Karen Hill

The Portuguese Man of War is a marine invertebrate also known as Physalia physalis from the Physaliidae family, and is very similar to a jellyfish but isn’t. Technically a siphonophore, other names for the Portuguese Man of War include Portuguese Man o’ War, bluebottle, and man-of-war. The Portuguese Man of War’s name comes from a … Read more

Sharks are fish that date from more than 420 million years ago, before the time of the dinosaurs. There are over 440 species of Shark and some like the whale shark, which can reach 39 feet, feed only on plankton and small squid. Sharks were called “sea dogs” by sailors until the 16th century. After … Read more

The nurse shark is also known as Ginglymostoma cirratum in the scientific community, and can reach a length of 14 feet and weigh 330 pounds. Its family name, Ginglymostomatidae, comes from the Greek word γίγγλυμος which means hinge and στῶμα meaning mouth. The shark’s skin is very tough and is often sought after for its … Read more

The Great White Shark, also known as great white or white death, is a large shark found in coastal surface waters in oceans all over the world. The great white shark is known for its size, and can exceed 20 feet and 4,940 pounds. With a lifespan of about 30 to 100 years, the great … Read more

Sharks are a fish with a full cartilaginous skeleton and a highly efficient streamlined body. The earliest sharks that we know of evolved from more than 420 million years ago, before dinosaurs even existed. Sharks have several sets of replaceable teeth, and popular species such as the Great White Shark are predators at the top … Read more

Cod liver oil is a nutritional supplement that comes from the liver of cod fish, which is how its name originated. It has high levels of omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, and is also high in vitamin A and D. Cod liver oil is known to reduce the symptoms of arthritis, and its other … Read more

The sea otter is a marine mammal that can be found on the coasts of the northern and eastern North Pacific Ocean. Its thick luxurious fur almost drove them to extinction, and is the thickest fur in the animal kingdom. The otter’s unbelievable density of fur, has about 650,000 hairs per square inch of its … Read more

The electric eel is the only species of its kind that can generate powerful electric shocks for self-defense and hunting prey. Electric eels live in the fresh waters of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in South America, and is not an eel but a knifefish, despite its name. An electric eel can produce about 500 … Read more

True crabs are crustaceans that have a short projecting “tail” or reduced hidden abdomen, while others such as hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs and crab lice, are not true crabs. Crabs can be found in oceans all over the world, and many crabs in tropical regions live in freshwater and on land. They are usually covered … Read more

A pitiful few members of the blue crab family have paddle-shaped legs that allow them to row through the water. Some crabs such as the Leaf Porter Crab hitch a ride on floating objects like leaves. This peculiar crab from Singapore uses leaves both as a flotation device when traveling and as defense against predators. … Read more

Lobsters have blood that is colorless unless exposed to oxygen, when it develops a bluish tint. Lobsters are mostly gray, green, or brown when alive, but never red. Boiling them breaks down the pigments that color their shells. The most durable heat-resistant pigments are the carotin-based reds, and they are last to break down during … Read more

Lobsters are a little different from humans and mammals, being that they’re crustaceans n all. Many lobsters live up to 50 years and even more in some cases. Some scientists have even claimed that they could effectively live indefinitely. They start out looking like tiny bugs, smaller than crickets, and they grow and molt all … Read more

Unrefrigerated lobster meat turns bad faster than other types of edible animal flesh, including fish. This is why the cruel tradition of boiling them alive began centuries ago, before the refrigerator was invented. Nowadays they can be killed humanely without going bad before boiling. In fact, currently most lobsters are killed and frozen right on … Read more

Females Lobsters mate during the soft-shell phase after molting. The courtship process is a little odd. Before molting, the female approaches a male’s den and stands outside, releasing her scent in a stream of urine. When he emerges from his den, the two spar briefly, then the female places her claws on his head to … Read more

