10 Secret Abilities of Well-Known Animals

As kids, we all learned about the world’s most famous animals from books, TV, video games, or the Rainforest Cafe and its incredibly biodiverse gift shop.

However, Big Animal is keeping certain secrets from you, and the animals you’ve known and loved since childhood harbor some weird and obscure secret abilities, features, and effects. Read on to discover the unexpected majesty, or wackiness, of the great creature kingdom.

Related: 10 Amazing Animals with Unique Environmental Adaptations

10 Chimpanzees Pee Together to Become Better Buds

Kyoto University did the world a solid by devoting a study to a criminally underrepresented issue: contagious urination.

Otherwise known as social urination, it’s prevalent in both the human and non-human kingdoms, as many species exhibit evidence of urination in groups, including us. To better study the evolutionary roots of such a phenomenon, researchers spent 604 hours watching chimpanzees pee. This lengthy period of “direct observation” yielded 1,328 “urination events.”

The findings? The closer a chimp was to a urinator, the higher the chances of joining the urinating. Similarly, lower-ranked chimps had higher rates of urination contagion and were more likely to join in.

The practice may have a long evolutionary history, possibly helping forge stronger bonds and synchronize group activities. Also, instead of saying you have to pee, you can sound much classier by saying you must perform a urination event.^[1]

9 Doggy Dream Cycles Vary Greatly

Dogs and humans both have cycles of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non-REM sleep. But dogs have more of these cycles per night, about 15 to 20, compared to just four or six for humans. The doggy dream cycle is also shorter. Though a big dog’s sleep cycle may last 90 minutes or so, like a human’s, smaller dogs have smaller cycles: a Chihuahua may dream every ten minutes, which makes for a spectacular motivational quote.

Until we invent the doggy-dream machine, we’ll never be sure of what our flocculent friends see in their sleep. Though scientists say it’s likely the same stuff we dream about, composed of fragments of everyday activities. Therefore, your buddy likely dreams about the important things in life you also dream about, like chasing one’s own tail, snarfing peanut butter, and spending quality together-time.^[2]

8 Owls Create Insanely Accurate Sound-Based Mind-Maps

Some owls have odd auricular (fun fact, this means related to ears) placements, with one ear above the other. This placement helps the sound-dependent owls measure the difference in timing and other aspects, like loudness, between the sounds entering each ear.

Specifically, the right ear is more sensitive to sounds coming from above, while the left ear is better at honing in on sounds originating from below. This is part of what allows impressive owl-y efficiency while hunting tiny, silent, or hidden prey.

Additionally, scientists used a “small remote control loudspeaker that could travel around the head of an owl” to discover that parts of the owl’s brain activate only when certain sounds come from certain places. This neat ability allows owls to create a multidimensional mind map of the space around them by basically “seeing” the world with their ears.^[3]

7 The Closest We Can Discern Dinosaur Intelligence: Emu Food Puzzle

As Australia learned in the first third of the 20th century, the emu is a pretty clever bird. The emu and its large, flightless kin are a living dinosaur lineage, yet also cute enough to be the subject of stuffed animals.

They also have a poor cognitive reputation, possibly because so much attention has been given to the thinkers of the bird kingdom—your crows and parrots. So to test emu intelligence, scientists built a rotating wheel that released snacks when it was lined up properly.

And it turns out the emus excelled at its operation, turning it the right way 90 percent of the time. Ostriches, not as much. Most intriguingly, any such studies that include these large, land-locked birds are the only modern way to shed light on dinosaur behavior.^[4]

6 Snakes Have Cool Colors We Can’t See

Animals rely on color for communication, scaring off predators, camouflage, or attracting mates. Unfortunately, we humans aren’t always privy to these chromatic strategies because our eyes can only detect a certain range of colors.

We can only appreciate a small portion of the color kingdom, yet animals like snakes use invisible (to us) ultraviolet light for various purposes. These UV colors are common across the “snake tree of life,” which would be the most terrifying thing if it were an actual tree.

Virally, the UV ability of some snakes probably protects them from birds. Lots of plants in the forest reflect UV, so arboreal snakes with a lot of invisible color would appear to blend in and avoid being swooped up or pecked by hungry birds. Surprisingly, unlike other animals, colors don’t seem to be a reproductive strategy in the serpent kingdom because both males and females brandish the same UV colors.^[5]

5 Ants “Talk” by Using Spikes on Their Bodies

Ants are incredibly complex creatures despite being so small. In addition to all their dynamic social abilities, it turns out that they can also “talk” through a form of acoustic communication.

