by John Lloyd
An ostrich egg weighs as much as twenty-four hen’s eggs; to soft-boil one takes forty-five minutes. Queen Victoria tucked into one for breakfast and declared it among the best meals she had ever eaten.
The largest egg laid by any animal – including the dinosaurs – belonged to the elephant bird of Madagascar, which became extinct in 1700. It was ten times the size of an ostrich egg, nine litres in volume and the equivalent of 180 chicken’s eggs.
The elephant bird (Aepyornis maximus) is thought to be the basis for the legend of the fierce roc that Sinbad battles in the Arabian Nights.
How long can a chicken live without its head?
About two years.
On 10 September 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem attached to the neck for him to survive, even thrive.
Mike, as he was known, became a national celebrity, touring the country and featuring in Time and Life magazines. His owner, Lloyd Olsen, charged twenty-five cents for a chance to meet ‘Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken’ in sideshows across the USA. Mike would appear complete with a dried chicken’s head purporting to be his own – in fact, the Olsens’ cat had made off with the original. At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4,500 a month, and was valued at $10,000. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the unfortunate victims lived for more than a day or two.
Mike was fed and watered using an eyedropper. In the two years after he lost his head, he put on nearly six pounds and spent his time happily preening and ‘pecking’ for food with his neck. One person who knew Mike well commented: ‘He was a big fat chicken who didn’t know he didn’t have a head.’
Tragedy struck one night in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona. Mike started to choke and Lloyd Olsen, to his horror, realised he’d left the eyedropper at the previous day’s show. Unable to clear his airways, Mike choked to death.
Mike remains a cult figure in Colorado and, every May since 1999, Fruita has marked his passing with a ‘Mike the Headless Chicken’ Day.
What has a three-second memory?
Not a goldfish, for starters.
Despite its status as a proverbial fact, a goldfish’s memory isn’t a few seconds long.
Research by the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in 2003 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish between different shapes, colours and sounds. They were trained to push a lever to earn a food reward; when the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time. A number of similar studies have shown that farmed fish can easily be trained to feed at particular times and places in response to an audible signal.
Goldfish don’t swim into the side of the bowl, not because they can see it, but because they are using a pressure-sensing system called the lateral line. Certain species of blind cave fish are able to navigate perfectly well in their lightless environment by using their lateral line system alone.
While we’re dealing with goldfish myths, a pregnant goldfish isn’t, hasn’t and can’t be called a ‘twit’. Goldfish don’t get pregnant: they lay eggs that the males fertilise in the water.
In principle, there could be a word for a female fish with egg development – such as ‘twit’, ‘twat’ or ‘twerp’ – but none is listed in any proper dictionary.
STEPHEN Well, there is this fallacy that goldfish have a three-second memory –
ALAN It’s not a fallacy!
STEPHEN It is a fallacy. They’ve done tests.
ALAN Oh, they haven’t.
STEPHEN They have. A man from Plymouth University did a wonderful test –
ALAN There isn’t a Plymouth University; that’s made up.
SEAN It’s just a sweet shop with a copy of The Times in it.
What’s the most dangerous animal that has ever lived?
Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).
Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis, filariasis and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds.
Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson – known as ‘Mosquito’ Manson – proved that elephantiasis was caused by mosquito bites.
Seventeen years later, in 1894, it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross, then a young doctor based in India, to test the hypothesis.
Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the Plasmodium parasite through their saliva. He tested his theory using birds. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for humans, he infected his own son – using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome. (Fortunately, after an immediate dose of quinine, the boy recovered.)
Ross won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902. Manson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, knighted and founded the London School of Tropical Medicine.
There are 2,500 known species of mosquito, 400 of them are members of the Anopheles family, and, of these, 40 species are able to transmit malaria.
The females use the blood they suck to mature their eggs, which are laid on water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae or ‘wrigglers’. Unlike most insects, the pupae of mosquitoes, known as ‘tumblers’, are active and swim about.
Male mosquitoes hum at a higher pitch than females: they can be sexually enticed by the note of a B-natural tuning fork.
Female mosquitoes are attracted to their hosts by moisture, milk, carbon dioxide, body heat and movement. Sweaty people and pregnant women have a higher chance of being bitten.
Mosquito means ‘small fly’ in Spanish and Portuguese.
STEPHEN What I want you to do first is tell me all about the twelve Frenchmen and the twelve mosquitoes.
