Random Fun Facts That Will Amaze You - Part 10

Let's investigate some very interesting facts that you never knew you wanted to know!

A Snail Woke up After 5 Years of Being Glued to a Museum Card

Some animals have perfected the art of playing dead to protect themselves from greedy predators, but what happens when method acting goes too far? In the case of one very unfortunate snail, you could end up being scooped up and stuck to a museum card for the next 5 years!

Way back in 1846 authorities at the British Museum glued what they thought was a deceased snail to a piece of cardboard for a display. The snail in question formerly known as the species Helix Desertorum had been collected by Charles Lamb Esquire, who found it in the Egyptian desert in March of 1846 before donating it to the museum.

Assuming the snail had simply expired in transit, recipients glued it to a cardboard show card. For 5 long years, no one knew that the British Museum’s catatonic snail had simply retreated into its shell in a deep sleep.

Until one day, when curators noticed something strange while cleaning the exhibit: the snail’s shell seemed to have moved slightly, and a suspicious trail of iridescent slime followed it. They removed the specimen from the card and decided to bathe it, and within minutes, the snail reacted to the moisture and poked its head out to survey its new surroundings!

You might imagine that waking in a British museum up after 5 years of undisturbed sleep would be quite a shock to the system, but the snail didn’t seem to care much. After being fed some cabbage, it fell asleep for another 2 years.

Why Does A Small Speck Of Dirt In Your Eye Hurt So Much?

The world is full of things that can cause us pain, but sometimes it’s the smallest things that hurt the most, like getting a tiny speck of dirt in your eye. We’ve all been there: first, the familiar discomfort of a little intruder on the surface of your eyeball, then the immediate regrets of rubbing that bad boy and experiencing a searing pain followed by redness.

Before you know it, there’s a bunch of tears running down your cheeks. But how can something so seemingly insignificant cause such a world of hurt? It’s all to do with the way your eye works. The transparent outer layer of your eyeball that covers your iris and pupil is called the cornea, and it has a lot of nerve endings.

When you get a speck of dust in your eye and then try to tackle the problem by rubbing it, all you’re really doing is dragging the dust against the delicate cornea, making the pain even more unbearable.

What’s worse, you could even end up embedding the foreign object inside the cornea. That could lead to a whole host of vision related problems because the cornea accounts for about two thirds of the eye’s total optical power. Instead, the best thing to do is try blinking enough to dislodge it. If that fails, you could also try and flush your eyes with cold water. But whatever you do, do not rub it; you’ve been warned!

Where Are All The Baby Pigeons?

It’s no secret that there are pigeons a plenty in the world’s biggest cities, which means there must be baby pigeons, but ask yourself this: when was the last time you actually saw one? Does that further confirm the theory that pigeons are really just machines designed by the government to spy on us? Or perhaps they just spontaneously reproduce in a cloud of feathers.

Sadly, the reality is far less exciting, but at least it’ll help you sleep at night! Baby pigeons are known as "squabs", and the reason why you never see them is because they’re well hidden. Pigeons also known as Rock Doves build their nests in places that mimic the caves and cliffs that their ancestors used in the Mediterranean.

In places like New York City, they build their nests in protected places like windowsills, rooftops, under bridges or in other artificial, cliff-like spots. Another reason why you’re unlikely to see a squab is that they only stay in the nest for about four to six weeks, until they’re effectively adult sized.

It’s probably a good thing we don’t see baby pigeons because they’re actually pretty revolting. They are sort of semi transparent, pink and hairy. Perhaps that’s why their parents literally throw up their food to feed them!

Why Do We See Monsters In The Mirror?

Have you ever stared at yourself for so long in the mirror that you start to see some terrifying demon staring back at you? To get to the bottom of those ghoulish apparitions Dr. Caputo from the University of the University of Urbino conducted a 2010 study which asked participants to stare into a mirror in dim lighting for 10 minutes.

At the end of the study, 66% of the participants recorded seeing huge deformations of their face, 28% saw an unknown person, and 48% saw fantastical and monstrous beings. But why do we see imaginary monsters in the mirror?

