Yes, it’s only natural indeed to want to learn how animals and plants really behave.
Camels store water in their humps.
Camel humps are filled with fat.
Penguins mate for life.
Emperor penguins are serially monogamous, meaning they mate with only one partner during one breeding season, then mate with a different penguin the next year.
Bulls get angry when they see red.
Bulls are colorblind. What agitates them isn’t the color of the bullfighter’s flag, but the motion, which they perceive as a threat.
When threatened by predators, ostriches bury their heads in the sand, thinking that they can’t be seen.
These birds have small heads, and when they peck at the ground for food, it may look like they’re burying their heads in the ground. They also actively go underground to turn their buried eggs…but only for a moment.
You can catch warts by touching a frog or a toad.
The bumps on frogs and toads aren’t even warts. And besides, the humans-only human papilloma virus spreads human warts.
Wolves howl at the moon.
Wolves howl to talk to other wolves.
Dogs sweat by panting and salivating.
Dogs sweat mostly through glands in their footpads. They regulate their body temperature by panting.
One “human year” equals seven “dog years.”
That’s the result of some loose math that took the average human lifespan and equated it with the lifespan of dogs. The reasoning: If humans can live to be 100, then dogs who live to be 1/7th of that, or 14, live to be “100” in their own way. It doesn’t hold up because different breeds of dog have different lifespans, ranging roughly from 9 to 16 years.
A dog’s mouth is sterile.
Your dog’s mouth is just as bacteria-laden as yours.
When you pet a dog in that certain spot and they start kicking, it’s because they like it.
That’s an involuntary reaction—you’ve excited a nerve. And your dog hates it.
Cats purr when they’re happy.
Cats purr when they’re happy, to communicate with their kittens, when they’re sick, when they’re threatened, or to calm themselves.
Panthers are a type of wild cat.
Panthers found in Asia and Africa are a variant of leopards, and panthers found in America are a kind of jaguar.
Cats can see in the dark.
Due to their curved corneas and large lenses, cats can see clearly with only 1/6th of the light that humans need.
The lion is the “king of the jungle.”
Lions live in the plains.
Elephants can sense their death coming and leave their herd to instinctively find an “elephant graveyard” to join their ancestors.
Elephants have been studied to show interest when coming across dead elephants, but they don’t magically know where to go to die.
Elephants are afraid of mice.
Elephants are very prone to getting startled by quick, sudden movements, like those of a mouse. But they’re not afraid of them.
Like a fatal game of “follow the leader,” lemmings will march off the edge of a cliff to their deaths, one right after the other.
People largely believe this because of a scene in the 1958 Disney nature documentary White Wilderness, in which filmmakers staged the shot of falling lemmings.
Chameleons change color to disappear into their surroundings and avoid predators.
Some breeds’ appearance changes with the temperature or due to stress, while others may alter their color to signal to other chameleons of an imminent danger.
Primates pick at each other and eat the bugs and lice they find.
They’re picking off chunks of dead skin…and eating them.
Humans evolved from chimpanzees.
The scientific consensus is that humans and chimpanzees both evolved, separately, from a common ancestor.
Humans are the only animals that have recreational sex.
So do gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, macaques, and dolphins.
Every wolf pack has an “alpha.”
The studies that perpetuated this fact were conducted on non-related wolves in captivity. Out in the wild, wolf packs don’t appear to operate with any kind of rank, nor do young wolves overthrow the old wolves to become a new alpha.
Koalas are bears.
Koalas are marsupials and are not related to bears.
Pandas are bears.
They look like bears, with the large bodies, big heads, and cute little ears on top of those big heads. But they’re not bears; they’re members of the raccoon family.
Sharks can smell blood from a mile away.
They’ve got a great sense of smell, but it only covers about a quarter of a mile, tops.
Sharks are vicious, human-hunting monsters.
Sharks actively keep their distance from people. More often than not, when a shark attacks a person, it’s because that individual had the bad luck to hit the water right where a shark was already swimming, causing the startled shark to act defensively.
Dolphins, whales, and other big sea animals drink ocean water.
They get the water they need to live from the food they eat.
Whales spout water out of their blowholes.
When a whale surfaces to breathe, it opens its blowhole, violently spewing out a bunch of moist air that was caught in there, resulting in a propelled spray that just looks like it’s all water.
Octopi have eight tentacles.
Squids have tentacles. Octopi have arms.
That appendage on the head of a narwhal is a tusk.
It’s a tooth.
When plunged into boiling water to be killed and cooked, lobsters scream.
Lobsters can’t scream because they don’t have vocal cords. The high-pitched sound coming from a cooking lobster are air bubbles in the shell escaping.
Goldfish have a three-second memory span.
Studies show that goldfish have a memory that goes back a few months.
Dangerous snakes are dangerous because they’re poisonous.
Dangerous snakes are venomous. Poisonous organisms spread their nastiness passively by being touched, while venomous creatures attack others to spread their stuff, which means they generally need a way to get their venom into their victims, such as fangs.
Snake charmers hypnotize snakes with their music.
Snakes are reacting to the wind coming out of their handler’s pipe.
Mosquitos bite.
They don’t even have teeth. They puncture the skin with a needle-like proboscis.
Female praying mantises eat their mates during sex.
In controlled laboratory settings, the males ate the females just as much as the females ate the males—about 2 percent of the time.
