Animal facts, education & inspiration
Fascinating facts about some of the world’s most amazing animals. From Aardvarks to Zebras our A-Z of the animal world is guaranteed to inspire. If your favourite animal’s not yet included, please let us know. Check out the Top 3 most loved animals! »
Aardvarks are tough mammals that live throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. They can eat 50,000 ants a night and are brilliantly adapted to digging with their spade-shaped feet. As prey animals, Aardvarks are food for many species. This makes them a vital part of the ecosystem. Their old burrows provide homes for other animals such as African Wild Dogs.
The Adélie Penguin lives along the coastline and the small islands of the Antarctic continent. It breeds in rocky, ice-free coastal areas. When the sea freezes in the winter, they travel north and forage in the open ocean. Warming of the air and ocean is causing a decline in the West Antarctic Peninsula colonies.
African bush elephants, also known as Savanna elephants, are one of the largest mammals alive! They live on grass, fruit and roots. They spend most of their day eating, as they need to eat a large amount to get the calories they need. They strip leaves and branches off trees using their powerful trunk, and they use their tusks for digging and for scraping bark.
Meet Africa’s most successful hunter! By working together, African wild dogs can take on prey much larger than themselves, and their success rate is 80% – that’s far more than lions, who kill successfully 30% of the time! What they hunt depends on pack size – larger packs can take on bigger prey, such as wildebeest or zebra, while smaller packs hunt antelope.
Female alligators construct nests of vegetation and mud and can lay over 50 eggs in a single season. The sex of a newborn alligator depends on temperature. Incubation temperatures of 30°C or below will produce females, whereas 34°C or above will produce males. Alligators are amongst the most attentive parents in the reptile world, remaining with their young for up to three years.
Amazon river dolphins are a strong part of Amazon folklore. Some say that if a person drowns, their spirit enters the body of a boto, while others say river dolphins transform into beautiful people at night to lure humans into their river forever. The magical shape-shifters will always wear a white hat to hide their dolphin blowhole!
The American Pika lives in isolated rocky areas at up to 3,000 metres in elevation and is well-adapted to cold alpine climates. Biologists fear that these hearty creatures may not survive global warming; unlike many wildlife species that are shifting their ranges north or to higher altitudes in response to changing climate, pikas have nowhere else to go.
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