The Green List
January 2007

1. The world's largest ant colony stretches from the Atlantic coast of Spain to Italy.

2. Watch out ladies! In order to impress the females, the New Guinean male Archbold’s bowerbird will build a simple platform bower three to eight feet in diametre and decorate it with snail shells, beetle wings, and honey-coloured resin ships. If he’s lucky he’ll find some blueberries and dead centipedes to add to the mix.

3. Australia’s satin bowerbirds are much pickier. The males search for seek blue items for their bowers and will take anything they can get their beaks around – flowers, berries, paper, glass, parrot feathers, and have been known to take things like toothbrushes and pen caps from unsuspecting hikers and campers.

Skunks - the stripey snuggler. iStockphoto.com

4. Only two species of mammals have internalized testicles - whales and elephants.

5. Skunks like to snuggle. Researchers have found that striped skunks that snuggle together in a den fare better during hibernation than if they spend the winter alone. Young males are often left out in the cold because they can't battle the older, stronger males for a spot in the largely female inhabited communal dens.

6. Adult polar bears need an average of 2 kg (4.4 lb.) of fat per day to maintain their weight. They eat mostly ringed and bearded seals and as well as other seal species, walruses, narwhals, beluga whales, whale carcasses, fish, reindeer, birds, eggs, berries and kelp.

7. What could bees and people possibly have in common? Despite having only one-millionth the number of neurons that people have in their brains, bees and people are two of only a handful species that form large, complex societies.

	Bee collecting pollen. iStockphoto.com

8. Bee hives function like well-developed societies, but there’s no question who’s the boss! Each hive has one queen, about 500 male drones, and up to 50,000 sterile female workers.

9. And the award for best sense of smell goes to…the honeybee! Genome sequencing has found that honeybees have 163 smell genes, but only 10 for taste. Mosquitoes and fruit flies both have close to the same number of both genes.

10. Speaking of bees, the bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), is believed to be the world's smallest mammal. This tiny creature is threatened by forest burning near its habitat in western Thailand and south-east Burma.

11. Rock lobster! Madagascar is home to a new species of rock lobster whose body spans half a metre.

Great white shark. iStockphoto.com

12. The deep sea is shark free! Sharks live at depths 1,500 metres or above.

13. That leaves plenty of room for everyone else - the average depth of the oceans is 3,794 m.

14. Long time no see! A type of shrimp thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago was found in the Coral Sea near Australia. Nicknamed Jurassic Shrimp, it is the same colour as modern shrimp but is bulkier.

15. Beavers, and frogs, and toads - oh my! Researchers have found that where beavers built their dams, frogs and toads are found in greater abundance. It is thought that beaver "ponds" may provide favourable conditions for developing tadpoles.

16. Growing up to 50 feet long (15 metres) whale sharks are the world's largest fish.

17. The long-eared jerboa, who has the unique honour of having the largest ear to body ratio of any mammal, can jump 50 times the height of its body, and has ears that are twice as big as his head. Just 74 to 110 mm in length, with a tail 152 to 185 mm long, they weigh 23 to 45 grams and can jump up to 1.5 m high.

	Polar bears roam the frozen ground in the Arctic. iStockphoto.com

18. Twenty per cent of the Earth’s surface is permanently frozen.

19. Approximately 71 per cent of the Earth is covered by water.

20. West Africa's pygmy hippopotamus is about half as tall as the hippopotamus and about a tenth of the weight. Well adapted to forest environments in West Africa, it is the only member of its genus still living on Earth.

21. Planet earth averages 35 earthquakes a day.

22. A small child could crawl through a blue whale’s major arteries.

23. Though that sounds far fetched, doesn’t it? Consider these blue whale facts: they have a lung capacity of 5,000 litres, their tongues are the size of an elephant, and they can weigh as much as an adult hippopotamus at birth.

24. It might be best to whisper…on a calm day in the Arctic a conversation can be heard from almost 3 km away.

25. Who could avoid coffee for that long?! The average pregnancy of an Indian elephant lasts 650 days.

Australia's red kangaroo. iStockphoto.com

26. Weighing in at 5 kg, elephants have the largest brains in the animal kingdom.

27. Talk about multi-tasking mamas! Red kangaroos are able to produce two different types of milk from adjacent teats to feed offspring of different ages.

28. When red kangaroo babies, or joeys, are born, they average only 2.5 cm in length.

29. And now for some timely facts about winter. On the average, 10 inches of snow melts down to about an inch of liquid rain.

30. In North America, winter storms usually form when an air mass of cold, dry, Canadian air moves south and interacts with a warm, moist air mass moving north from the Gulf of Mexico.

31. Ottawa, Canada is the about the seventh coldest capital city in the world. First place honours go to Ulan Batar, Mongolia.

Snowy day in the city. iStockphoto.com