What do chameleons do?

They don’t change colour to match the background.

Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total lie.

They change colour as a result of different emotional states. If they happen to match the background it’s entirely coincidental.

Chameleons change colour when frightened or picked up or when they beat another chameleon in a
fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes
change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature.

A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells called chromataphores (from
Greek chroma, colour, and pherein, to carry), each with different coloured pigments. Altering the
balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a
kind of walking colour-wheel.

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It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies called Antigonus of Carystus in about 240 BC. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour-change to fear and, by the Renaissance, the
‘background’ theory had, once again, been almost entirely abandoned. But it’s come back with a
vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know’ about
chameleons.

Chameleons can remain completely motionless for several hours at a time. Because of this, and the
fact that they eat very little, they were, for many centuries, believed to live on air. This, of course,
isn’t true either.

The word chameleon is Greek for ‘ground-lion’. The smallest species is the Brookesia minima,
which is 25 mm (1 inch) long; the largest is the Chaemaeleo parsonnii, which is more than 610 mm
(2 feet) long. The Common Chameleon glories in the Latin name Chamaeleo chamaeleon, which
sounds like the opening to a song.

Chameleons can rotate and focus either eye independently to look in two completely different
directions at once, but they are stone deaf. The Bible forbids the eating of chameleons.

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Publisher: moath - 9:27 AM

How do lemmings die?

Not by mass suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.

The suicide idea seems to have originated in the work of nineteenth-century naturalists who had
witnessed (but not understood) the four-year boom-and-bust population cycle of the Norwegian
lemming (Lemmus lemmus).

Lemmings have a phenomenal reproductive capacity. A single female can produce up to eighty
offspring a year. Sudden surges in their numbers once led Scandinavians to think they were
spontaneously generated by the weather.

What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation that in turn leads to over-grazing.
The lemmings set off into unfamiliar territory in search of food until they pile up against natural
obstacles like cliffs, lakes and seas. The lemmings keep coming. Panic and violence ensue. Accidents happen. But it isn’t suicide.

A secondary myth has evolved which is that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented by the
1958 Walt Disney film White Wilderness. It’s true that the film was a complete fake. It was filmed in land-locked, lemming-free Alberta, Canada: the lemmings had to be bussed in from several hundred miles away in Manitoba. The shots of the ‘migration’ were made using a few lemmings on a snowcovered turntable. The notorious final scene – where lemmings plunge into the sea to the doom-laden voice-over of Winston Hibbler: ‘This is the last chance to turn back, yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space’ – was created by the film-makers simply throwing the lemmings into a river.

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But Disney was only guilty of trying to recreate an already entrenched story. Here it is described in
the most influential children’s reference book of the early twentieth century, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, published in 1908: ‘They march straight forward, over hill and dell, through gardens, farms, villages, into wells and ponds to poison water and cause typhoid… on and on to the sea, then into the water to destruction…

It is sad and terrible, but if the dismal exodus did not occur lemmings would long ago have eaten
Europe bare.’ Publisher: moath - 9:21 AM

What has a three-second memory?

Not a goldfish, for starters.

Despite its status as a proverbial fact, a goldfish’s memory isn’t a few seconds long.
Research by the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in 2003 demonstrated beyond
reasonable doubt that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish
between different shapes, colors and sounds. They were trained to push a lever to earn a food
reward; when the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time.

 A number of similar studies have shown that farmed fish can easily be trained to
feed at particular times and places in response to an audible signal.

Goldfish don’t swim into the side of the bowl, not because they can see it, but because they are
using a pressure-sensing system called the lateral line. Certain species of blind cave fish are able to
navigate perfectly well in their lightless environment by using their lateral line system alone.
While we’re dealing with goldfish myths, a pregnant goldfish isn’t, hasn’t and can’t be called a
‘twit’. Goldfish don’t get pregnant: they lay eggs that the males fertilise in the water.