If a Sea Turtle has been swimming, it can stay underwater for a few minutes. If resting, it can stay underwater as long as two hours. Sea turtles are almost always under water, and have developed an anaerobic system of respiration. Although all sea turtles breathe air, they may divert to anaerobic respiration for long … Read more

The longest known case of aquatic crustaceans living out of water is about 10,000 years, a record set by brine shrimp. Brine shrimp is the English name for the Artemia genus of marine crustaceans. The tiny shrimp have evolved little since the Triassic period. Brine shrimp, also known as “sea monkeys” in toy stores, can … Read more

Kangaroos can hop up to 33 feet per jump, with a maximum speed of about 44 mph for short bursts. This method of travel is fast and efficient and has evolved because of the need to travel long distances in search of food and water, rather than the need to escape predators that didn’t exist. … Read more

One reason kangaroos don’t run is because they can’t run, even if they wanted to really badly. To move at slow speeds, a kangaroo performs crawl-walking by using its tail to form a tripod with its limbs, and raises its hind feet forward to move. Their legs have evolved to a point where they’re completely … Read more

A baby kangaroo is a little larger than a lima bean, but smaller than a full-size peanut when it’s born. And it’s not very cute, unless you’re the kind of person who finds slimy pink animal babies irresistibly adorable. Kangaroos are marsupials, as are most of the mammals that are native to Australia. Besides looking … Read more

All kangaroos and marsupials have pouches for their babies, but not all pouches are equal. Marsupials give birth at a very early stage of development and use their pouch or marsupium to help protect their offspring. For a marsupial like the kangaroo, which spends most of its time standing upright on two legs, the marsupium … Read more

Male marsupials do have very strange forked penises. The other strange thing is that their testicles generally lie in front of their penises instead of in back like other mammals. So how do they have sex? Well, it turns out that there’s somebody for everybody, and marsupials are no exception. Female marsupials have two uteri … Read more

No marsupial species are native to Europe, Asia, or Africa. It was once thought modern placental mammals evolved from marsupials, but recent fossil evidence disputes this assumption. The earliest known marsupial is Sinodelphys szalayi, which lived in China around 125 million years ago. On many continents placental mammals were much more successful and no marsupials … Read more

Marsupials are a family of mammals with a distinctive pouch called the marsupium, which females use to carry their young. The only native North American marsupial is the opossum, and the only other marsupial that doesn’t live in Australia is the shrew opossum from South America. All others live in Australia and the surrounding islands. … Read more

The Australian dragonfly is the Fastest Insect in the World. A dragonfly is a type of insect with large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of transparent wings, and an elongated body. Dragonflies are similar to damselflies, but the wings of most dragonflies are held away from the body when at rest. They are not capable of … Read more

No, there weren’t any honeybees in North America before Columbus arrived. European settlers first brought honeybees to the American colonies in 1622. Over the coming years, many of the insects fled the regimentation of man-made hives and sought freedom in their own colonies throughout the New World. By the late 1700s honeybees had settled along … Read more

The frantic piece of music called “Flight of the Bumblebee” was written in 1899 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. The piece is at the end of Act III, Tableau 1, where Prince Gvidon Saltanovich is transformed into an insect so that he can fly away to visit his father. … Read more

The silkworm is the larva of the domesticated silkmoth known as Bombyx mori, which means “silkworm of the mulberry tree” in Latin. Bombyx mori is a domesticated variety bred from the Bombyx mandarina species from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan and eastern Russia. As hinted by its Latin name, the Silkworm loves white … Read more

One of the joys of deep-sea fishing is exploding fish. Some deep-sea fish will explode when you pull them out of the water, and no, it’s not a joke or funny for the fish. Here’s why it happens: most fish keep their equilibrium in the water with an air bladder that balances their body mass … Read more

The red dye known as Carmine is made from crushing the red-colored scale insect Cochineal that live on the prickly Paddle Cactus, and is native to tropical and subtropical South America and Mexico. The Cochineal is a scale insect that produces carminic acid that protects it from predation by other insects and animals. Carminic acid … Read more

