Have you ever been told to eat slower at the dinner table? If so, simply remind your dinner guests that they are lucky to not be eating with a Star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) who takes less than 0.25 seconds to eat its food! Now that’s what you call fast food.
Need help moving? Be sure to recruit a beetle! The Dung Beetle (Onthophagus taurus), for instance, can pull 1,141 times its own body weight. That’s like a person pulling six large buses full of people!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100323212158.htm
The largest plant seed in the world belongs to the Double Coconut Palm or coco-de-mer (Lodoicea maldivica), which tips the scales at a whopping 30kg. This plant also has some of the longest leaves and its tall stock can grow upwards of 34 metres in hight. The double coconut palm grows naturally on the Praslin and Curieuse Islands and is now extinct on St Pierre, Chauve-Souris and Round Islands. This plant is listed as vulnerable, the biggest threat? Those wonderful seeds which people love to collect. When people pick up these seeds it prevents the plant from growing new palms.Â
http://eol.org/pages/1140238/details
This animal-loving girl wants to be an Earth Ranger or a veterinarian when she grows up. After she saw the Earth Rangers show at the Royal Ontario Museum in June, Breanna wanted to do more to help; so, she thought big, like birthday big!
Breanna decided to have an Earth Rangers’ birthday party, where instead of presents she asked for donations to support her Bring Back the Wild campaign. Breanna’s party was an absolute blast with 23 guests (who all gave generously) and a special visit from a young alligator-friend. Thanks to the generosity of Breanna and her party guests she was able to increase the amount of funds raised for her Bring Back the Wild campaign. The Jefferson Salamander was her animal of choice because its home in Happy Valley Forest needs protecting. To thank everyone for supporting Bring Back the Wild, Earth Rangers sent Breanna and her friends some fun trading cards and buttons.
Thanks Breanna for turning your birthday bash into a fun way to help Earth Rangers Bring Back the Wild!
The record holder for the longest tortoise life goes to… a Madagascar Radiated Tortoise (Geochelone radiata) who was given to the Tongan royal family by Captain Cook in the late 1700’s and lived to the ripe old age of 188!
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/AnimalRecords/default.cfm
Rainforests are chalked full of life and are found around the world, on every continent but Antarctica. Not only do rainforests provide homes for tons of plants and animals they are also an important source of fresh water. One-fifth of the world’s fresh water is found in the Amazon Basin.
http://www.nature.org/rainforests/explore/facts.html
The Pebble toad  (Oreophrynella nigra) of Venezuela moves slowly, getting around by walking rather than hopping. They live in areas where there is a bit of small vegetation poking out of otherwise bare rock faces. They eat all kinds of different insects and are either dark brown or black in colour. What makes this species stand out the most though, is their incredible survival strategy. When facing a predator the Pebble toad will curl into a ball and roll away, tumbling over rocks to escape.
http://eol.org/pages/1039190/details
You may want to grab some ear plugs, at a distance of 50 cm the African Cicada Brevisana brevis can produce a noise that is almost as loud as a road side drill, at around 107 decibels. Â This recorded noisiness earned this African Cicada the record of being the world’s loudest insect!
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir/chapters/chapter_24.shtml
The world’s smallest frog, called (Microhyla nepenthicola), has been found in Borneo and, as you can tell from the picture, scientists would have had to squint to find them. The discovery of these little guys was made by Indraneil Das and Alexander Haas, they are also part of a project to find lost amphibians across the world. To learn more about the global search for frogs, click here.
Doing the same thing for a long time can be tricky, like standing on one foot, or jumping and definitely flying. The Bar-Tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica) is the record breaker for this, flying a non-stop eight day migration from Alaska to New Zealand covering an astounding 11,000 kilometers.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100609102052.htm
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