In principle, there could be a word for a female fish with egg development – such as ‘twit’, ‘twat’or ‘twerp’ – but none is listed in any proper dictionary.

STEPHEN Well, there is this fallacy that goldfish have a three-second memory –
ALAN It’s not a fallacy!
STEPHEN It is a fallacy. They've done tests.
ALAN Oh, they haven’t.
STEPHEN They have. A man from Plymouth University did a wonderful test –
ALAN There isn’t a Plymouth University; that’s made up.
SEAN It’s just a sweet shop with a copy of The Times in it. Publisher: moath - 8:01 PM

How long can a chicken live without its head?

About two years.

On 10 September 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and
lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem attached to the neck for him to survive, even thrive.

Mike, as he was known, became a national celebrity, touring the country and featuring in Time and
Life magazines. His owner, Lloyd Olsen, charged twenty-five cents for a chance to meet ‘Mike the
Headless Wonder Chicken’ in sideshows across the USA. Mike would appear complete with a dried chicken’s head purporting to be his own – in fact, the Olsens’ cat had made off with the original.

 At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4,500 a month, and was valued at $10,000. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the unfortunate victims lived for more than a day or two.

Mike was fed and watered using an eyedropper. In the two years after he lost his head, he put on
nearly six pounds and spent his time happily preening and ‘pecking’ for food with his neck. One
person who knew Mike well commented: ‘He was a big fat chicken who didn’t know he didn’t have a head.’

Tragedy struck one night in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona. Mike started to choke and Lloyd
Olsen, to his horror, realised he’d left the eyedropper at the previous day’s show. Unable to clear his airways, Mike choked to death.

Mike remains a cult figure in Colorado and, every May since 1999, Fruita has marked his passing
with a ‘Mike the Headless Chicken’ Day. Publisher: moath - 8:38 PM

Which bird lays the smallest egg for its size?

The ostrich.

Although it is the largest single cell in nature, an ostrich egg is less than 1½ per cent of the weight
of the mother. A wren’s egg, by comparison, is 13 per cent of its weight.
The largest egg in comparison with the size of the bird is that of the Little Spotted kiwi. Its egg
accounts for 26 per cent of its own weight: the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a six-year-old
child.

An ostrich egg weighs as much as twenty-four hen’s eggs; to soft-boil one takes forty-five minutes.
Queen Victoria tucked into one for breakfast and declared it among the best meals she had ever eaten.

The largest egg laid by any animal – including the dinosaurs – belonged to the elephant bird of
Madagascar, which became extinct in 1700. It was ten times the size of an ostrich egg, nine litres in
volume and the equivalent of 180 chicken’s eggs.
The elephant bird (Aepyornis maximus) is thought to be the basis for the legend of the fierce roc
that Sinbad battles in the Arabian Nights. Publisher: moath - 8:36 PM

What’s the largest living thing?

It’s a mushroom.

And it’s not even a particularly rare one. You’ve probably got the honey fungus ( Armillaria
ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree-stump.
For your sake, let’s hope it doesn’t reach the size of the largest recorded specimen, in Malheur
National Forest in Oregon. It covers 890 hectares (2,200 acres) and is between 2,000 and 8,000
years old. Most of it is underground in the form of a massive mat of tentacle-like white mycelia (the
mushroom’s equivalent of roots). These spread along tree roots, killing the trees and peeping up
through the soil occasionally as innocent-looking clumps of honey mushrooms.
The giant honey fungus of Oregon was initially thought to grow in separate clusters throughout the
forest, but researchers have now confirmed it is the world’s single biggest organism, connected under the soil.

STEPHEN What, or which, is the largest living thing on earth?
BILL France. Publisher: moath - 5:22 PM

What’s the name of the tallest mountain in the world?

Mauna Kea, the highest point on the island of Hawaii.