It all comes down to something called ‘selective processing’. Basically, your brain can only process so much information at once. While you’re watching a video, you probably don't notice the feel of the clothes against your skin or the pattern of your breath, because your brain stops paying attention to certain stimuli which it doesn’t deem as important.

The same can be said for your sense of sight. When faced with a bunch of visual stimulation, your brain will simply tune out the non-relevant parts. That phenomenon is called the Troxler Effect, which was discovered in 1804 by physician and philosopher Ignaz Troxler.

If you stare into your own eyes for too long in the mirror, it’s possible that other areas of the face might melt and blend into the mirror, giving you a terrifying appearance. What’s worse, your brain likes to fill in things it can’t recognize with things it can no matter how scary. That means your mangled, distorted face can easily morph into some monster you once saw in a movie that has been locked away in the catacombs of your memories.

Pythagoras Hated Beans So Much It Killed Him

Pythagoras was not only an Ancient Greek Philosopher, but an avid bean-hater. Pythagoras was a strident vegetarian, and he also abstained from eating beans because he believed that humans and beans supposedly spawned from the same source.

To prove his theory, he conducted a simple experiment. He buried a handful of beans in the mud, then retrieved them a few weeks later and declared how similar they looked to human fetuses.

According to Pythagoras, to eat a bean would be akin to eating human flesh. The solution was simple: he avoided beans for life, and even forbade his followers from consuming them or so much as touching them!

There’s even one account of Pythagoras coming upon on Ox that was eating beans in a sunny pasture in the region of Tarentum in the South of Italy. After informing the startled herdsmen that the ox must be stopped, Pythagoras strode across the muddy field and spoke quietly into the ox’s ear.

According to the herdsmen, who were beside themselves with laughter Pythagoras had convinced the ox to never desire beans again. Sure enough, the ox persisted with a "beanless" diet and lived well beyond the years of an ordinary ox. It all sounds pretty harmless, but Pythagoras’ bean aversion actually led to his fatal downfall.

As the story goes, Pythagoras was being chased by a mob of angry townspeople when he suddenly stopped: a vast bean field stretched in front of him. Unwilling to trample the beans, his pursuers caught up with him and spilled his blood on the plants, ending his life for the sake of a simple bean.

There’s A Bird That Vomits Oil

There are some pretty freaky defense tactics in the animal kingdom, but none are quite as gross as a Fulmar Chick’s. Check out the video below:

Puking Bird by leonard .cole

In case you didn’t quite catch it, that adorably fluffy chick is literally throwing up in self-defense. But it gets worse. That isn’t just any old chuck-up, it’s stomach oil. When they feel threatened, those seabird chicks have learned to spew a stream of sticky, smelly bright orange digestive oil up to 6 feet away!

And if you happen to be a predatory bird, being sprayed by stomach oil isn’t just utterly repulsive it’s lethal too. The thing is, that gloopy oil glues the predators feathers together so that it can’t fly. Things go from bad to worse when the attacking bird goes to the ocean to wash the oil off, finds that it has lost its buoyancy and drowns instead.

That is because the oil interferes with the locking mechanism of the feather barbs and displaces the insulating air which is usually trapped against the skin, leading to hypothermia, flight lessness and loss of floatation.

The smell of the vomit also acts as a warning to the chick’s parents, who will approach the nest cautiously in case the predator is still lurking. Apparently, even chicks that haven’t hatched yet can squirt the liquid out of a hole in their eggshell!

Why Can’t Penguins Fly?

Somewhere along the bumpy path of evolution, it became clear that penguins simply aren’t destined for the skies. Like most birds, penguins must travel a long way between their feeding and breeding grounds, but rather than flying, they swim.

In fact, some of those arctic birds spend up to 75% of their lives in the water and can swim at speeds of 15-25 miles per hour. But that has left biologists scratching their heads over why they did not keep their ability to fly as their swimming and diving abilities evolved.

To try and solve that conundrum, a study led by biologists at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada conducted in 2013 examined species of seabirds that still have some ability to fly. Those included the pelagic cormorant, which propels itself underwater with webbed feet, and the thick-billed murre, which flaps its wings underwater to swim.

They tagged the birds with recorders that measured the time of their dives as well as depth and temperature and used the results to calculate how much energy the birds expended for diving and flying.

