Here are some of the saddest facts of nature!
10 - It’s either me or you While sharks may not be the most snuggly animals
to begin with, the sand tiger shark sets a new precedent for ferocity.
This species practices a form of sibling competition that’s really ferocious.
Essentially, think of you and 8 of your brothers and sisters are in a room and someone throws
a knife in the middle, and says only one of you gets out.
Yeah…...it’s THAT ferocious.
Essentially, sand tiger sharks eat their brothers and sisters while still in the womb!
Even scientists admit that this is an unusual mode of survival.
Females have both a left and right uterus and when tiger sharks develop, some grow faster
and larger than others.
Once the largest embryos cross a certain size threshold, the hungry babies turn to their
smaller siblings as convenient meals.
The stronger ones eat the weaker ones until only one remains.
Litters can start with as many as 12 pups but it always end up with only one!
If that isn’t insane to you guys…..wellllllll okay then.
Some researchers believe that this came about because of mating habits.
Female tiger sharks usually mate with multiple males, and this ensures that the fittest male
genes are passed on!
9 - So sleepy You guys know which animals are probably sleepier
than you?
Ants.
Studies of the sleeping habits of ants have revealed that queen ants sleep essentially
as much as she likes, while worker ants are forced to get by only on power naps!
Queen fire ants fall into relatively long, deep sleeps and sleep for an average of nine
hours every day.
By contrast, workers sleep just half as much and get to rest by taking short power naps.
And by that we mean HUNDREDS of short power naps.
This ensures that enough worker ants are awake at any one time to protect and serve the colony!
On average, a single worker ant takes 250 naps per day, each one lasting just over a
minute.
That equates to 4 hours and 48 minutes of sleep a day.
Approximately 80 percent of the workforce is awake and active at any given time!
That just sounds like punishment!
The queen would fall asleep 90 times a day, sleeping for just over 6 minutes at a time.
That equates to over nine hours of sleep a day.
This division of rest may help explain why queens live for years, while worker ants typically
only live for months!
8 - GTFO Male bees, known as drones, are unable to
do much work around the hive.
They can't sting, they can't look after the larvae and they can't collect nectar or pollen.
The only things they can do is eat and mate.
And when that’s the only thing you know how to do, then that’s going to be a big
problem!
When winter comes, male bees are often forced out of the hive and left to starve, because
they’re of no actual use to the hive, as they’ve already have done their jobs!
When fall comes, you'll see drones lying dead in the grass or male bees being pulled out
by worker bees.
Because drones take a lot of resources to raise, the hive is strict when it comes to
which ones it keeps.
If there are lots of drones about, this is a clear indicator that there’s plenty of
food within the colony.
If worker bees kick out drones in the summer as well, it might mean there’s a problem
and that the colony doesn’t have enough to eat.
They’ll only raise and keep drones if they have ample pollen and nectar.
If not, they're out!
7 - Sad Tarsiers A tarsier has eyeballs the size of its brain,
a head that can rotate 180 degrees, ears like a bat and is one of the world’s smallest
primates at just four inches tall.
This thing sound ridiculous to you yet?
It’s no wonder that tourists flock to see them!
All this is actually relatively normal compared to another bizarre tarsier trait.
The tarsier is a sensitive little guy, and when it’s stressed, it bashes its head,
to the point of offing itself!
Tarsiers are sensitive to pretty much everything, and that sensitivity includes daylight, noise,
and physical contact.
Really, tarsiers aren’t cut out for captivity.
When people go see animals, they go near them make loud noises.
Plenty of people try and take selfies or even try and touch animals.
These are exactly the sort of things that makes the tarsiers so stressed out.
Caging them is perhaps the worst of all, because they want to escape.
They start bumping their heads on the cage, and since their skull is so fragile, they
end up hurting themselves fatally a lot of times!
The tarsiers are a major tourist attraction in the Philippines but the Philippine Tarsier
Foundation reports that there are just a few hundred of them left in the world.
While the government has banned hunting the animal, tarsiers are still caged for tourists.
6 - No father No cry So who is it that teaches the baby birds how
to sing?
That’s right, it’s the guys!
Male songbirds teach their young to sing the distinctive songs of their species.
Song-learning in birds is similar to speech-learning in humans.
Listening, imitating and practicing is a big part of song-learning.
And just like us, young baby birds rely on their parents to help them master their singing
voice.
If a baby bird grows up without a father, he won't learn to sing properly.
The first month or so, baby birds don’t sing, but they listen to what their fathers
are singing.
After that month they start to sing by themselves, but in the beginning their songs are more
like a baby babbling.
What they’re doing is hearing their own song and trying to match their own vocals
to their dads.
So, without their a father during a bird's early years, a baby bird will sing a stunted
version of the song of his species, and things aren’t gonna go well for them.
If a bird grows up WITH a father, he’ll soak up the sounds from his dad, and that’s
a beautiful thing!