Squids, Cuttlefish and Octopuses are mollusks that belong to the cephalopod group of invertebrates, meaning they have eight legs. Squid have a hard inner-body shell called a pen, instead of an outer one like clams and snails. The octopus, in contrast, has no shell at all. Its outer mantle, or skin, is thick and tough, … Read more

The Squid is a much faster swimmer than an Octopus. Octopi are smooth swimmers, gliding along on their tentacles like an eight-legged Fred Astaire, but they’re no match for the squid. Squid shoot water backward with a siphon in its mantle cavity via jet propulsion, pushing them forward in great bursts of speed. Both of … Read more

The giant squid is the second biggest squid and marine invertebrate in the world after the colossal squid. The giant squid is bigger than any octopus, and can grow up to 43 feet for females and 33 feet for males from caudal fin to the tip of the two long tentacles. There have been reports … Read more

If shooting ink isn’t enough defense to scare off a predator, an octopus can go on the offensive with its tentacles and a beak-like mouth. An octopus’s main defense is to hide by camouflaging itself and avoid being detected as an octopus. Octopuses are also venomous, but only the small blue-ringed octopuses are lethal to … Read more

In the scary movies, the giant tentacles of an Octopus wrap around a victim and pull them down into the octopus’s garden. Except for the dangerous rubberized special-effects kind, there’s no verified record of an octopus actually doing this. Ironically, it isn’t the giant octopus you need to watch out for, but a tiny one … Read more

When an Octopus is threatened by a predator it will squirt ink, change skin color as camouflage, and jet away. As good a job as the ink does of hiding something as hard to hide as an octopus, it’s also poisonous to some creatures and stuns others, even when diluted in the vastness of the … Read more

Octopi, as in the plural for octopuses always sounded funny when saying it, the singular sounded plural and the plural sounded singular. Even those of us who knew the grammar rule tended to avoid using octopi because it made us sound way too smart. So it is both satisfying and deeply disquieting to learn that … Read more

Trout and Salmon are so closely related that some fishermen and scientists have trouble classifying the individual species. Techincally, Trout is a species of freshwater and saltwater fish. Salmon belong to some of the same family as trout but, unlike most trout, most salmon species spend almost all their lives in salt water. Both Trout … Read more

Salmonella is a rod-shaped, gram-negative, non-spore forming bacteria that cause illnesses in humans and many animals, such as typhoid fever, paratyphoid fever, and salmonellosis which comes from eating contaminated food. Salmonella infections are zoonotic, which means it can be transmitted by humans to animals and vice versa, and this includes food. People at risk of … Read more

Salmon return to the same exact spot where they were born when spawning and die shortly after. We still don’t know how these fish are able to remember the site of their birth. Salmon live in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Great Lakes of North America. Most of us have … Read more

Deep sea fish are fish that live below the photic zone of the ocean. The most common deep sea fish is the lanternfish, and others include the flashlight fish, bristlemouths, anglerfish, viperfish, and cookiecutter shark. The photic zone extends only a few hundred meters below the ocean surface, and is also an extremely hostile environment, … Read more

Flying fish are a family of marine fish called Exocoetidae with about 64 species that can be found in oceans all over the world, and common in tropical waters. The scientific name Exocoetidae comes from the Greek ‘εξωκοιτος which means “sleeping under the stars”, and described some flying-fishes believed to leave the water to sleep … Read more

It isn’t that hard to train animals and even killer whales. Animal trainers observe natural behaviors and reward those they seek to get the animal to perform again on cue. But when in nature would killer whales encounter a situation where they would deliberately beach themselves and still survive? After all, whales that beach themselves … Read more

A red herring is not a specific type of fish, but refers to any herring that’s been smoked. The meat turns red and gives off a pungent odor, sending any but the truest lover of the dish running for fresh air. Hunters learned that dogs could easily follow the scent of smoked herring for long … Read more

