Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (18 page)

What species, native to the mountains of Borneo, commonly dines on insects and tree shrew poo, but occasionally kills frogs, lizards, birds, and rats?

I have wings but do not fly. The fastest horse, I could run right by. Despite the legend, I hold my head high. What am I?

Nepenthes rajah
. It’s not an animal—it’s the world’s largest carnivorous plant, and one of the only ones that traps small mammals, birds, and reptiles. Known as a “pitcher plant,”
N. rajah
has a foot-long purple leaf rising up over the top of an urn-shaped bowl that holds about a gallon of water mixed with digestive juices. (It looks like an open mouth.) Although
N. rajah
can trap small vertebrates, its primary prey is insects, which are attracted to its trap by sweet nectar on the underside of the leaf. The larger animals that drown in the bowl are just collateral damage.

Why, then, is this pitcher plant’s pitcher so large? Because it’s the perfect size for a tree shrew—a rodentlike primate—to stand on the rim and eat nectar from the leaf, with its backside over the top of the bowl. Then the tree shrew defecates into the bowl. It’s win-win: The tree shrew gets a tasty meal, and the nitrogen contained in its feces fertilizes the pitcher plant.

An ostrich. The average ostrich can maintain a speed of up to 50 mph, making it the fastest bird on land. (By comparison, the fastest racehorse was clocked at 43 mph.) And the story about the ostrich “hiding” by burying its head in the sand is a myth. However, they have been known to lie flat on the ground to avoid detection by predators…before resorting to their awesome speed.
Meep-meep!
(Oops, wrong bird.)

Dolbear’s Law—expressed in the equation TF = 50 + (N – 40)/4—allows us to use which animal to tell us what?

Why are there no wild cows?

Dolbear’s Law allows us to use the snowy tree cricket to tell the temperature to within 1°F. Found in much of the U.S., these crickets are known as “nature’s thermometers.” After noticing that crickets chirp faster when it’s warmer, American inventer Amos Dolbear first published the equation in 1897 (after he lost a telephone patent battle against Alexander Graham Bell).

Here’s how the formula works: TF is temperature (in Fahrenheit); N is the number of chirps per minute. Count the number of chirps in a minute, subtract 40, divide that number by 4, and add 50, and you’ve got the temperature. (There’s also a shortcut, which will give you an approximation: Just count how many times the cricket chirps in 15 seconds, and add 40.) You can do this with other crickets, but each requires its own formula. For example, for the common field cricket, less accurate but easier to locate, add 38 to the number of chirps per 15 seconds.

We’re not talking about feral cows that wander away from ranches, but actual
wild
cows. They did once exist. The animal, called an
aurochs
, was domesticated 8,000 years ago and continued to roam European grasslands until just a few centuries ago. Although the research is ongoing, scientists believe the aurochs was the precursor to the modern cow, though the wild aurochs was much larger than its domestic counterpart. In 1627 a poacher on a hunting preserve near Warsaw, Poland, killed the last known wild aurochs (and had steak for dinner).

According to ancient Greek legend, the goddess Aphrodite created it. The Romans used it as a symbol for secrecy (a Roman phrase for “confidentiality” is named for it). Ancient Persians spread its oils around the world. It was found in King Tut’s tomb. Early Christians called it the “blood of the martyrs.” During the Dark Ages, monks kept it alive for medicinal use. The English fought for it, and Josephine adored it. What is it?

The rose, and it’s much older than Aphrodite. Paleobotanists have traced its origins to central Asia about 60 to 70 million years ago; the rose remained in the Northern Hemisphere until humans arrived and spread it to south of the equator.

Since the dawn of civilization, people and roses have had a profound connection—for medicinal and ornamental purposes alike. In fact, one of the symbols of decadence that led to the fall of the Roman Empire: Rose gardens began to outnumber food gardens. Some Roman dining rooms even had rose vines spreading across the ceiling. What was said at dinner was supposed to remain there, which led to the Latin phrase for “secrecy”—
sub rosa
, or “under the rose.”

In 15th-century England, the House of York adopted a white rose; the House of Lancaster, a red rose. When Henry VII finally won the War of the Roses—and with it the English throne—he bred the red and the white flowers together to create the Tudor Rose, the official Rose of England.

But it was Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, and her “Rose Renaissance” that brought the rose into the modern age. She wanted to grow every kind of rose in the world in her gardens. To that end, Napoleon ordered his captains to bring back roses from their conquests. By the end of her life, Josephine had successfully cultivated 250 varieties of the flower. So beloved were her gardens that they sparked a fad of growing ornamental roses throughout Europe and in the New World—a fad that persists to this day.

How many frogs live in the ocean?

What’s the difference between a pig and a hog?

No frogs
live
in the ocean—at least not for very long. Frogs are
water-permeable
, which means they can drink water through their skin. So if a frog jumped into saltwater, it would quickly become dehydrated and die. However, there is one frog that can tolerate saltwater for short periods of time: the crab-eating frog of southeast Asia. Because the mangrove swamps it lives in can contain brackish water, the crab-eating frog has adapted by increasing its ability to produce and retain
urea
(a chemical compound found in urine), allowing it to absorb moisture back from its own pee so it doesn’t rapidly dehydrate as other frogs would, even when it’s briefly exposed to saltwater.

It’s all in the poundage. In the United States, any fully grown swine weighing less than 180 pounds is generally called a pig. Any swine heavier than that is called a hog. (This isn’t a global rule: All British swine are simply “pigs.”)

The U.S. has other specialized names for swine. Newborns are called
piglets
until they’re weaned. After that, the animal is called a
shoat
or a
weaner
. A half-grown pig can be a
gilt
(female), a
boar
(uncastrated male), or a
barrow
(castrated male). Adult females are
sows
, uncastrated males are still called
boars
, and castrated males are
stags
. After death, most farm swine get a new name—either
sausage, chops, ham
, or
bacon
.

How can you tell if two horses are really fighting or just elephanting around? Oops…we got that backwards. Second try: How can you tell if two elephants are really fighting or just horsing around?