10 popular animal “facts” that are plain wrong (Part 2 of 2)

Welcome to the second part of the posts about misconceptions / false "funfacts" about the animal kingdom. In this post we will look at the last 5 misconceptions, so if you want all ten, click here to check out the first part.

Lemming does not jump off cliffs

Media has often portrayed the mass suicide of lemmings, where they jump off cliffs to their certain death. This has then been explained by telling us that they always keep moving in a straight line, even if there are obstacles, which lead them to jumping off cliffs.

You probably guessed it already, but this is absolutely not true. The do not jump off cliffs, and they do not always move in a set direction. Their behavior is a lot like most other rodents, but they are a lot more aggressive. Most lemmings are not afraid to attack your shoe or your skis if you get too close to them.

An image of a lemming in an agressive position. Image by Frode Inge Helland, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

There might still be some hold to the myth. When there are large amounts of lemmings, they can be seen to cross big rivers, and this activity has a high mortality. Observing this behavior might lead people to believe that they are witnessing a mass suicide, but the lemmings are certainly not trying to die, they just end up downing because of the current.

The aerodynamics of the bumblebee is not theoretically preventing them from flight

Another common misconception or “funfact” about animals is that bumblebees should be incapable of flight. The myth claim that these insects break the laws of aerodynamics, due to their size and the wing beats per second.

Funnily enough my girlfriend told me this “funfact” once, but it is absolutely not true. It has indeed been speculated that they are indeed breaking the laws of aerodynamics, and some calculations even circulate the internet, but these are wrong. What these calculations usually lack is the inclusion of the dynamic stall effect and the viscosity of the wings of small insects. So they might theoretically be incapable of flight if you calculate it only by taking the wing size into account, but once you include the specialization these insects have evolved, they are not breaking the laws of aerodynamics anymore.

I’m not all that familiar with aerodynamics within the insects, so you can read the “Misconception about flight” on Wikipedia to get a better understanding of the misconception.

Image attributions: © Friedrich Haag / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.

You don’t really eat spiders in your sleep

There are lots of myths surrounding the amount of spiders you eat in your sleep. The myths range from a few to 8 spider swallowed yearly, but luckily you are not likely to swallow any spiders in your sleep.

You probably want to facts to prove this, but let us start out with some logical arguments. Firstly, most beds do not offer any prey for the spiders, so they are not interested in crawling onto your bed in the first place. Spiders are generally not interested in humans, so they have no reason to even climb into the bed in the first place. The exception is if you have bed bugs, so make sure to change those sheets often!

When we are asleep, we obviously keep breathing, and human breathing is used as a warning signals for spiders, and they will stay away from it. Crawling directly into the mouth that produces the warning signal is not going to happen for a spider that wants to live.

If you have your mouth open while you sleep, you are likely to be snoring. This creates vibrations that acts as another warning signal for the spider. In addition to this, the mouth is usually a humid place, while spiders prefer to stay in as dry places as possible, so it does not make sense for them to go into a mouth.

Even if a spider ignores all these warning signals, and crawl onto your bed, even though there is no prey there, most people would wake up if they had an insect that crawled on their face. If it had managed to get into your mouth, you would definitely wake up from the tickling feeling.

It is of course possible that a spider might end up to be swallowed by a sleeping person, but it is not even close to the amount of times the myth suggest. If anything, it might happen once or a few times in a person’s entire life. Source from Scientific American.

You can safely touch a baby bird

When I was young, my parents told me not to touch any baby birds, because their mother would abandon them if they had human smell on them. Yes, this is also a myth!

Except for a few bird species, most of the birds have pretty terribly smell senses, and would likely not even be able to detect the smell of a human on their young.

Asides from this fact, abandoning a young bird because it has been touched would not make any sense at all. After spending so much energy to produce the egg, keep it warm and keep the chick alive, it just does not make sense to abandon it simply because it has been touched by another species.

It won't be abondoned by being touch, but you should still leave it along. Image by Areefi, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

There are however some birds that will abandon the whole nest if it is disturbed by humans or other predators. This is probably a self-defense mechanism where they are afraid to get killed if they return to the nest. They calculate that they would rather survive and be able to reproduce next season, instead of trying to save their offspring, which would potentially end in disaster for the parent bird. For this reason it is not wise to disturb their nest at all, but whether or not you touch the chick will not really affect the outcome. Source.

Camels does not have water in their humps

All camels (genus Camelus) have humps on their backs. They can either have one or two humps, but these are not for storing water in. This myth is based on old studies, and at one point it was believed that the camels store water in their humps, but this has been shown to be incorrect.

What they actually do store in their humps are body fat. This is because they usually live in hot climate, and storing the body fats all over their body would be extremely hot. Therefore they evolved an adaptation where they keep their fat reserves in the humps, which is useful when you spend so much time in the extremely hot deserts. That way the rest of their body can be cooled down by breezes, and they don't have to worry about any insulation that the fat provides.

So where do they get their water from? Even though the don’t have water directly in their hump, the fat there is actually used as a water storage. They metabolize the fat, and get the water from this chemical process. However, this adaptation would not require the fat to be stored in the hump, and could be done with any fat cells in the body. Along with this, they have several other adaptation that allows them to withstand long periods of time without a water supply, such as having different blood cells than most other mammals.

A look at a Bactrian camel(Camelus bactrianus), with two humps. Image by EmmanuelFAIVRE, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

About the author

Hi, I’m @valth! I live in Norway with my pregnant girlfriend and our two dogs, one of which is seen wearing a bow tie in the profile picture!

I am very passionate about nature and biology, and have been studying ecology for a few years now. My passions are mostly within conservation biology, mycology (the studies of mushrooms), animal behavior and general microbiology. I really enjoy both the theoretical aspect, as well as the more practical aspect of biology, and I spend about as much time in front of biology textbooks as I do spend on finding and identifying plant, mushroom and animal species in the forests.

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