At the top of the risk list from mosquitoes is malaria. Even after decades of battling against the mosquito carrier, an amazing 40% of the world's population, mostly those living in the world's poorest countries, is still at risk of malaria. The disease causes more than 300 million acute illnesses each year and over a million deaths annually, mainly children under five.

The flea when jumping accelerates 50 times faster than a space shuttle. Without its outer shell it would get smashed by the velocity of the jump.

Trails leading away from an ant nest always fork at a 60-degree angle, similar to a capital Y. On their way out to pick up food, they take either the left or right branch (30 degrees off their current heading). On their return home, ants need only stay as straight as possible to find their nest.

Honey is effectively regurgitated nectar that has been partially digested by a honeybee. Mmmmm...

More than 20 million plastic pink flamingos have been sold since 1957. Flamingos are pink because of the beta-carotene in the shrimp they eat.

Turns out a gland near their beaks filters the saltwater -- once the gland gets full, a penguin will knock his beak on a rock to empty the salt out.

The record for a human being is 5.15 seconds (set by Canadian Ben Johnson in 1988).

Insects make up more than half of all living things on Earth, comprising over one million species. For every human, there are 200 million insects. This figure does not include non-insect arthropods, such as spiders and scorpions.

The earth's surface area is 197,000,000 square miles.

Multiply those and you get 1,280,500,000,000,000,000 (1 quintrillion or 1 billion billion) insects. That's a lot of bugs.

If you bite a snake and it makes you sick, it's poisonous. If a snake bites you and it makes you sick, it's venomous. Hence, rattlesnakes and cobras aren't poisonous, they're venomous.

The 13-foot Burmese python was found with the gator's hindquarters protruding from its midsection. Pythons are not native to the Everglades -- rather, they have been introduced via pet owners who abandoned their pythons.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with toxic dart harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several of these dolphins are thought to have been let loose inadvertently.

The mosquito's probiscis is very sharp and thin, so it's often not even felt. After sucking in about 5 microliters (5 x 10^-6 liters), the mosquito flies off. Unfortunately, some saliva remains in the wound causing swelling and itching.

The nearly 9-foot-long Mekong giant catfish was landed May 1 by villagers in Chiang Khong, a remote district in northern Thailand, and weighed by Thai fisheries department officials, said Zeb Hogan, who leads an international project to locate and study the world's largest freshwater fish species.

Most dolphins have a brain roughly equal in weight to an average human brain. It is estimated that they have the intelligence of a two-year old human.

Eventually they grow to about 20 pounds (9,000 grams) by eating mostly eucalyptus leaves (approx. 500 grams/day as adults).

The cardiac stomach, which is a sacklike stomach located at the center of the body, may be everted - pushed out of the organism's body and used to engulf and digest food. Some species take advantage of the great endurance of their water vascular systems to open the shells of mollusks (clams, mussels, etc.), and inject their stomachs into the shells. Once the stomach is inserted inside the shell it digests the mollusk in place!

Anyway, it turns out they're not just in Napoleon Dynamite! There's a real liger in Russia!

Tiny ultra-sensitive ears can detect the movement of prey within a quarter of a mile!

Hypersensitive nostrils can detects a single drop of blood in the water up to 50 yards away. The jaws of a great white can exert 42,600 pounds per square inch of pressure - 24 times the power of a jackhammer.

Great whites have 50 triangle-shaped teeth at any given time. The narrow bottom ones grab and hold prey while the top row cuts the flesh. As front teeth are broken or lost, they are replaced by the new ones from multiple rows of reserves.

Using a modified version of sign language, Koko has a vocabulary of over 1,000 words, in addition to understanding spoken English!

Dr. Penny Patterson has been teaching her for 23 years and there are some great videos of her signing, painting, etc.

Crocodile Hunter is scared of parrots, because they always bite him and have "nearly torn his nose off", while he says he's been "catching crocodiles since I was nine".

Check out Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey and his first commercial.

And then there is always the skateboarding dog. Animals rock.

It's not because some grow tails and some don't. Most breeds got their start in docking of tails to avoid a tax that was charged on "luxury" dogs - aka pets. Since working dogs weren't taxed and typically had their tails docked, breeders began docking tails to avoid paying the tax.

It helps them digest their food better.

Spike your bird food with some cayenne and it will deter the squirrels.