The team compared their results to some that had already been collected for birds such as geese and penguins and found that both cormorants and murres must spend exceedingly large amounts of energy to fly. The highest among all known flying birds, in fact.

That demonstrated that those birds are basically sitting on an evolutionary knifepoint: because their wings are still built for flight they can create enough drag underwater, while their bodies are just light enough to help them take off and cool down quicker than penguins bulkier bodies.

To improve their diving abilities, the birds would have to reduce their wings and grow larger, which is exactly what happened to penguins over time. Basically, a bird has to decide what it wants to be good at: diving or flying!

Where Do Eels Come From?

Aristotle thought eels spontaneously emerged from mud and rainwater. The Ancient Egyptians thought they were made by the sun warming the Nile. In the spring of 1876, a nineteen year old man spent many countless afternoons retrieving freshly caught eels from the seaside city of Trieste and dissecting them in the hopes of unravelling the mystery of their origins.

That man was Sigmund Freud, although he followed his evolutionary questions in other directions before he ever got to the bottom of it. Two years before Freud arrived in Trieste, the German biologist Max Schlutze declared on his deathbed that he was leaving a world where “all the important questions had now been settled”, “except the eel question”.

In 1904, Danish searcher Johannes Schmidt trawled the oceans for eel larvae and concluded that their breeding ground was the Sargasso Sea. Over the past century, a consensus has formed that American and European eels journey thousands of kilometers across the ocean to spawn in the conductive conditions of that wide ocean.

As the story goes, after the eels reach maturity they leave the shores of Europe or North America for the Sargasso Sea and engage in "panmixia", where individuals randomly mate with each other. The resulting larvae mature into transparent “glass” eels and make their return journey to spend their lives in river estuaries in respective continents before the cycle continues.

It seems like a sound explanation, but the truth is that those slippery sea creatures have not been observed spawning in the Sargasso Sea or anywhere on route, meaning their migration is still a total mystery.

Rollercoasters Were Invented To Distract Americans From Sin

There’s nothing like the thrill of riding a rollercoaster, but it wasn’t kicks that motivated the invention of the very first rollercoaster, it was immorality. In the 1800s, successful hosiery businessman LaMarcus Thompson couldn’t help but notice that Americans were tempted by hedonistic places like saloons, dancing halls and brothels.

Thompson was not only a very rich man but an intensely religious one too, and he decided to take it upon himself to solve Americas emerging obsession with sinfulness. On a pleasure trip to the oddly named town of Mauch Chunk in Pennsylvania, he came across people riding an old mining railway for fun.

The railway once transported coal to the nearby docks on the Lehigh River and onto the steel mills of Bethlehem, but it had been converted to a vacation experienced when the coal mines began to fade. Tourists paid one dollar for an 80 minute ride on the disused railway, which included a “thrilling” 600 plus foot drop, that was really more of a slope by modern standards.

Thompson drew up plans for a smaller version of the switchback railway, and the first Thompson “rollercoaster” was built in the spring of 1884 in the most immoral place he could think of: New York’s City’s very own Coney Island.

His invention would tempt people out of the brothels and taverns and into the fresh air, as well as bringing families back together. As we know, the rollercoaster was a hit and the rest is history!

This Creature Looks Like A Baby Demogorgon

Just watch this adorable little critter in the video below:

Video of baby bird being fed with straw reminds Twitter of Demogorgon from Stranger Things by Viral Star

What you’re seeing there isn’t actually extra-terrestrial spawn, it’s just a newly hatched chick eating from a feeding tube! With those weird white spots around its mouth, tiny teeth inside its beak and gross, lumpy body, it’s hard to imagine that creature ever taking to the skies.

But according to some eagle-eyed nature lovers, that is actually the spawn of a Gouldian Finch, which grows up to be totally beautiful.

So, what’s up with their chicks’ weird alien mouths? Although we can’t be certain why those tropophobia inducing markings exist, the most likely theory refers to something even creepier: brood parasites.

Simply put, a "brood parasite" is any organism that relies on others to raise their young. Bird parasite species lay eggs that resemble the hosts and distribute them among a number of different nests. As a result, the two species often end up co-evolving as the parasite tries to perfect its mimicry to blend in as seamlessly as possible.

