Strange But True

Your guide to all the unusual, unique, and unbelieveable stuff that goes on in nature

• Hercules beetles make human weight lifters look like wimps. The brawny bugs can push press 850 times their weight. To do the same, an Olympian would need to lift more than 150,000 pounds!
• Feathers in a flash: Six days after hatching, yellow-billed cuckoo chicks go from basically bare to fully feathered in about two hours. Three days later, they take flight.
• Although perfect for predator protection, an armadillo’s armor is heavy. To cross wide rivers, armadillos gulp air until their stomachs blow up like balloons, then they float across. To ford narrow streams, they simply walk along the bottom.
• Here’s the scoop on wild turkey poop: Male turkeys usually leave J-shaped droppings. Female turkeys leave spiralshaped droppings.
• Sucking blood makes a dog tick feel, well, swell. Female ticks suck enough blood to swell to more than 100 times their normal weight. If you packed on pounds by the same factor, you’d weigh more than a minivan!
• Meadow jumping mice are the kings of spring. When startled, the gerbil-sized rodents can leap 12 feet in a single bound. If you had the same spring in your step, you wouldn’t have problems jumping over two school buses parked end to end.