The Crabeater Seal is the most numerous seal species in the southern ocean with a population nearing 50 million. It is the second most numerous large species of mammal on Earth, after humans, but there are much fewer than the 1.3 billion domesticated cattle in the world. More than one in every two seals in … Read more

Krill are various small shrimp or crustaceans that live in great swarms in the ocean and have a biomass that is twice as big as all the humans on earth. It’s ironic that whales, the world’s biggest mammals, can exist on some of ocean’s smallest creatures. Krill feed on phytoplankton and some zooplankton, converting these … Read more

To our best knowledge, we believe the modern and humble blue whale is the biggest animal in the world of all time to have ever lived on earth. The huge blue whale is a marine mammal that is long and slender, and the blue whale’s body can be various shades of bluish grey and lighter … Read more

Whales are marine mammals of the order Cetacea, and there are many species, but all whales have forelimbs modified as fins, a tail with horizontal flukes, and nasal openings or blowholes on top of the head. Whales typically live between 77 and 211 years depending on the species, although the upper range has been questioned … Read more

The blue whale has the biggest heart in the world. Its heart is about the size of a VW Beetle. The blue whale is also the largest animal ever known to have existed on earth, and can grow up to 108 feet in length and weigh up to 180 tons. Before being hunted almost to … Read more

Beluga whales are mammals, and like all but two species of mammals, they don’t lay eggs. It would be impossible to slice them open as we do fish and pull out their eggs to salt, pickle, and sell to status seekers with too much money. But the word belukha means “white” in Russian, meaning there … Read more

Krill is a shrimp-like marine invertebrate animal found in all oceans of the world. The small crustaceans are important organisms in the zooplankton family, and is food for many animals such as baleen whales, manta rays, whale sharks, crabeater seals, and seabirds that eat nothing else. Krill are also known as euphausiids, named after their … Read more

Seals have shorter, fatter flippers and no visible ear flaps, and are often smaller than their cousin the sea lion. Sea lions and fur seals belong to the Otariidae family in the Pinnipeds group of animals. They have a semi-aquatic lifestyle, feeding and migrating in the water but breeding and hanging out on land or … Read more

Porpoises are related to whales and dolphins, and there are some differences between a dolphin and a porpoise. Porpoises are slightly smaller than dolphins for one. Also, dolphins have a sharp snout and cone-shaped teeth, while porpoises have a rounded snout and spade-shaped teeth. Both dolphins and porpoises are predators of fish, squid, and crustaceans, … Read more

Ants and bees live in a matriarchal society where nearly every member, queen, worker, and soldier, is female. A few male boy-toys are allowed to live to service a new queen if necessary, but they aren’t kings in any sense of the word. In the winter, when food gets scarce, the males are the first … Read more

Termite queens are the longest living insect in the world. Some entomologists say they can live to fifty years, while other experts say seventy-five or even up to one hundred years, depending on who you ask. Termites are a group of eusocial insects along with ants and some bees, and divide labor among gender lines, … Read more

The word Butterfly is definitely not another word for “flutterby.” Butterfly comes from the Old English word buterfleoge, meaning “butter/flying creature.” Some linguists speculate that maybe the buter refers to the butter-yellow color of some European butterflies. However, that doesn’t make a lot of sense; plenty of colors besides yellow are represented in the butterflies … Read more

It doesn’t seem to make sense for vulnerable colorful butterflies to be so brightly colored. They should be more like the other bugs, which blend so much into the background that they’re nearly invisible to their enemies. Butterflies are so bright, it’s almost as if they’re trying to be seen. It turns out, though, that … Read more

Cooties is a slang term in North American English used by children and adults for lice, fleas and other pests. A child is said to catch cooties by touching an infected person. The phrase is most commonly used by children under 10. The Game of Cootie from 1949 is an American children’s roll-and-move toy for … Read more

The headmaster at Harry Potter’s school shares his name with an early term for the common bumblebee. Dumbledore, bumblebee, and humblebee could be onomatopoeic attempts to re-create the bee’s buzzing sound. Rowling said she chose the name Dumbledore, which is an Early Modern English word for “bumblebee”, because she “imagined him walking around humming to … Read more

