Burmese Pythons

Burmese python’s are probably the only snakes to be nurtured by their mother, as they are cared for during the first two weeks of their life. Starting life at only around 40cm in length, within a year they can exceed 3 meters and 40 kg in weight. Feeding on mammals and reptiles, these snakes have been known to attack, kill and even swallow crocodiles.


They can dislocate their jaws, and expand the skin and ribs to accommodate food much larger than their own head. Female Burmese have been known to reach lengths of 8 meters and are capable of swallowing goats or larger animals. They can go without food for many months at a time, shutting down their entire digestive system. In captivity some have been known to go without food for up to a year.


To save water, they excrete urinate a white jelly like substance which is concentrated salts and waste which quickly turns into a powder.


Burmese are known as the gentle giants of the snake world but are surrounded by myths of taking and swallowing children at play around villages. In reality they do not identify humans as food and would find it hard to swallow us because of our shoulders as they have no muscles for opening their mouths to this degree, they depend on swallowing food by moving over it like a sock.

Enlarge                   Photo:  David Griffin

Alligator Snapping Turtles

Like creatures from lord of the rings, the dinosaurs of the turtle world, alligator snappers swim through the southern American rivers in search for food. life expectancy is around 70 years they grow through out their lives weighing up to 140kg .Their shells are leathery rather than hard like normal turtles with a large head they don’t have teeth but a hard sharp hooked and extremely strong jaws which can slice through flesh effortlessly .their diet consists of fish rodents birds or other turtles they also scavenge  dead prey roots and occasionally fruit. They have a unique feature in their mouth they have a little string of bright red flesh in their grey mouth which they wriggle under water to fool fish into thinking their is a handy meal then snap! The fish has no chance agents their jaws, sliced in half. They are very aggressive on land and will some times pursue a treat rather than waiting for the attack. 

Enlarge                                                     Photo:  David Griffin 

Cockroach facts

Cockroaches have been around this planet for around 350 million years.
Can be found all round the world except in Polar Regions and the Antarctic.
There are 3,500 known species and about six different types in Ireland. They like damp humid conditions where there is decaying food.
Seventy five percent of the day cockroaches spend resting and sleeping then the rest of their time scurrying around finding food .they can run at a speed of 3 miles an hour about human walking speed
If you were to cut a cockroaches head off he will actually stay alive for a week or more before dying, without a mouth it can’t drink water.
Some females only mate once and remain pregnant for the rest of their lives. They nurture their young for about a week. During a lifetime  of  2-4 years a female can produce 1000 young and can you imagine if 500 of those produced 1000 young each, that’s half a million and half of those 1000 young each you could easily have a grandmother with 25 million grand and great grand children in only 2-3 years. So we can take it that these are not an endangered species. Cockroaches play a very important part in the environment as they break down dead material like leaf litter and human and animal waste.

                                                                                                     Photo:  David Griffin

Dinosaurs are still alive and among us !

Before a huge Asteroid hit the Earth 65 million years ago the world climate was changing, temperatures were cooling and there were cooler winters, as a result many dinosaurs started growing feathers which helped them to retain body heat. These feathers are also thought to have helped them to escape predators when jumping over objects.

During this time vegetation was also evolving, trees produced fruit, nuts and flowers for the first time. These feathered dinosaurs were using their feathers to get higher into the trees to feed.

Their isolation probably saved this species from extinction and to help them to survive the extreme climatic change which followed the meteor. As time passed these dinosaurs mastered flying, their claws evolved into wings and their long rows of teeth became beaks, giving us our modern day dinosaur. Birds are as closely related to dinosaurs as we to apes.

Next time you see a chicken look at its feet, they are identical to dinosaur feet. If you open the wings you can imagine how they were once claws, how their beak’s could have been a long mouth full of teeth. They also lay eggs just like dinosaurs did. Just think next time you eat chicken nuggets, you are eating a dinosaur. All birds are dinosaurs, in actual fact there are more dinosaurs on earth now than ever before, they just look different

                   

                                                                                                                               Photo:  David Griffin

Meerkats

A group of Meerkats are known as a mob, they are found throughout the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the mob is lead by a dominant male and female. These community animals and are intelligent creatures that lookout for each other, even female Meerkats who don’t have young produce milk to help out the ones that do. They communicate with the use of different whooping noises. The adults teach the young how to catch food and how to survive in their harsh environment. They have excellent long distance vision known as binocular vision and are known to be able to spot birds of prey even while looking directly into the sun.
The black circles around their eyes are there to protect their eyes from sun glare , unfortunately their short vision is very poor so they find it hard to see things close up, to compensate for this they will band together in a group standing upright on their hind legs. They live in burrows often sharing with ground squirrels and occasionally the odd venomous snake. They have a unique ability of closing their ears while digging their diet consists of insects, millipedes, lizards, and venomous scorpions. They have a very fast metabolism and must eat constantly, over night a Meerkat will lose 5% of their body weight which is a lot so it would not take long to die of starvation. Thankfully Meerkats are one species of mammal that are doing well in Africa and are not endangered.