The inactive volcano is a modest 4,206 m (13,799 feet) above sea level, but when measured from
the seabed to its summit, it is 10,200 m (33,465 feet) high – about three-quarters of a mile taller than Mount Everest.
As far as mountains are concerned, the current convention is that ‘highest’ means measured from
sea level to summit; ‘tallest’ means measured from the bottom of the mountain to the top.
So, while Mount Everest, at 8,848 m (29,029 feet) is the highest mountain in the world, it is not the
tallest.

Measuring mountains is trickier than it looks. It’s easy enough to see where the top is, but where
exactly is the ‘bottom’ of a mountain?
For example, some argue that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – at 5,895 m (19,340 feet) – is taller
than Everest because it rises straight out of the African plain, whereas Everest is merely one ofmany peaks topping the enormous base of the Himalayas, shared by the world’s next thirteen highest mountains.

Others claim that the most logical measure ought to be the distance of a mountain’s peak from the
centre of the Earth. Because the Earth is a flattened rather than a perfect sphere, the equator is about 21 km (13 miles) further from the centre of the Earth than the poles. This is good news for the reputation of those mountains that are very close to the equator – like Mount Chimborazo in the Andes – but it also means accepting that even the beaches in Ecuador are
‘higher’ than the Himalayas.

Though massive, the Himalayas are surprisingly young. When they were formed, the dinosaurs had
been dead for 25 million years. In Nepal, Everest is known as Chomolungma – ‘Mother of the Universe’. In Tibet, it is called Sagamartha – ‘Forehead of the Sky’. Like any healthy youngster, it is still growing – at the not very exciting rate of 4 mm (less than a quarter of an inch) a year.
ALAN Do you know that one in eight of people who’ve tried to climb Everest die? PHILL So, when you’re putting your party together to go up Everest, just … If there’s seven of you, just get one really … someone you don’t like. Preferably with asthma … ‘Lead on, Wheezy!’ Publisher: moath - 5:20 PM

Where is the highest mountain?

It’s on Mars.
The giant volcano Mount Olympus – or Olympus Mons in Latin – is the highest mountain in the
solar system and in the known universe.
At 22 km high (14 miles) and 624 km (388 miles) across, it is almost three times the height of
Mount Everest and so wide that its base would cover Arizona, or the whole of the area of the British
Isles. The crater on the top is around 72 km (45 miles) wide and over 3 km (nearly 2 miles) deep,
easily big enough to swallow London.
Mons Olympus doesn’t conform to most people’s idea of a mountain. It is flat-topped – like a vast
plateau in a sea drained of water – and its sides aren’t even steep. Their slight incline of between one
and three degrees means you wouldn’t even break sweat if you climbed it.
We traditionally measure mountains by their height. If we measured them by their size, it would be
meaningless to isolate one mountain in a range from the rest. That being so, Mount Everest would
dwarf Olympus Mons. It is part of the gigantic Himalaya–Karakoram–Hindu-Kush–Pamir range
which is nearly 2,400 km (1,500 miles) long. Publisher: moath - 4:01 AM

Where are you most likely to get caught in a hailstorm?

The Western Highlands of Kenya in Africa.
In terms of annual downpour, Kericho in Kenya has more hail than anywhere else on earth, since it
falls on average 132 days each year. By comparison, the UK averages only fifteen hail-days in a year
and the worst affected area in the US, the eastern Rockies, experiences an average of forty-five haildays
a year.
What causes the abundance of hail is not fully understood. Kericho is the home of Kenya’s tea
plantations, and a 1978 study showed that organic litter from the tea plants gets stirred into the
atmosphere, where it acts as a nucleus around which hailstones can grow.
Another theory is that the high altitude of the region could be to blame, as the shape of the terrain
causes a large uplift of warm air which quickly condenses. This, and the reduced distance between
the freezing level (about 3 miles up) and the ground, reduces the chance of hailstones melting.
The average hailstone is about quarter of an inch across, but they can grow large enough to dent
cars, shatter greenhouses and even injure people.
The largest single hailstone ever recorded in the United States was 7 inches in diameter, 18.75
inches in circumference, and weighed in at just under a pound. It fell into the back yard of a house in
Aurora, Nebraska, in June 2003. This is off the end of the official US scale for describing hailstones
which starts at ‘pea’ and rises progressively through ‘mothball’, ‘walnut’ and ‘tea-cup’ to ‘softball’.
The Aurora hailstone was the size of a small melon and would have hit the ground at 100 mph.
Hail costs the US a billion dollars each year in damage to property and crops. A hailstorm that
struck Munich, Germany, in July 1984 caused an estimated billion dollars’ worth of damage to trees,
buildings and motor vehicles in a single afternoon. Trees were stripped of their bark and whole fields
of crops were destroyed. Over 70,000 buildings and 250,000 cars were damaged and more than 400
people were injured.
However, the world’s worst hailstorm occurred in the Gopalanj district of Bangladesh on 14 April
1986. Some of the hailstones weighed over two pounds and at least ninety-two people were killed. Publisher: moath - 4:00 AM

