The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (13 page)

Rats multiply so quickly that in eighteen months, two rats could have over a million descendants.

THE RAT TALES

Deserved or not, rats have always received bad press. One reason the Egyptians had a cat goddess was because her feline children ate the rodents that ate Egyptian grain. We remember Dick Whittington and his cat, because the cat saved London from an invasion of rats—rats carrying the Black Death—in the Middle Ages.

There is only one known rat goddess. The Malekulans, who live on the island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have a goddess named Le-Hev-Hev, whose name
translates as “she who smiles so we can draw near and she can eat us.” They offered her boars so she wouldn't eat human corpses.

The best rat story concerns the Pied Piper, that magical fellow who lived in early thirteenth-century Germany and had a magic flute whose tune attracted rats. He traveled about the countryside offering to drive the rats out of towns and into a cave under a mountain for a fee. When he visited Hamelin, the good burghers hired him, and he whistled the rats away. But the burghers neglected to pay him. So the Pied Piper changed his tune and led the town's children under the mountain with his whistle.

WHEN RATS TAKE OVER

During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church decided that cats were agents of the devil and ordered the extermination of all felines. For two hundred years, there were cat burnings and other forms of cat murder. If you tried to protect your puss, you could be burned at the stake as a witch. Consequently, the population of cats in Europe was decimated, which had an effect the church hadn't considered—the rat population, now unchecked, exploded. And so did the Black Plague, which was spread by fleas on rats. By the time the church saw
the error of its ways and reversed its order, decreeing that good Christians must treat cats kindly, 75 percent of the population of Europe had died in the Plague. Cats' revenge, perhaps?

A WHALE OF A TIME

Female blue whales give birth to calves every two to three years. Pregnancy lasts for about one year. A newborn calf is about 23 feet (7 m) long and weighs 5,000 to 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg). A nursing mother produces over 50 gallons (200 liters) of milk a day. The milk contains 35 to 50 percent fat and allows the calf to gain weight at a rate of up to 10 pounds an hour—or over 250 pounds (44 kg) a day! At six months the calf is weaned, and at that point its average length is about 52 feet (16 m). The blue whale reaches sexual maturity in ten years.

WOMAN'S BEST FRIEND

A woman in California who ran a successful coffee business had her canine companion constantly at her side. One afternoon while taking a much needed break, her dear doggie began to sniff and lick at her breast area. That night, her dog repeated the odd behavior
by tugging at the blankets and biting at her pajama shirt. The next day, the canine jumped into her lap and dove at her breasts, which caused some pain. She was stunned to discover that she had a lump in her breast, and later medical tests revealed it to be a cancerous tumor. She had had a routine breast exam just three months earlier, but the odd behavior of her dog saved her life. If the tumor had developed more extensively, it could have spread into her lymph nodes. After months of chemotherapy and radiation, she is now living cancer free.

FIBONACCI FLOWERS

Plants with spiral patterns related to the golden angle (an angle related to the golden ration or “divine proportion”) consistently display another fascinating mathematical property: the seeds of the flower head form interlocking spirals going both clockwise and counterclockwise. These numbers of seeds are almost always
two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Fibonacci numbers form a sequence in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on).