Bearded Dragons Video.

Black Widow Spider /Dave's Animal bites

Deadly and not so Deadly Scorpions

Tarantulas

Koala Bear young eat alot of crap!!!

Koala bears are not bears but are in fact marsupials they belong to the same family as a kangaroo and wallaby. They sleep about 16 hours a day and rarely drink except during a drought when the leaves they eat contain less liquid. They live on a low energy food of eucalyptus leafs which leaves them slow moving and lethargic in appearance.
A young koala bear is called a Joey. It spends its early life in its mothers pouch drinking her milk, after a period of six months it also begins to feed on a substance which comes from its mothers poo called pap.  The infant continues on this delicious diet of pap and milk till it is one year old.

Why Moths Fly Into Candle Flames.

If you ever sit outside on a summer’s night after a barbecue and watch the havoc around a light as moths and midges bash off the hot illumination and ask why they do that! Worse again, watch as a moth appears to commit suicide as it carriers into a burning candle flame and inflicts a painful and certain death upon itself.

There is an explanation for this and it has to do with the insect navigation.  The compound eyes of an insect contain lots of optical tubes radiating out from the centre of the eye. The insect uses the light from the sky as part of its navigation. Light hits specialised eye cones at an angle of 30 degrees and the insect uses this light to travel in a straight line. 

Our six legged friends have been around for millions of years and artificial light has only been around for around 50,000 years. When a moth sees an artificial light it throws its navigation out of sync causing it to fly around the flame in a spiral till the circle gets tighter and then in the case of a candle woof he goes up in flames!

We All Started Life Looking Like A Fish

Fact. If you look at an embryo of a fish, lizard, bird, horse or man you will notice how similar we all are to each other.  As the embryo develops, so do our differences and similarities.  A fish develops gills which it will use to breath.   For mammals our inner ear develops from the same components as the gill to make our ear including the canal, incus and staples.  Birds have similar three chambered ears as mammals where as reptiles use their lower jaw to hear.  As we develop and become mammals, fish become fish, birds became birds and reptiles became reptiles.We all have so much in common, a spine and four limbs and a head to name a few.

If you look at skeletons of birds you will find they have 5 fingers as part each of their two wings same goes for bats, horses have five fingers except they are formed differently and are elongated into a hoof, all mammals,  birds and reptiles have four limbs as do whales and dolphins.

Our heads are an enlarged vertebra which protects our brain; our fingernails are made of the same substance as fish and reptile scales. The same substance (keratin) makes feathers on birds’ horns on rhino and hair on our heads.

We share a lot of our genes with insects, worms, fleas, spiders and vegetables the only difference is that they are sequenced differently and when activated they build different traits.  In theory we could by turning on the right DNA sequence produce humans with wings and beaks, tusks or scales or humans with gills and webbed feet, long necks like giraffes and with the trunk of an elephant 

In 65 million years  little mouse like creatures (our ancestors) thrived due to the demise of dinosaurs  and were responsible  through  evolution for humans, whales, dogs, cats, apes and cows to name a few. 

360 million years ago mammals, including dinosaurs (reptiles) evolved from amphibians and migrated onto land as it was probably safer to lay its eggs on Terra Firma than in the water, if we go back millions and millions of years earlier again fish evolved from shrimp like creatures then shrimp like creatures from tiny plankton all the way back to little microbes and singular cell organisms.

So what does it all mean!  Not much to most of us, but thanks to human knowledge of our genetic past which is a history book of our existence contained in our own DNA, it can help us understand more about our bodies, help create new better medicine for the prevention of disease which  improves quality and length of life.

For me it just makes the natural world that bit more fascinating






For further reading, this book is great - Your Inner Fish by Neil Shuban http://tiktaalik.uchicago.edu/book.html