The Ladybug’s name seems to be a case of insect sexism, either that or it was named by a drunk man. The alternative names in English are also feminine, ladybirds, lady beetles, and even, for some reason, lady clocks. However, merely claiming sexism isn’t that simple. During the Middle Ages, the insect-killing beetles were regarded … Read more

Gardeners and farmers have much love and respect for the humble ladybug because ladybugs have a huge appetite for garden pests, especially aphids and scale bugs. An adult female ladybug can consume up to 75 aphids a day, while the smaller male may consume up to 40. Even the larva, resembling a tiny alligator, uses … Read more

Gnats hang out in clouds because safety in numbers is a good self-defense tactic and works on almost anything. Predators often get confused when they are surrounded by many of them, and the animals that the gnats swarm are less likely to fight back if dozens are biting them at once. Another reason is the … Read more

The Traditional Spanish Folk Song “La Cucaracha”, is literally about a stoner cockroach’s wasted life, death, and funeral, and is beloved equally by children and the sandwich trucks that serve lunch to office workers. Also known as a corrido, it became popular in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution during the 20th century, and is played … Read more

The word Insect comes from the Greek word entomon, which means notched or segmented at the waist, and is also the root word or derivative of entomology. Entomology is the scientific study of insects, and a branch of arthropodology. Insects are a class within the arthropods that have an exoskeleton, a three-part body, head, thorax, … Read more

You would be surprised at how quickly seventeen years can go by when you’re doing things like reading, watching TV, hanging out, facebook, and partying. But seriously, the seventeen-year cicadas essentially do the same as the thirteen-year cicadas, they live as larvae a few inches underground, sucking nutrition from the undersides of tree roots. Entomologists … Read more

The Cicada is loud enough to damage human ears, and loud enough to drown out lawn mowers. But think how loud it would be if the female cicadas joined in. Only the males make noise, and the silent females seek them out. A cicada is an insect with large eyes far apart on its head … Read more

How Fast Can a Housefly Fly and how quickly can a flea flee? So many questions, so little time. When you’re trying to catch a housefly, it seems like they are really fast and agile like a ninja. Seriously though, you could easily outrun a housefly, even when walking. Although its wings can flap 200 … Read more

Blood is a bodily fluid that transports important nutrients and oxygen to the body’s cells, and transports waste products away from those same cells. In vertebrates or mammals, it contains blood cells suspended in a liquid called blood plasma. Plasma contains dissolved proteins, glucose, hormones, carbon dioxide, and blood cells themselves. The most abundant cells … Read more

The raccoon is sometimes spelled as “racoon”, also colloquially known as coon, is a medium-sized mammal native to North America. As a result of escapes and deliberate introductions in the mid-20th century, Raccoons can also be found across Europe and Japan due to a few escapes and introductions over the past hundred years. The Raccoon’s … Read more

Prairie dogs are burrowing rodents found in the grasslands of North America. There are five different species of prairie dogs, black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison, Utah, and Mexican prairie dogs, and are a type of ground squirrel. These rodents can grow up to 3 pounds, and are found in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the … Read more

Not including lawyers and politicians, the mammal with the smallest heart in the world is the Etruscan Pygmy Shrew, with the bumblebee bat of Thailand coming in a close second. The Etruscan Pygmy Shrew is also known as Savi’s pygmy shrew and White-toothed Pygmy Shrew. Both are about the size of a bumblebee or an … Read more

Glowworms and fireflies are the same thing because they are the same species. Glowworms are the larvae of fireflies and, in some species, the flightless females. The larvae take one or two years to develop before passing through a brief pupal state and becoming adults. As larvae, they eat earthworms, snails, and the larvae of … Read more