DARA Once upon a time … there were twelve Frenchmen, called [in French accent] Apee, Sleepy, Arrogant, Furieux, Choses comme ça, Bof and Zut Alors. And …
PHILL [writing on pad] That’s six!
DARA Fenêtre … er, Boulangerie, er –
ALAN Le Table!
DARA La Table, of course, and Jambon et Fromage, the twins. And they used to travel around with mosquitoes, solving adventures.
DARA It was a very, very low-rent 1950s French detective season, that involved, at some point, the extraction of a tiny amount of blood from one of the suspects.
Do marmots kill people?
Yes, they cough them to death.
Marmots are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly, the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague.
They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death-toll is over a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans.
When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called ‘buboes’, from Greek boubon, ‘groin’, hence ‘bubonic’). Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because ‘they contain the soul of a dead hunter’.
The other parts of the marmot are a delicacy in Mongolia. Hunters have complicated rituals to stalk their prey that include wearing false rabbit-ears, dancing and waving the tail of a yak. The captured marmots are barbecued whole over hot stones. In Europe, the fat of the alpine marmot is valued as a salve for rheumatism.
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Other species of marmot include the American prairie dog and the woodchuck, or groundhog. Groundhog Day is on 2 February. Each year, a marmot known as Punxsutawney Phil is pulled out of his electrically heated burrow at Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania by his tuxedo-clad ‘keepers’ who ask him if he can see his shadow. If he whispers ‘yes’, it means winter has six weeks to go. Since 1887, Phil has never been wrong.
Bubonic plague is still with us today – the last serious outbreak occurred in India in 1994 – and it is one of the three diseases listed in the US as requiring quarantine (the other two being yellow fever and cholera).
STEPHEN The bubo itself actually comes from the Greek boubon, which is ‘groin’. One of the areas where you get a big swelling when you get the bubonic plague.
CLIVE How often …?
STEPHEN … do I get a swelling?
CLIVE Yes, sorry.
STEPHEN Not as often as I used to, I’m sorry to say.
How do lemmings die?
Not by mass suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.
The suicide idea seems to have originated in the work of nineteenth-century naturalists who had witnessed (but not understood) the four-year boom-and-bust population cycle of the Norwegian lemming (Lemmus lemmus).
Lemmings have a phenomenal reproductive capacity. A single female can produce up to eighty offspring a year. Sudden surges in their numbers once led Scandinavians to think they were spontaneously generated by the weather.
What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation that in turn leads to over-grazing. The lemmings set off into unfamiliar territory in search of food until they pile up against natural obstacles like cliffs, lakes and seas. The lemmings keep coming. Panic and violence ensue. Accidents happen. But it isn’t suicide.
A secondary myth has evolved which is that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented by the 1958 Walt Disney film White Wilderness. It’s true that the film was a complete fake. It was filmed in land-locked, lemming-free Alberta, Canada: the lemmings had to be bussed in from several hundred miles away in Manitoba. The shots of the ‘migration’ were made using a few lemmings on a snow-covered turntable. The notorious final scene – where lemmings plunge into the sea to the doom-laden voice-over of Winston Hibbler: ‘This is the last chance to turn back, yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space’ – was created by the film-makers simply throwing the lemmings into a river.
But Disney was only guilty of trying to recreate an already entrenched story. Here it is described in the most influential children’s reference book of the early twentieth century, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, published in 1908:
‘They march straight forward, over hill and dell, through gardens, farms, villages, into wells and ponds to poison water and cause typhoid… on and on to the sea, then into the water to destruction… It is sad and terrible, but if the dismal exodus did not occur lemmings would long ago have eaten Europe bare.’
What do chameleons do?
They don’t change colour to match the background.
Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total lie.
They change colour as a result of different emotional states. If they happen to match the background it’s entirely coincidental.
Chameleons change colour when frightened or picked up or when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature.
A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells called chromataphores (from Greek chroma, colour, and pherein, to carry), each with different coloured pigments. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel.
It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies called Antigonus of Carystus in about 240 BC. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour-change to fear and, by the Renaissance, the ‘background’ theory had, once again, been almost entirely abandoned. But it’s come back with a vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know’ about chameleons.
Chameleons can remain completely motionless for several hours at a time. Because of this, and the fact that they eat very little, they were, for many centuries, believed to live on air. This, of course, isn’t true either.