5 - Dude, where’s that reef Oftentimes, whales have trouble hearing one
another because of human marine noise pollution.
They have to either call louder or call at a slightly different frequency in order to
communicate over all the background noise.But what about a whale who sings at the wrong
frequency altogether?
One whale, that’s been recorded since 1989 and tracked since 1992, sings at a much higher
frequency than her fellow whales.
She's lonely because no one else can hear her!
This particular whale sings at 52 Hertz, which is roughly the same frequency as the lowest
note on a tuba, and much higher than its fellow whales, whose calls fall in the 15 to 25 Hertz
range.
Not only does she sing too high, this whale also fails to travel along any known migration
route of any baleen whale species.
So not only do the other whales not hear her, they don't run into her along common migration
paths.
The best guess of researchers is that this lonely whale is either a "deformed" hybrid
between two species of whale or the last surviving member of an unknown species.
Pretty sad…….
4 - Nope not doing it You first have to know that dolphins and whales
aren’t mammals like us.
Every breath they take is actually a conscious effort!
Because they choose whether or not they want to breathe, this gives dolphins some interesting
choices.
One such situation involves Peter, a bottlenose dolphin.
Peter is said to have stopped breathing after being separated from a woman that was doing
on research on him.
She was a woman he supposedly loved.
Animal researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt, lived with Petar in a specially built house in the
Virgin Islands for a few months in 1965 while trying to teach Peter English.
All of that was part of a NASA-funded project, led by an eccentric neuroscientist.
Nope, we didn’t make this one up guys!
The story of the project is pretty weird and there’s a lot to the story, but you guys
will have to look it up yourselves!
Anyways, the gist of the story is that ends with Peter being moved to an isolated tank
in Miami, where he refused to breathe!
Dolphins will refuse to breathe if they’re depressed enough!
Another example is a dolphin named Kathy who was one of several dolphins who played the
character Flipper on the TV show.
She’s said to have stopped breathing as well because she chose to.
Kathy is said to have swum into the arms of her former trainer before she decided to stop
breathing and sinking to the bottom of the tank.
3 - Where’s Mom The first few hours of a loggerhead sea turtle’s
life are pretty exciting.
After hatching in their beach nests, baby turtles crawl clumsily into the ocean and
swim out without looking back.
Seriously, it’s still amazing to us how animals just know what they’re supposed
to do!
The sad fact is that sea turtles never get to meet their moms, or their dads.
And they have just a one-in-a-thousand chance of making it to adulthood!
Just a handful of the tiny turtles, probably less than half will survive the gulls and
sharks.
The tide sweeps them off alone, away from their surviving siblings, with no mom to protect
them.
The time following their famous beach hatching ritual is a bit of a blur.
Scientists call this period in a sea turtle’s life the “lost years” because they don’t
really have any concrete evidence about what happens to them.
For loggerheads, the lost years supposedly last anywhere from 7 to 12 years.
It’s speculated that baby sea turtles probably spend these adolescent years traveling long
distances, floating in seaweed beds to avoid predators and hanging out at the ocean surface.
The very few lucky ones, the one in a thousand who make it, will come back to lay their own
eggs in about 30 years!
2 - Lion pride When you live life as a lion and you’re
the leader of your pride, life is good when you’re on top.
However, when it’s over, it’s really over.
This emaciated lion is how one of Kruger National park most famous lions spent his last days.
The lion, known as Skybed Scar, used to lead a pride but he was pushed out of the pride
once he wasn’t the alpha lion anymore and became too weak.
When he was the leader, he protected the pride, and his lionesses brought him food.
He used to be the lion king, but once he was out of the pride, the elderly lion found himself
chased by anything larger than he was.
He was too weak to hunt on his own, and he had to resort to scavenging.
After being kicked out of a pride, lions either find another pride to which they can battle
for dominance or if they’re too old like Skybed Scar, they live lonely sedentary lives.
Living in a pride is especially important for lions, as lions hunt in groups, and it’s
difficult for weaker lions to catch a large prey all alone.
Old lions often pass because of starvation or they pass because of disease.
Shortly after the photograph was taken, the lion quietly passed away.
1 - Forever Alone Imagine just being born, and then boom, you’re
completely on your own.
Megapodes are chicken-like birds with small heads and large feet.
Most birds receive parental care but megapodes are a big exception.
They’re mainly solitary birds that don’t even incubate their eggs with their body heat
as other birds do.
Instead, they build a large mound of decaying vegetation and bury their eggs in the mound!
Amazingly, the mounds can be the size of a car!
Nice.The parents control the mound’s temperature by removing or adding more vegetation.
However, once the offspring are born, the baby birds dig their way out and run off without
ever seeing their parents!
The reason for that is that megapodes hatch essentially full mature.
They hatch with their eyes open, decent body strength, and full wing feathers.
The chicks are able to run, hunt, and in some cases, fly on the same day they are born!
Here’s what’s next!