Fireflies glow in the dark to attract mates. Males fly around flashing the world in a pattern of dots and dashes that is very specific to their species. Female fireflies wait until a male flying nearby flashes the correct signal for their species, and in return, she flashes him with her own light. They meet … Read more

Earthworms have no eyes, but they can sense light and dark. Earthworm is the common name for the largest members of Oligochaeta, and is also known as “dew-worm”, “rainworm”, “night crawler” and “angleworm”. Earthworms are hermaphrodites and can live up to 8 years, but normally live for about 2 years in the average garden. Locomotion … Read more

If worms could multiply by dividing, they could dispense with all that messy sex business. Worms are hermaphrodites, so they can mate with any other worm of their species, although not with themselves, as some believe. After mating, both will likely be pregnant, and they can each lay an egg capsule about a week later. … Read more

Entomophagy is the scientific name for the practice of bug eating. All of us eat insects accidentally all the time, check out the Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines for acceptable levels of insect parts in common foods. A regular size jar of peanut butter is legally allowed to contain up to 210 insect fragments before … Read more

Bookworms must have had a hard time back in the days of clay tablets and scrolls. We can imagine them sitting impatiently on empty shelves, waiting for centuries, and finally cheering in the fourth century A.D. when somebody got the bright idea of sewing sheets of parchment together, creating the direct ancestor of the modern … Read more

There are people all over the world who eat bugs and insects as food, and the practice is called Entomophagy, which comes from the phrase “insect eating” in Greek. Entomophagy also applies to other animal groups including insects that eat other insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals. Insects and nematodes that obtain their nutrition from … Read more

Hubert Duprat is a French artist who uses caddisfly larvae and precious stones like gold, opal, turquoise, to create his unusual work. Caddisflies construct elaborate protective tubes from twigs, snail shells, sand and small stones found in their habitat in their stream bed homes. The tubes have little stones to help with traction in fast-moving … Read more

A formicarium is a vivarium for ants and is designed for the study of ant colonies and ant psychology, also known as myrmecology. An Ant Farm is a similar device that is popular for school projects, and is usually an ant colony enclosed by a transparent box made of glass or plastic. The first commercially … Read more

If you have not seen leaf-cutter ants at work, there are hundreds of thousands of ants chopping out pieces of leaves and determined to carry them back to their colony. This species of tropical, fungus-growing ants can be found in South and Central America and some parts of the southern United States. Leaf-cutter ants form … Read more

Enterprise, Alabama has a Boll Weevil Monument to show appreciation to the insect as a “herald of prosperity”. It’s currently the only monument in the world built to honor an agricultural pest. Boll weevils destroyed the entire cotton crop in southern Alabama, and local farmers were forced to try a variety of other crops that … Read more

It may seem funny, but most U.S. states do have official state insects. Some also have a state butterfly. Alabama’s situation is particularly confusing, its state insect is the monarch butterfly, not the boll weevil, but its state butterfly is the eastern tiger swallowtail. Most people who have been in the state would agree that … Read more

The peanut, also known as the groundnut, is a species in the legume “bean” family native to India, Africa, Mexico, South and Central America. The scientific name “Arachis Hypogaea” means “under the earth.” The name Peanut came from its appearance and is not an accurate label as the Peanut is not a nut but classified … Read more

The old myth about lemmings that commit mass suicide is a deeply ingrained in our culture. The metaphor of lemmings following the crowd to their death is so good that it’s even used by people who know better. The reality is that lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. Not even the really depressed ones. Not that … Read more

The Myth about Disney inventing the myth about Lemmings Committing Suicide in a movie has little truth to it. Disney did a lot of work to perpetuate the story, however. Disney cameramen shooting lemmings for the film White Wilderness in 1958 were instructed to “throw them over the cliff by the bucketful if necessary” to … Read more

Porcupines mate and reproduce much like any other animal. It’s actually not as dangerous or awkward as you might expect, although we don’t recommend trying this at home. For starters, mating is a dangerous pastime for male porcupines. They are one of many species who fight for the rights to mate with the receptive female, … Read more