The word chameleon is Greek for ‘ground-lion’. The smallest species is the Brookesia minima, which is 25 mm (1 inch) long; the largest is the Chaemaeleo parsonnii, which is more than 610 mm (2 feet) long. The Common Chameleon glories in the Latin name Chamaeleo chamaeleon, which sounds like the opening to a song.
Chameleons can rotate and focus either eye independently to look in two completely different directions at once, but they are stone deaf.
The Bible forbids the eating of chameleons.
How do polar bears disguise themselves?
They cover their black nose with their white paw, don’t they?
Adorable but unfounded, unfortunately. And they’re not left-handed either. Naturalists have observed polar bears for many hundreds of hours and have never seen any evidence of discreet nose-covering or of left-handedness.
They like toothpaste, though. There are regular reports of polar bears wreaking havoc in Arctic tourist camps, knocking over tents and trampling equipment, all in order to suck on a tube of Pepsodent.
This may be one of the reasons the town of Churchill in Manitoba has a large concrete ‘polar-bear jail’. Any bear moseying into town is apprehended and incarcerated there. Some serve sentences of several months before being released back into the community, embittered, institutionalised and jobless. Formerly the morgue for a military base, it is officially designated Building D-20. It can hold twenty-three bears at a time. Polar bears don’t eat during the summer, so some of the inmates aren’t fed for months at a time. They’re held until spring or the autumn – their hunting seasons – so that when they’re released they go off fishing and don’t just wander back to Churchill.
The earliest-known captive polar bear belonged to Ptolemy II of Egypt (308–246 BC), and was kept in his private zoo in Alexandria. In AD 57, the Roman writer Calpurnius Siculus wrote of polar bears pitted against seals in a flooded amphitheatre. Viking hunters captured polar bear cubs by killing and skinning the mother, spreading her pelt on the snow, and nabbing the cubs when they came to lie on it.
The scientific names can be a bit misleading. Ursus arctos isn’t the polar bear, it’s the Brown Bear. Ursus means ‘bear’ in Latin and arctos means ‘bear’ in Greek. The Arctic is named after the bear, not the other way around; it was ‘the region of the bear’, where bears lived and where the great bear in the sky, the constellation Ursa Major, pointed. The polar bear is Ursus maritimus – the sea bear.
The constellation Ursa Major has been identified as a bear by a number of cultures including the Ainu of Japan in the east, the American Indians in the west and ourselves in the middle. Even though all polar bears are born, literally, under the constellation of the Great Bear, astrologically they are all Capricorns, born in late December or early January.
The Brown Bear is the same species as the Grizzly, which is the term applied to Brown Bears living in inland North America. Male and female bears are known as boars and sows, despite being about as closely related to pigs as koalas are to seals. Bears’ closest relatives are actually dogs.
STEPHEN Ahh. They are beautiful animals, aren’t they? You must admit they are very, very beautiful animals.
ALAN Well, I’d certainly tell one he was beautiful if he came near me …
How many galaxies are visible to the naked eye?
Five thousand? Two million? Ten billion?
The answer is four �
� although from where you are sitting, you can only see two; and one of those is the Milky Way (the one we’re in).
Given that there are estimated to be more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing between 10 and 100 billion stars, it’s a bit disappointing. In total, only four galaxies are visible from Earth with the naked eye, only half of which can be seen at once (two from each hemisphere). In the Northern Hemisphere, you can see the Milky Way and Andromeda (M31), while in the Southern Hemisphere you can see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
Some people with exceptional eyesight claim to be able to see three more: M33 in Triangulum, M81 in Ursa Major and M83 in Hydra, but it’s very hard to prove.
The number of stars supposedly visible to the naked eye varies wildly, but everyone agrees that the total is substantially less than 10,000. Most amateur-astronomy computer software uses the same database: it lists 9,600 stars as ‘naked-eye visible’. But no one really believes this figure. Other estimates vary from around 8,000 down to fewer than 3,000.
It used to be said that there were more cinemas (around 5,200) in the former Soviet Union than there are stars visible in the night sky.
At the Canadian web-site www.starregistry.ca you can have a star named after yourself or a friend for $98 CDN (or $175 CDN with a framed certificate). They list 2,873 stars as being visible to the naked eye. None of these are available as they already have historical or scientific names.
What man-made artefacts can be seen from the moon?
Deduct ten points if you said the Great Wall of China.