Estrildid Finches which belong to the same family as the Gouldian Finch, suffer from brood parasites that bear almost identical mouth markings to the Finch chicks. However, Gouldian Finches aren’t known to suffer from those parasites. That suggests that the Finches developed the markings first, and the parasites then evolved to mimic them.

In that case, it seems that the markings may have served another purpose, like helping the birds parents locate their chicks’ mouths for feeding. Either way, you have to applaud the commitment of the parasites for making themselves look repulsive just to get a bit of grub.

When You Swat a Fly, It Isn’t Blood You See

Swatting a fly is one of life’s many small victories. Cleaning up the nasty red smear left behind is not quite as fun, but get this: that isn’t actually blood. Bugs do have blood, but it’s not like ours. The thing is, human blood has red blood cells in it which are responsible for taking oxygen and carrying it throughout our bodies.

The reason they’re red is because they contain hemoglobin, which is a special protein that binds the oxygen. Insect blood or "hemolymph", on the other hand, contains various nutrients, hormones and other things but has no hemoglobin. So instead of being red, insect blood is mostly clear.

However, it may sometimes have some very light pigments in it thanks to the plants they’ve eaten, which might give their blood a yellow or greenish hue. So, where does the red smear come from?

To put it simply: that crimson smear you see when you squash a housefly is actually the result of the red pigments in their eyes! Somehow the idea of wiping up bright red eye juice is even less appealing than blood.

A Beetle Can Escape From a Frogs Butt After Being Eaten Alive

Life as a puny insect is full of dangers and being eaten alive by a larger predator is a pretty gnarly way to go. But one species of water beetle has a unique way of escaping that almost certain death through the back door.

When Shinji Sugiura from Kobe University in Japan presented the pond frog Pelophylax nigromaculatus with the aquatic beetle Regimbartia attenuata during a series of experiments in September 2019, the frog quickly swallowed the beetle whole as expected but then things took an unexpected turn.

In 93% of about a dozen experiments, the beetles miraculously re-appeared after slipping out of the frogs anus alive and well. Sugiura speculates that the beetle has evolved that defense against the frogs in their marshy habitat.

Though muscles typically hold the frogs anal vent tightly shut, those muscles loosen up when the frog poops, meaning the beetles could be somehow stimulating the frogs’ defecation reflex to temporarily open that emergency exit.

Once swallowed, the beetle travels the dark, perilous and airless path through the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and large intestine. From end to end, that journey took a minimum of 6 minutes, but in most cases the beetles emerged between 1-6 hours after being eaten.

The unconventional passage wasn’t without its own drawbacks though. According to Sugiura, the triumphant beetles were “frequently entangled in fecal pellets”, but they recovered fairly quickly.

Ants Can Gut An Almond

Ants are some of the most resilient workers in the animal kingdom. Those tiny bugs can achieve some incredible feats, like lifting objects up to 5,000 times their own body weight! In case you needed reminding why you shouldn’t underestimate them, check out this colony of ants below, that gutted an almond to make their own almond flour!

Ants are fearsome natural scavengers and have an incredibly diverse diet. Like humans, they are also sophisticated and social animals who’ve devised a whole host of ingenuous ways to locate, harvest, store and distribute their food throughout the colony.

When worker ants come across something to their liking, they return to the nest leaving a chemical trail of pheromones for other worker ants to pick up. Then, they get to work breaking down the object using their sharp pincers before carrying pieces back to the nest. Because ants are so opportunistic, stray food in your home like that discarded almond can easily become an invitation.

Nuts aren’t a usual staple of an ants diet, but those enterprising insects certainly had no problem gutting the almond to see what they could get out of it anyway. There may be a few reasons why they have piled up the floury insides around the nuts shell. Ants crave fats and oils, which they could get by chewing the almond and discarding the unwanted parts.

Some ants are also intelligent enough to know not to bring anything back to the nest that will grow mold, while other species like Temnothorax, which often set up home inside acorns might create such piles in the hopes of using the contents for nesting. Either way, that is one seriously incredible feat of teamwork!

I hope you were amazed at these weird and wonderful trivia facts. If you want to find out more interesting facts, you might want to take a look at our whole fun fact series. Thanks for reading!