Monday, August 30, 2010
TT - Cow Facts
The average cow's temperature is 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
A cow can't vomit.
Her intestines can get up to 170 feet.
Her liver weighs 10 to 12 pounds, and the kidney's average 20 pounds each.
From a cow's gelatin, we get photographic film.
On the top front of their mouths, cows have a tough pad of skin instead of teeth.
Cows have a total of 32 teeth, 8 incisors on the bottom front and 6 strong molars on the top and bottom back.
No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.
A cow has one stomach with four sections.
Cows regurgitate their food and rechew the cud to help digestion.
A cow spends up to 8 hours a day eating.
The oldest cow ever recorded was a Dremon cow named "Big Bertha" that died 3 months short of her 49th birthday on New Years Eve, 1993.
The greatest amount of milk produced during a single day was 241 lbs by a cow named Urbe Blanca.


posted by Nature Mad @ 3:25 PM   19 comments
Sunday, August 29, 2010
WW






I found this one on Flickr too!



Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) , Hilton Head Island.


posted by Nature Mad @ 3:27 PM   12 comments
Monday, August 23, 2010
TT - More Insect Trivia
In a survey conducted on mosquitoes it was noticed that mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.
Only the female mosquitoes bite because they need the protein from blood to produce their eggs and she can triple her body weight with just one meal of blood.
Only full-grown male crickets can chirp.
Dragonflies have as many as 30,000 lenses in each eye.
The average mosquito has 47 teeth - but it's the mosquito's sharp proboscis that'll make you itch.
The proboscis, which looks like a really long, pointy nose, is the female mosquito's rather effective tool for sharing your blood supply.
There are grasshoppers that can draw blood with a kick.
Fleas that can leap eight hundred times farther than their body length.
Did you know that the Deer Bot Fly, Cephenemyia jellisoni Townsend (the infamous supersonic fly) was reputed by C.H.T. Townsend, that father of "Myiology" in 1926, to zoom from hilltop to hilltop in New Mexico at speeds of up to 818 miles per hour!
Courtship among Balloon Flies is dangerous because the female, when given a chance, will eat the male. To keep his head and get the girl, the male fly resorts to gift-giving, presenting the female with a small, balloon-shaped cocoon. Unwrapping the present keeps the female distracted, giving the male time to love her and then leave her.
A scorpion can have up to 12 eyes.
A caterpillar grows roughly 27,000 times its size when it first emerges as an egg.
Locusts can eat their own weight in food in a day. A person eats his own body weight in about half a year.


posted by Nature Mad @ 3:56 PM   11 comments
Sunday, August 22, 2010
WW


Another flickr favorite of mine...


a black Vulture...alert but not scared...with a beak made for tearing


posted by Nature Mad @ 3:30 PM   10 comments
Sunday, August 15, 2010
WW - Fox



A FOX
posted by Nature Mad @ 2:48 PM   12 comments
Monday, August 9, 2010
Thursday Thirteen - Insect Trivia
Monarch caterpillars shed their skin four times before they become a chrysalis, growing over 2700 times their original size.
The common garden worm has five pairs of hearts.
About 80% of the Earth’s animals are insects!
There is only one insect that can turn its head -- the praying mantis.
A flea can jump 130 times its own height.
The fiddler crab can grow a new claw when it loses one of its own.
The Jungle Nymph Stick is one of the heaviest insects. In Malaysia they are often kept by people who feed them guava leaves and use the droppings to make tea.
Some caterpillars store poisonous chemicals in their brightly-colored bodies that make birds sick.
Glowworms have a blue light that shines from their abdomens in attracts smaller insects for food.
Queen bees lay over 1,000 eggs a day; queen termites lay over 30,000 eggs a day.
A tabanid fly, related to horse flies, has been clocked at 90 miles per hour.
The fastest runners are cockroaches, which can move almost a foot per second. However this only translates to a little over 1 mph.
The queen of a termite colony may lay 6,000 to 7,000 eggs per day, and may live 15 to 50 years.

posted by Nature Mad @ 3:57 PM   14 comments
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Wordless Wednesday - World's Largest Thing

General Sherman is the name of a Giant Sequoia. It is the largest tree in the world, and generally considered the largest organism, calculated according to its volume

posted by Nature Mad @ 3:24 PM   16 comments
Monday, August 2, 2010
TT - Insect Trivia
Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
The total distance of the many trips honey bees travel to produce a pound of honey is about equal to twice the distance around the world.
There are more than 200 million insects for each human on the planet.
If you weighed all the earthworms in the US, they’d be about 55 times heavier than the combined weight of all Americans.
The male gypsy moth can “smell” the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.
Some dragonflies can fly at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.
The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
Cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 15 minutes.
Since the successful launch of space shuttle Columbia on mission STS-90 there have been more crickets in space than humans.
The average caterpillar has 2000 muscles. The average human has 700.
After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again!
Only the female mosquito bites, the male does not.


posted by Nature Mad @ 3:58 PM   12 comments