Where is the driest place on earth?

Antarctica. Parts of the continent have seen no rain for two million years.
A desert is technically defined as a place that receives less than 254 mm (10 inches) of rain a year.
The Sahara gets just 25 mm (1 inch) of rain a year.
Antarctica’s average annual rainfall is about the same, but 2 per cent of it, known as the Dry
Valleys, is free of ice and snow and it never rains there at all.
The next-driest place in the world is the Atacama Desert in Chile. In some areas, no rain has fallen
there for 400 years and its average annual rainfall is a tiny 0.1 mm (0.004 inches). Taken as a whole,
this makes it the world’s driest desert, 250 times as dry as the Sahara.
As well as the driest place on earth, Antarctica can also claim to be the wettest and the windiest.
Seventy per cent of the world’s fresh water is found there in the form of ice, and its wind speeds are
the fastest ever recorded.
The unique conditions in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are caused by so-called katabatic winds
(from the Greek word for ‘going down’). These occur when cold, dense air is pulled downhill simply
by the force of gravity. The winds can reach speeds of 320 kph (200 mph) evaporating all moisture –
water, ice and snow – in the process.
Though Antarctica is a desert, these completely dry parts of it are called, somewhat ironically,
oases. They are so similar to conditions on Mars that NASA used them to test the Viking mission.
STEPHEN The Dry Valleys, in Antarctica, are free from ice and snow, and haven’t seen
rain for two million years. So it’s a long way clear of its closest contender, the
Atacama, parts of which haven’t recorded rain for a mere 400 years. The Sahara is
lush by comparison.
ALAN Lush.
STEPHEN ‘Lush’ is often shouted at you, I know. I’m going to shout it again. Publisher: moath - 3:59 AM

How many nostrils have you got?

Four. Two you can see; two you can’t.

This discovery came from observing how fish breathe. Fish get their oxygen from water. Most of
them have two pairs of nostrils, a forward-facing set for letting water in and a pair of ‘exhaust pipes’ for letting it out again.

The question is, if humans evolved from fishes, where did the other pair of nostrils go?
The answer is that they migrated back inside the head to become internal nostrils called choannae
– Greek for ‘funnels’. These connect to the throat and are what allow us to breathe through our noses.

To do this they somehow had to work their way back through the teeth. This sounds unlikely but
scientists in China and Sweden have recently found a fish called Kenichthys campbelli – a 395-
million-year-old fossil – that shows this process at its half-way stage. The fish has two nostril-like
holes between its front teeth.

Kenichthys campbelli is a direct ancestor of land animals, able to breathe in both air and water.
One set of nostrils allowed it to lie in the shallows and eat while the other poked out of the water a
bit like a crocodile’s.

Similar gaps between the teeth can also be seen at an early stage of the human embryo. When they
fail to join up, the result is a cleft palate. So one ancient fish explains two ancient human mysteries.
The most recent research on noses, incidentally, shows that we use each of our two external
nostrils to detect different smells, breathing different amounts of air into each to create a kind of nasal stereo. Publisher: moath - 10:43 AM