1.President Theodore Roosevelt (after whom the Teddy Bear is named) was particularly fond of animals, having five guinea pigs called Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, Admiral Dewey, and Father O’Grady. He also owned a small bear called Jonathan Edwards, a lizard by the name of Bill, Baron Spreckle (a hen), a badger called Josiah, Eli Yale the parrot and - brilliantly - a snake known to his family as Emily Spinach.
2.In its lifetime, an albatross is believed to fly around fifteen million miles. To put that into perspective, it is the same as flying half way to Mars when it is at its closest distance to the Earth.
3.In possibly one of the cutest facts you will ever read, sea otters hold each other’s paws whilst they are asleep so they don’t drift apart from each other.
4.Elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants than they are shrews.
5.Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can’t find anything else to eat. Amazingly, they can consume up to 95% of their own bodyweight and still survive.
6.During lent, the only meat that the Catholic Church allows its followers to eat is salted fish. However, because people got very bored of fish at every supper for forty days, the church actually changed the definition of ‘fish’ to include puffins, beavers and turtles as they can all swim.
7.The diet of mountain goats lacks an important ingredient - salt. With this in mind, goats seek out areas where it is present to lick, such as a piece of ground or particularly salty rock. However once they discovered that human urine is quite salty, they started hanging out around areas in which people were camping, waiting for a man to unbutton his flies, and would then run up to him and start drinking his pee.
8.If a baby stork is not happy with the way it is being reared, it sometimes abandons its parents and wanders into another nearby nest to be fed by a new family!
9.Mosquitos prefer to bite children rather than adults - and prefer blondes to brunettes! No-one knows why.
10.Well-known American writer Ernest Hemingway was also a keen fisherman. He developed a number of new techniques to improve his catch rate when fishing in the sea. Although some were not particularly sporting (such as shooting sharks with a sub-machine gun), others were quite innovative and enabled him to catch seven marlin in just one day - a world record at the time!
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