25 “Facts” About Animals You Have All Wrong

Dogs are colorblind

The truth: Dogs don’t see color the way humans do, but they don’t live in a black-and-white world either. Dogs have two types of color receptors (called cones) in their eyes—compared to humans’ three—so they see a limited range of color. They can easily determine blues and yellows, but reds and greens look gray to them. (Some humans are similarly red-green color-blind.) The misconception has been traced back to a book published in 1942 by optometrist Gordon Walls in which he claimed that dogs could see little color in the world around them. But ophthalmologist and color vision researcher Jay Neitz, set the record straight with a 1989 paper published in the scientific journal Visual Neuroscience. And a 2017 study by Italian researchers confirmed that dogs’ color vision resembles that of human red-green blindness. Just one more fascinating fact about dogs!

Bulls get mad when they see red

The truth: Bulls have nothing against the color red. In fact, they can’t even see it. Like a lot of animals, bulls don’t have the color receptors in their eyes that would allow them to see reddish colors. To bulls, the crimson-colored “muleta” that a matador waves during bullfights looks more like drab yellow-gray. Studies have suggested that when bulls charge at the matador, they are likely responding to the movement more than the color of the cape. Which is why you’ll see the bull also charge at the matador’s other cape, the pink and yellow “capote” used in the early rounds. So why do matadors use red capes at all? It’s to mask the animal’s blood when he impales it with his sword.

Owls are wise

The truth: Not so much. Although owls have been portrayed as sage thinkers in everything from ancient Greek mythology to Winnie the Pooh, researchers have found that the birds don’t have any more smarts than your average sparrow. In fact, a 2013 study found that great gray owls repeatedly failed a simple cognitive experiment in which they were asked to pull a string to get a treat. Meanwhile, ravens, parrots and crows aced the test. But all is not lost for the adorably big-eyed birds. They’re talented hunters thanks to exceptional night vision and hearing abilities.

Frogs can give you warts

The truth: No, touching a frog or toad will not give you warts. The myth may have arisen because toads tend to have dry, bumpy skin, which, in truth, does kinda make it look like they have warts. But rest assured, those bumps are not warts. Warts are transmitted by the human papillomavirus (HPV) and frogs and toads don’t carry it. Which is not to say that you want to reach out and touch every frog or toad you see. Some toads secrete a toxic liquid in their skin that they use to ward off predators. The sticky white substance can irritate your skin and sometimes even be poisonous.

Ostriches bury their heads in the sand

The truth: They do not. While the image of an ostrich with its head in the ground is a popular metaphor for someone trying to avoid a problem, in real life, the birds do no such thing. When an ostrich believes it’s in danger, it will either take off at a clip (they can hit speeds of more than 40 mph) or drop its entire body to the ground to make itself less visible. The myth about head-burying might have arisen from another typical ostrich behavior. When they’re getting ready to lay eggs, female ostriches will dig shallow holes in the sand to serve as nests for their young. The ostrich will use its beak to turn the eggs in the next several times a day and given the small size of an ostrich’s head, that might look from a distance as if the bird is burying its head.

Koalas are bears

The truth: Call them what you want, but koalas are marsupials, not bears. The source of the confusion here seems easy enough to understand. When early European settlers first came to Australia and saw the impossibly cute tree dwellers, they thought koalas looked like bears and started calling them koala bears. (Koala comes from the name the Aboriginal Australians had for the animals.) But female koalas have a pouch, making them marsupials, and more closely related to kangaroos and possums than to grizzlies. So the next time you see one of these cuddly creatures at the zoo, call it a koala, not a koala bear.

Bees only sting once

The truth: It depends on the kind of bee. Some bees, like the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which are found all over the world, do only sting once. That’s because when a honey bee stings, it leaves its barbed stinger in your skin. When it flies off, it’s missing its back end and therefore dies soon afterward. But honeybees are only a tiny percentage of the bee population and their numbers have been shrinking, inspiring worldwide efforts to save them. What you really have to worry about is the 99.96% of other bees who don’t die after stinging you. Those suckers are free to sting again and again as much as they want.

Touch a baby bird and mom will fly the coop

The truth: Bird moms don’t give up that easily. It’s only folklore that birds will reject their young if humans touch them. “If a bird’s nest is disturbed by a potential predator during the nesting or egg-laying stage, there’s a possibility that [it] will desert and re-nest,” Frank B. Gill, a former president of the American Ornithologists’ Union, said in a 2007 interview with Scientific American. “However, once the young are hatched and feeding, [their parents are] by and large pretty tenacious.” In fact, they may not even realize you’ve been there. Most birds can’t detect human scent because their small olfactory nerves limit their ability to smell. But messing with a nest could still make your feathered friend flighty, so it’s always best to keep your hands off.

The king of the jungle is a freeloader

The truth: Not so fast! While it has long been believed that female lions do, well, the lion’s share of the hunting while male lions lounge around looking fierce, it turns out that’s not true. Male lions are pretty skilled at bringing home the prey as well, they just have their own way of doing it. Researchers used GPS collars to track the lions’ movements in the dense brushland of the African savanna to see how the animals hunted. While the female lions tended to hunt in groups, employing teamwork to stalk and take down their victims in open areas, male lions were shown to be solitary hunters who would lie in wait in the dense vegetation and then pop out and ambush their prey.

Only females get pregnant

The truth: Not if you’re a seahorse. Seahorses are one of the most fascinating sea creatures. In the seahorse world, it’s the male that carries the young. Male seahorses have a “brood pouch” on their abdomen and after an elaborate courtship with a female seahorse, the female will transfer her eggs into the male’s pouch to be fertilized. The male then carries the fertilized eggs for a two-to-four week gestation period before giving birth to as many as 1000 baby seahorses. (Abdominal contractions push the babies from the pouch.) Large litters are sadly necessary because only about .5 percent of the baby seahorses—called “fry”—survive to adulthood.

Bats are blind

The truth: They can see! While the saying “blind as a bat” may apply when your husband can’t find the ketchup bottle standing right in front of him, it definitely doesn’t apply to bats. Although most bats navigate by using echolocation—a method of bouncing sound off of objects to plot their flight paths—they also use their eyes to see. Some bats prefer eyesight to sound while hunting and many fruit bats have such sharp vision they don’t even echolocate at all.

A goldfish has a three-second memory

The truth: Goldfish remember everything—and for at least several months! No one seems quite sure why goldfish got tagged as fish with poor memories—although it may have been to assuage our own guilt at making them swim around the same glass bowl over and over. But in fact, several studies have shown that goldfish are much smarter than we might think. In one, researchers at Plymouth University taught goldfish to press a lever to get food. And when the research team adjusted the lever so that it would only work during a specific one-hour window, the fish learned to come back at that time every day. Another study showed that goldfish were able to distinguish between photographs of plastic turtles and frogs, even when the images were rotated, suggesting they recognized things from different perspectives.

Porcupines can shoot their quills

The truth: They cannot. While it’s true that porcupines have pointy quills all over their bodies, they can’t shoot them out like darts at a brewpub. A porcupine’s quills are actually stiff hollow hairs with tiny fishhook-like barbs at the tip. Most of the time, the quills lie flat against the animal’s body, but when a porcupine feels threatened, it will puff them up in a dramatic display to scare off potential predators. If a human or another animal touches a quill, the barb will lodge in their skin and pull free from the porcupine’s body. That easy detachment may be where the myth that porcupines can shoot out their quills got its start.

Camels store water in their humps

The truth: There’s no water in those humps. Experts think the myth arose because camels are known for being able to go long periods without water, and it might seem that those humps would make a great place to store extra hydration. But camels actually store fat inside their humps. When food is scarce, they use the fat inside the humps for energy and the hump deflates and droops down until the camel gets enough food and rest to return it to normal. Camels do load up on water when they drink—as much as 32 gallons at a time!—but that water is stored in the camel’s bloodstream.

If you cut a worm in half, it will survive as two worms

The truth: It depends on the worm. With a run-of-the-mill earthworm, you’ll be out of luck. Earthworms have two distinct ends, a head and a tail. If you cut it in the middle, the head can probably grow a new tail, but the tail won’t be able to grow a new head. (Yes, the tail might wiggle for a bit—probably where the myth got started–but it won’t be able to survive without a head.) Now, slice up a planarian flatworm, on the other hand, and almost anything is possible. Studies have shown the planarian flatworm, can regrow its body from a slice 1/300th of its original size. That’s because planarians have stem cells called neoblasts distributed throughout their bodies. When part of the worm is amputated, those neoblasts go to work to recreate the pieces that have been removed, even new heads. Still more incredible? Researchers have found that the new heads seem to possess the memory of the original worm.

Chameleons change colors to blend in with their surroundings

The truth: While the lizards do change colors, it’s not because they want to match their backgrounds. According to Bill Strand, host of the Chameleon Academy podcast: “Chameleons cannot change any color of the rainbow they wish. There is a predetermined palette that they choose from and their color changes with respect to age, mood, temperature, and health.” Chameleons turn bright colors when they are excited, trying to attract a mate or ward off an adversary. They turned more muted in color when they are relaxed or need to cool off. Studies have shown that the lizards are able to change their color because of an intricate lattice of tiny nanocrystals in their skin that allow them to reflect specific colors of light. The chameleons change the distance between the crystals to reflect different wavelengths of light, and therefore different colors.

Ducks can’t fly

The truth: Of course, ducks can fly! Migrating duck species like mallards, Northern pintails and blue- and green-winged teals fly thousands of miles every year as they migrate from North to South and back again. (In fact, a GPS-tracked mallard set a speed record last year, clocking in at 103 mph on his way to spend his summer in Canada.) But some ducks don’t fly, which may be the source of the whole “ducks don’t fly” disinformation. Domestic ducks, especially those raised for meat like the Pekin duck, have been bred to be heavier, leaving them unable to fly because their wings are too small to carry their weight. And then there are steamer ducks, a large diving bird native to regions of South America. Three of the four species of steamer duck—who get their name because the way they propel themselves across the water by thrashing their wings and feet (it looks a little like a paddle-wheel steamboat)—have evolved to be flightless, though scientists aren’t quite sure why.

Adult opossums hang by their tails

The truth: Only in cartoons. Opossums do have prehensile tails that they can wrap around branches as they climb or use to carry objects, but their tails aren’t strong enough to hold the weight of a full-grown possum. Baby opossums do sometimes hang upside down by their tails—inspiring impossibly cute opossum photos— as they’re learning to climb trees, but even then, they can’t hang that way for long. The misconception seems to have originated in cartoons and animated films like Walt Disney’s Bambi, where a family of opossums hangs upside down from a branch. But in real life, you’re more likely to find the nocturnal creatures snoozing inside trees, woodpiles or other dark and sheltered places. Opossums are North America’s only marsupial and while many people call them possums, they’re not. That name is reserved for a separate breed of marsupials found in Australia and New Zealand. All American “possums” are opossums.

Lemmings commit mass suicide

The truth: The tiny rodents might sometimes get a little depressed, but they are definitely not suicidal. So, where did such a crazy idea come from? Experts point to the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness which showed dozens of lemmings hurling themselves over a cliff as a narrator explains that the creatures intentionally kill themselves during times of overpopulation. The shocking images were supposed to demonstrate the cruelty of nature but what they really showed was the cruelty of some Hollywood filmmakers. An investigation by a Canadian Broadcasting System producer later determined that the entire scene had been faked. Filmmakers had herded the animals to the cliff and used snow-covered turntables to launch the poor lemmings to their deaths.

Sharks can smell blood from a mile away

The truth: Sharks have a highly acute sense of smell, but it’s not that good. One of the fascinating things about sharks is that, unlike humans, sharks use their nostrils only for smelling, not for breathing, and that makes them particularly sensitive to smells. Some sharks can detect blood at a concentration one part per 10 billion—which is about one drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool!—but in the ocean, lots of factors figure in, including the speed at which the shark is swimming and the direction of the water current. It’s estimated that in the open sea, a shark can smell blood from about a couple of hundred yards away. Not quite a mile, but still pretty impressive.

Earwigs burrow into your ears

The truth: Despite the fact that they like dark, cozy places, you’re not likely to find an earwig burrowing into anyone’s ears. Thank goodness! Earwigs are long, flat insects with force-like appendages on the end of their abdomens. They get their name from an 18th-century superstition that had earwigs creeping into the ears of sleeping humans and boring into their brains. But fortunately, like a lot of superstitions, that turned out not to be true. The bugs feed on plants and smaller insects but aren’t dangerous to humans.

Crocodiles fake tears

The truth: It’s complicated. Crocodiles do cry while eating—but not because they’re faking regret at having trapped you in their powerful jaws. While the expression “crocodile tears” has come to mean a show of feigned emotion or sadness, the reason crocodiles cry isn’t insincerity; it’s biology. Researchers believe the tears may occur as a result of the way crocodiles hiss and huff as they eat, theorizing that air forced through the creature’s sinuses may be mixing with tears in their lacrimal glands and emptying into their eyes. So they are crying, but they’re definitely not sorry.

Bears hibernate

The truth: That image you may have of Yogi Bear stretching and yawning after a season-long snooze is more Hollywood fancy than scientific fact. Bears do tuck themselves away for the winter as a way of conserving energy during the time of year when food and water are scarce. But many experts now avoid the word “hibernation” and say that bears spend winter in a lighter sleep state called “torpor.” The difference is key: Animals who hibernate lower their body temperature and slow their breathing, heart and metabolic rates to the point where even loud noises and physical contact won’t wake them up. Torpor also involves decreased breathing, heart and metabolic rates, but the bear’s body temperature decreases only slightly, and they can wake themselves when they need to. So if you don’t want to be the victim of a bear attack, don’t poke a bear in torpor!

Giraffes sleep for only 30 minutes a day

The truth: It depends on their living conditions. Giraffes in the wild live their lives on high alert, always wary of potential predators sneaking up on them. As a result, they have evolved to sleep as little as 30 minutes a day, often in five-minute spells while standing up and in a half-awake “catnap” kind of sleep. But in zoos and protected environments where they don’t have to fear becoming some lion’s lunch, giraffes can relax. As a result, they will sleep much longer, for as many as six hours a day. They’ll even lie down and twist around to use their back end as a pillow.

Anteaters inhale their prey

The truth: Never mind what you see in those cartoons, anteaters don’t actually vacuum up the insects they eat. Instead, inside that impressively long snout is an even more impressive 2-ft.-long tongue which they use to scoop up their ant meals. Their tongues are coated with a sticky saliva and can flick in and out of their mouths as many as 150 times per minute. Which makes devouring a mound of ants or termites no problem at all.

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