Bees are so light that their ability to fly violates the laws of physics.
Scientists have figured out how bees fly; they just fly in a different manner than do other flying organisms.
Ticks are insects.
Because they have four pairs of legs and no antennae, they’re arachnids.
Daddy long legs are a type of spider.
They’re arachnids, but they’re not spiders.
Bats are blind.
The vast majority of bat species navigate by echolocation, but they still have fully functional eyes.
Cockroaches would survive nuclear Armageddon.
Cockroaches anywhere near the impact zone of a nuclear blast would die.
Cut an earthworm in two, and it will become two new worms.
The part with the mouth on it can continue to eat, and thus live, while the other end will quickly die.
Never touch a butterfly, because you can easily rub off that powder on their wings, and then they won’t be able to fly.
That powder is scales, but those have nothing to do with flight. If you touch and ground a butterfly, it’s because you broke one of their delicate wings.
Earwigs can and will burrow into your ear and lay eggs.
They don’t do that, and the myth probably started because these critters smell like earwax. An earwig (or any other bug) couldn’t be able to get that far into the ear canal before they’d reach a dead end…and then turn around and leave.
Owls can spin their heads all the way around.
Great horned owls can spin their necks 270 degrees—which is three-quarters of a full turn.
Flies live only for 24 hours.
Their lifespan is closer to 24 days.
Tomato juice kills the lingering odor of skunk spray.
It doesn’t kill the smell—it just overpowers it.
Mice love cheese.
Mice are scavengers, so they’ll eat anything. They prefer sugary foods, but cheese is traditionally the bait of choice for mousetraps because it smells, thus attracting mice.
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo.
They do, but it’s hard for the human ear to pick up on.
If you touch a baby bird, the mother will abandon it.
Birds’ sense of smell isn’t particularly strong, so they won’t much care about your scent. It’s not a good idea to handle baby birds because you can spread (or pick up) germs.
The dinosaurs all went extinct at the same time.
Many species evolved into birds.
Humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.
While 40 percent of American adults think this is true, dinos and people missed each other by about 64 million years.
A Tyrannosaurus rex’s vision was based on movement.
That’s a myth propagated by Jurassic Park. The king of the dinosaurs had excellent vision, akin to that of a hawk, and certainly better than that of a human being.
Almost all plant life on earth depends on bees for pollination, meaning humanity depends on bees for most of its food.
Bees pollinate about 40 percent of plants consumed by humans.
Tumbleweeds are native to the western United States.
While they rolled past the screen in countless movie westerns, they’re an invasive species that arrived in contaminated packages of flax seeds brought by Ukrainian immigrants to South Dakota in the late 1800s.
Poison ivy is poisonous, which is why it cause a painful, itchy rash on the skin.
It’s not poisonous—it contains allergens. Poisons are toxic to all people, but allergens only get a reaction out of some people. Not everyone gets that nasty itch after touching this plant.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice.
If a certain area is prone to thunderstorms, then lightning will eventually hit the same spot. For example, the Empire State Building endures 100 lightning strikes every year.
Raindrops are tear-shaped.
They’re flat, wide, and domed, similar to the top bun of a hamburger.
Clouds are weightless.
They’re much bigger than you think. The average fluffy cumulus cloud is about one square kilometer in size, with a volume of a billion cubic meters. That adds up to a weight of more than one million pounds.
It’s darkest before dawn.
That’s more of a metaphorical adage about hitting rock bottom before things improve. Astronomically speaking, it’s darkest around 2 a.m.
Diamonds are made from coal under intense pressure.
Diamonds are made from carbon.
Rubies are a distinct kind of precious gem.
They’re just red sapphires (which are usually blue).
Calling it the theory of evolution means that it’s just an idea—that there’s some doubt.
In the world of science, theory doesn’t mean “idea.” It’s more akin to a thesis statement, provable with observable phenomena in the natural world. In this regard, a scientific theory is the same thing as a scientific fact.
The theory of evolution explains the origin of life on Earth.
It explains how organisms developed and changed.
The Higgs boson particle is nicknamed the “God Particle” because it helps explain all of existence.
The Higgs boson helped scientists better understand the structure of matter, but unlocking its secrets was so frustrating that it earned the nickname “G****** Particle,” but a publisher of an important book about the concept wouldn’t allow publish a book called The G****** Particle, so they shortened it.
There are no straight lines in nature.
Of course there are, like in crystal formations and in snowflakes.
Dogs see in black and white.
No, but they are quite colorblind. They see the world in shades of yellow, blue, and gray.
Cats should drink milk.
They’ll drink it because it tastes good, but they shouldn’t touch it because they’re lactose intolerant, as far as cow’s milk is concerned.
So, piranhas are bloodthirsty monsters who will attack humans unprovoked. Not at all. In 1913, former president and adventure celebrity Teddy Roosevelt took a trip to Brazil, where locals introduced him to a river they said was full of dangerous man-eating piranhas. They threw in a bunch of raw meat, and the piranhas excitedly and violently ate it all up. Roosevelt went home and wrote extensively about his encounter with piranhas, solidifying their reputation. What he didn’t know: The locals had staged the whole thing. They stocked the river beforehand with piranhas, and then starved them, ensuring they’d put on a show for their distinguished guest.