It’s firmly established that ants use chemicals to communicate. They lay down scent markers called pheromones, which is why you see them queue up and follow little ant trails so neatly and accurately. Plus, they can smell what nest each other ant is from and even each other’s social status.

Less known, however, is their noise-based communication: adult ants and mature pupae (these are like angsty ant adolescents) have a spike on their abdomen. They rub this spike with their back leg to make a noise, which can be likened to an ant alarm for dangerous situations or a call for help. Want to hear it yourself? Just get really low and press your ear close to the next ant you see! Or, better yet, don’t.^[6]

4 Platypuses Have an Alien-Like Glow

The platypus is a grab bag of fun facts. It senses electricity with its bill, oozes milk from its body (no nipples needed here), secretes venom if it’s male, and is pluralized as “platypodes” in old Greek.

Here’s another pretty pertinent platypus power: they glow! Not too many years ago, scientists discovered that platypuses glow an otherworldly bluish-green when observed under ultraviolet light. The reason is unclear. In fact, there may be no reason at all. This fluorescence doesn’t have to serve a purpose, researchers say.

Some materials simply fluoresce because that’s their inherent property, and the platypus may be one of these materials. But if we’re throwing out hypotheses, one idea states that platypuses may absorb and transform UV light (instead of reflecting it) to better hide from the potential predators that can perceive this part of the light spectrum, which is invisible to our naked anthropoid eyes.^[7]

3 Tiny Toads (Hilariously) Suck at Jumping Because Their Ears Are Too Small

Pumpkin toadlets are miniature frogs no larger than an M&M. But their thumbnail-sized size isn’t even their cutest feature because these tiny toadlets are terrible at jumping—which you can see and laugh at (if you’re mean) in the source link.

They’re so small they live among the leaf litter of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, and they’re too diminutive to be athletic. One of their distinguishing features is how often yet poorly they jump: any little scare sends them leaping through the air, where they tumble and corkscrew before landing on whatever body part chances to be closest to the ground.

These poor saltatory skills are due to their ears being too small to allow them to balance. Because of all an animal’s body parts, including our own, it’s the inner ear that dictates balance by sloshing fluid over a bunch of microscopic hairs. These hairs send electrical impulses to the brain, indicating direction and body position. Yes, evolution is weird.^[8]

2 Dinosaurs May Have Been Surprisingly Colorful

One of the most underrepresented aspects of dinosaurs may be their colors. Based on other animals that didn’t get permanently deleted by an asteroid, it’s possible that dinosaurs rocked wild hues across their bodies.

The study suggests that the bright colors originated from carotenoids, which birds obtain through their diet. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because, nowadays, these compounds come from carrots. As well as corn, orange bell peppers, grapefruit, cantaloupe, and even non-orange-y things like kale, broccoli, and watermelon.

The problem? These pigments don’t preserve as well as browner, darker ones, so the evidence must come from living animals like birds. The research suggests that claws and feathers may have lacked color but gives a 50% chance that skin, beaks, and scales may have offered splashes of vibrancy. Resultantly, a dinosaur’s most chromatically brilliant parts could have been its face and feet, which may have “popped with color.”^[9]

1 Octopuses Have Human-Like Sleep with Weird Waking Dreams

Octopuses are basically an alien species with remarkable brains capable of what can be described as waking dreams.

Octopuses experience two-stage sleep like we humans do. For us, one stage is active sleep, or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which we dream all our wacky dreams. The other stage, slow-wave sleep, is deeper and allows our bodies and minds to relax and repair.

But octopuses are special with their two-stage sleep because other spineless animals only have a single-stage sleep. So, if octopuses independently evolved complex sleep, that may mean that this type of dreaming yet restful sleep could be an eventual and common adaptational feature of life in general.

Yet sleeping octopuses do something even weirder, giving off color patterns and brain activity similar to being awake. The jury is still out on the meaning of this activity, but researchers say it’s possible (and intriguing) that octopuses are reliving their day, possibly going through the process of escaping a predator or some other such daily act that stirs octopus-ian excitement.^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen