45 interesting facts about your favourite animals

Turns out, humans aren’t the only animals that experience REM – the rapid eye movement of sleep during which we dream. Chickens have REM sleep, too, says ThePoultrySite.com. And more than that, they also experience something called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, in which one half of their brain stays awake while the other one rests.

While raccoons are renowned for getting into garbage bins and making a meal – and a mess – out of week-old garbage, find a little place of admiration in your heart for these masked scavengers – some of them have been witnessed dunking their food in water in an action that looks suspiciously like they’re giving it a preliminary wash.

Few people since the end of the Victorian era, when leeches were (misguidedly) used as a curative, have any fondness for these predatory worms. And it turns out, the distaste for them is well-founded. According to the American Museum of Natural History, leeches have “three separate jaws with 100 teeth each…[E]ach of the jaws and teeth makes a separate incision”… all the better to suck out your blood. Er, no thank you.

Honeybees living in a colony perform all sorts of tasks – cleaning and guarding the hive, feeding larvae, collecting pollen and flower nectar. In 2012, scientists at the University of Illinois reported their findings that bees have personalities that cause them to do well at the jobs they’re best suited to, with “thrill seekers” for example, excelling in scouting out new nest sites.

Faced with the seemingly impossible task of penetrating the hard shells of walnuts in order to gobble the sweetmeats inside, crows in Japan have learned to lay the nuts out in the middle of the road so that cars can run them over and crack them open. But perhaps most amazing of all, according to a PBS report: the crows are reading traffic lights in order to know when it’s safe to arrange the nuts, and when it’s safe to hop down and gobble them up.

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Source: RD.com