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With a wingspan of up to 3.5 m (11 ft), the wandering albatross has the longest wingspan of
all flying birds, which means that each of its wings is almost as long as an adult human is tall.
There is enough poison in a
single poison dart frog’s
skin to kill 10,000 mice.
The pregnancy of an Indian elephant
lasts for about 22 months.The biggest living cat is the Siberian tiger,
which weighs up to 300 kg (660 lb).A mole can tunnel through
100 m (330 ft) of earth in a day.
Male humpback whales
sing songs that last
20 minutes or longer.
They may be doing this
to serenade females.
The blue whale is the largest animal
that has ever lived. Its heart alone
can weigh 180 kg (400 lb).
Some species of springtails, a kind of insect, can
survive in temperatures as low as -38^0 C (-36^0 F)
because their bodies contain antifreeze.Beaver
dams can be
(1,000 ft) long and may
be hundreds of
years old.
300 m
China’s earthquake early warning system
involves the close monitoring of snakes, which
leave their nests shortly before an earthquake.A pile of elephant dung
may contain 7,000 beetles.
There are more than 370,000
known species of beetle.A dog can make about
100 different facial expressions,
most of them involving its ears.The part of a dog’s brain involved in
sensing smell is 40 times bigger than
that of humans.Cows have four stomachs, which
they use to process hard-to-digest
grass and vegetation.Spiders usually prefer
to live alone, but very
occasionally team
up to build huge
webs. A web
found in 2007
in Lake Tawakoni
State Park in Texas,
USA, measured
180 m (590 ft) across.
It was built by lots of
different species of spider.A flea can cover that’s 200 times the length of its own body.
30 cm
(12 in) in one jump –
A red kangaroo can cover
8 m (25 ft) in a single hop.
A bee’s buzz is made
by its wings, which flap
250 times a second.
The world’s largest living rodent, the capybara,
can weigh up to 65 kg (140 lb).A termite queen lays 30,000 eggs a day.A blue whale’s whistle
can be heard more
than 100 km (62 miles)
away underwater.Whales and dolphins put
half their brains to sleep at a
time so that they don’t drown.Camels can go up to two weeks without
drinking, but when there is water around, they
can down 200 litres (40 gallons) in 10 minutes.50
%
fat.
Whale milk is nearly
Monarch butterflies migrate
4,000 km (2,500 miles) from North
America to Mexico or Butterfly Grove
in San Francisco to spend the winter, even
though they have never been there before.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD ON PAGES 8–59
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