The Green List
March 2007

1. What a catch! A crew of New Zealand fishermen recently caught a 495kg adult colossal squid – the biggest known of its kind. The squid is about 200 kilograms heavier than the next biggest specimen ever found.

Giant Sequoias in Yosemite National Park

2. There are as many trees in the Taiga Forest as there are in all of the world’s rainforests combined. It contains a third of all trees on Earth.

3. In the frigid cold of the Taiga, it can take 50 years for a tree to grow bigger than a seedling.

4. Look up, up, waaaay up! The largest living thing on Earth is a giant Sequoia found in western Sierra Nevada, California – it weighs more than 10 blue whales.

5. Bristlecone pines are the oldest living things on Earth. Some are as old as 5,000 years – they were alive before the pyramids were built.

6. The world’s smallest deer is found in Chile, called the pudú.

7. The world’s smallest primate is the mouse lemur.

Whooping crane. Photo: Ryan Hagerty, USFWS

8. The largest North American bird is the Trumpeter Swan, which weighs up to 12.7 kg (28 pounds).

9. The tallest North American bird is the Whooping Crane, at 1.2 metres (5 feet).

10. Antarctica is the 5th biggest continent and 10% of the earth's land area.

11. Only 2% of the land is not covered in ice.

12. Antarctica has the lowest recorded temperature; -90°C at Vostock in 1983. The continent is so cold because up to 80% of incoming solar radiation is reflected back into space by ice and snow.

13. The oldest penguin-breeding colony discovered is in Antarctica at Cape Hickey in the south of the Ross Sea, containing eggshells from 43,000 years ago.

Penguin rookery

14. I wonder if they reduce and reuse, too? A non-venomous Asian snake, Rhabdophis tigrinus, recycles the venom from toxic toads it has eaten, storing it in glands and releasing it to ward off predators.

15. Oregon State University toxicologists sampled fish in 600 rivers in the western US -- and found detectable levels of mercury in every one.

16. Last year, biologists identified a record 52 new species on the southeast Asian island of Borneo: 30 fish, 2 treefrogs, 16 ginger plants, 3 trees and a large-leafed plant.

17. One of the discoveries was a catfish, Glyptothorax exodon, whose teeth protrude even when its mouth is shut.

18. Borneo contains other wonders of the natural world, including the world's largest cockroach, a snake that changes colours like a chameleon and a pygmy elephant.

19. Two-thirds of our planet is covered with water, and 90 percent of this water is more than two miles deep!

20. One of the flattest places on Earth is the salt plains of Bolivia, where relief varies less than 16 inches across over 10,000 square kilometres.

21. A little help here! About 75% of all flowering plant species need the help of animals to move their heavy pollen grains from plant to plant for fertilization.

Great blue heron

22. There are about 200,000 species who act as pollinators, including beneficial insects such as flies, beetles, wasps, ants, butterflies, moths, and bees, as well birds and bats.

23. Keep your eyes on the skies. The Important Bird Area found at Boundary Bay and the Fraser River Estuary attracts over 333 different species of birds, including 16 species of gull, 3 Great Blue Heron colonies and the last Canadian nesting population of Barn Owls.

24. Fifty percent of a tree is composed of carbon.

25. Trees store carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming -- but you need about 500 full-sized trees to absorb the carbon dioxide produced by a typical car driven 20,000 km/year!

26. Sea levels, rising at 1 millimetre a year before the industrial revolution, are now rising by 3 millimetres a year because of a combination of global warming, polar ice-melting and long natural cycles of sea level change.

27. Name that tune! The red-eyed vireo of North America holds the record for most songs sung in a single day – one uttered its song an incredible 22,197 times in 10 hours, about once every 1.62 seconds!

28. While most beaver’s dams are less than 300 metres in length (about 1,000 feet), some are more than 450 metres (1,500 feet) long – that’s the length of 4.5 CFL football fields!

Wood pile

29. Myth buster: Contrary to popular belief, beavers do not use their wide, flat tails to apply the mud to their dams—they primarily use their feet and noses.

30. Forest ecosystems are home to 70% of the world’s plants and animals, more than 13 million distinct species.

31. Roughly 7.3 million hectares of forest are lost annually to deforestation.