PM on January 9, 2016


If you put a frog into pan of tepid water and turn on the heat, the frog will jump out when it gets too hot. It will not let itself be boiled to death.

It's not an amazing fact, really. What's amazing is how often the opposite is asserted.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-boiled-frog-myth-stop-the-lying-now/7446/
posted by FencingGal at 5:32 PM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: Giraffes have super-high blood pressure.
posted by ostranenie at 6:08 PM on January 9, 2016


The rock that forms the summit of Mount Everest was laid down at the bottom of an ocean.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:05 PM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Here's some weird knowledge that I have that I have no reason to have:

Tarantulas can move at ten miles an hour. Usually, thankfully, they don't. They have to make a choice: either move or breathe. The hydraulics (not the right wording) that moves the legs also moves the lungs; the two can't operate at the same time because there isn't enough hydraulic pressure.

Also: some large tarantulas keep frogs as pets. When they lay eggs, ants like to prey on the eggs and the females are too large to keep the ants away. The frog, however, can. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmocleis_ventrimaculata (really the relationship is more mutual than 'pet', but it does sound funnier as "spiders keep frogs as pets").

No, I do not have spiders as pets. *shudder*
posted by LOLAttorney2009 at 10:25 PM on January 9, 2016


Best answer: Horseshoe crabs have blood that is blue due to them using hemocyanin (with copper) instead of hemoglobin (with iron). The blood is incredibly useful to humanity for the detection of bacterial endotoxins in medical applications.
posted by blueberry at 6:22 AM on January 10, 2016


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