Bet  you thought that cows were boring!


Here are some interesting facts about cows. During its lifetime a cow can produce around 200,000 glasses of milk. Each cow eats around 45kg of food a day. They have no top front teeth so they grab the grass and twirl it around their tongues then cut it with their lower teeth. They have 3 stomachs in which the food is fermented and they produce a lot of gas. Unfortunately cows are making a contribution to global warming, as all the gas their stomachs produce is more or less burped out through their mouths and their bums (cows fart a lot!). The gas (methane) is a green house gas which causes the sun to heat the earth more than it should. Each cow makes 20kg of gas each year and considering there are over 1 billion cows on the planet they may do more damage than car fumes to the environment.

Each herd and even cows from different areas have different accents, they have different moo’s depending which part of the country they are from. They have an acute sense of smell and can pick up scents from up to six miles away. Their intelligence is said to be higher than that of cats and comparable to a dog. Cows have good memories and can recognise human faces. They are very curious and like to work out problems. Each cow has a different personality and the happier they are the more milk they produce.

Wasps 

Wasps come from the same family as the dragonfly, ant and bee and have adapted very well to their environment.  Every spring after hibernation the queen sets about building her nest. First she finds a sheltered place to hang her nest, perhaps in a garden shed. She begins by chewing up dead or flaky wood into a pulp and moulds it into a sphere the size of a golf ball. Here she lays the first of her eggs. These are the first workers of her new colony. The queen feeds the newborn with small insects like green fly, caterpillars and anything else she can catch. The queen herself feeds from the sweet saliva produced from the larvae. When they are old enough, they will continue to build the nest and feed the newly hatched allowing the queen time to concentrate on building up the new colony.
All the workers are in fact females and instead of an ovipositor (used for laying eggs in most insects) they have a sting. According to myth a wasp can only sting once, but they can in reality sting many times. The workers like the queen feed on the saliva of the young. Each generation of wasp only lives for about six weeks.
Before the end of the summer the queen produces males who are sting less and they go out and mate with other potential queens. As the summer ends, the queen stops producing young so the workers have to find a new source of food.  They search for sweet things and this is when they become a pest entering our homes occasionally. At this stage the last of the colony is dying off and only the new queens survive hiding away in hibernation till next year.
                 

 The Frilled Lizard.

These prehistoric looking creatures are found in woodland areas in Australia and New Guinea. They spend a lot of time clinging to trees. When startled their frill bellows out and they open their mouths and even stand on their hind legs to scare off threats.  When under pressure they will even run on their hind legs. These creatures eat anything small that moves birds, insects, rodents and even other lizards. They crush with their sharp teeth to kill and then swallow their food whole. These lizards are very easy going and grow to a length of about two feet, the male is usually larger than the female. They can spend days without even moving, and then for no apparent reason just run away.

  Photo:  David Griffin

The Komodo Dragon

Komodo Dragons are found in one place in the world, that is Komodo Island one of 17,000 islands in Indonesia , South East Asia.

The largest lizard in the world, they can reach lengths of three to four meters and 165 kg in body-weight.

Along with their huge size they have a big appetite, hunting pigs, goats, buffalo and occasionally the odd human has fallen prey but this is rare.

With an ability to run in short bursts of 15 miles an hour they grab their prey ripping the flesh with curved teeth and injuring. Their mouths contain lots of dangerous bacteria. This is what eventually causes the victims death, the wound quickly gets infected. In the mean time the dragon follows its victim flicking its long tongue tasting the air for the scent. After a few hours the victim’s wound becomes severely infected causing the animal to become weak and eventually collapse with fever. This is when the Komodo takes advantage ripping the flesh with its strong claws swallowing large lumps of flesh. Very often other dragons will join in to share the feast.

   Check out the claws

  Look at those claws                        Enlarge                            Photo:  David Griffin