FACTS YOU MAY NOT KNOW
Emperor Penguin
- Emperor penguin is the largest of 17 penguin species.
- Their scientific name is Aptenodytes forsteri.
- About 60,000 live in Antarctica, the coldest place in the world.
- They cut their heat loss by clumping together in tightly packed huddles, slowly shuffling so each bird gets time out of the wind.
- They breed in winter; females compete for the males.
- Male emperors are responsible for incubuting eggs through nine weeks of bitter weather
Deep-sea life
- A colony of mussels and tube worms inhabit an underwater lake of brine 2,000 feets below the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico.
- Almost four times as salty as seawater and contains no oxygen, the brine is lethal to most animals.
- Methane and hydrogen sulfide feed bacteria that support the mussels and the tube worms.
- The mussel community has likely flourished there for centuries.
- Like seep mussels, tube worms attract Squat lobsters, which feed on them.
- The longest tube worms, at eight feet, are more than a century old.
Protia spider
- Spiders are often separated into two behavioral groups: those that build webs to capture prey and those that hunt away from their webs.
- Portia fimbriata does both.
- Portia invades other the webs of other spiders and devours the owners.
- The genus Portia contains 15 species of African, Asian, adn Australian jumping spiders.
- To lure other spiders, they mimic the mating ritual of their preys or imitate the vibrations made by a mosquito, the victim's prey.
- Portia can find a signal for just about any spider by trial and error. It makes different signals until the victim spider finally responds appropriately, then keeps making the signal that works.
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