Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (19 page)

Rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. What are these?

In a play fight, elephants wrap their trunks around each other’s heads. In a real fight for dominance, elephants protect their trunks by curling them under their chins while they shove against each other face-to-face at tusk level. Although this battle may seem quite fierce and full of sound and fury, it rarely injures the fighters and almost never leads to a fatality…for the elephants. Humans should keep their distance, though. As the Kikuyu people of Kenya say, “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

Contrary to popular belief, cows don’t really have four stomachs—rather, they have a four-chambered stomach consisting of the
rumen, reticulum, omasum
, and
abomasum
. You’d need a four-chambered stomach, too, if you tried to digest roughly 100 pounds of grass every day. How do cows do it? They regurgitate and rechew the partly-digested grass—called
cud
—as it goes from section to section. The repeated
mastication
(chewing) breaks down more and more of the plants’ cell walls, releasing the vitamins and minerals within. Even so, chewing the cud isn’t a complete process…which is evident by the amount of undigested grass that gets stuck to the bottom of your boot when you step in a cow pie.

Rhode Island’s are red. Which state’s are blue? And what do they say: “Cluck,” “Tweet,” or “Coo”?

How many more sheep than people are there in New Zealand?

If you recognized Rhode Island Reds in the question, then you know they’re chickens. And if you know they’re chickens, you know they say “cluck.” But unless you’re a chicken-ologist, you’ve probably never heard of the Blue Hens of Delaware. The official state birds were once formidable cockfighters, but are now much more peaceful (because cockfighting has been outlawed).

Footnote:
Rhode Island Reds are among the most prolific egg layers in the chicken world, some of them producing upwards of 250 large brown eggs per year.

New Zealand has tens of millions of sheep—roughly 10 for every one person. Sheep are so important to the island nation’s economy that New Zealanders celebrate National Lamb Day every February 15. But with the proliferation of synthetic fibers, sheeps’ original economic function—to provide wool for the British textile industry—is no longer their primary use.

So what do the Kiwis do with all those sheep? Many raise them for food. Sheep parts are also used to make lanolin and tallow for candles. Their intestines can be made into sausage casings, sutures, condoms, and strings for tennis rackets and musical instruments. Our favorite: Sterilized sheep poop contains cellulose, making it useful as an ingredient in paper.

You just bought a pound of honeybees. How many bees do you have?

Female mosquitoes want your blood. Why?

It takes 3,000 to 4,000 bees to make a pound, depending on how plump they are when you buy them. Who buys bees by the pound? Beekeepers, of course. This recent small-business craze—called
apiculture—
is buzzing with opportunity.

Beginning beekeepers usually buy two to three pounds of bees for their home apiaries, consisting of several thousand workers and a queen. The queen lays the eggs; the workers gather nectar and pollen and tend to the larval bees—the brood. In a good summer, if all goes well within the walls of the comb, the hive’s population can grow to anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000. Beekeepers then harvest and sell the honey and wax, and if they’re
really
lucky, after all the other expenses (hive boxes, packaging, marketing, protective suits), they can maybe break even for the year. “There’s a lot of money in beekeeping,” goes an old saying, “If only you could figure out how to get that money back out!”

Both male and female mosquitoes feed on nectar, but in order to lay eggs, the female also requires iron-rich nutrients. The world’s best supply happens to be found in the blood of plump, juicy mammals. This relationship has worked out great for the bugs, but lousy for people. Due to the spread of blood-borne diseases, mosquitoes have been responsible for about half of all human deaths since the Stone Age.

What animal met its end in a museum?

Where did the dodo live and die?

The Great Auk, a three-foot-tall flightless bird similar to the penguin, once thrived on the rocky islands of the North Atlantic. Then the Europeans arrived. They hunted the easy prey for food and fish bait, but mostly for its soft down, which became highly prized.

By the late 1700s, it had become obvious that the Great Auk was going extinct, prompting some of history’s first environmental protection laws, but it was too late. All across Europe, museum curators said, “We must procure a stuffed Great Auk for our collection before they’re all gone!” Result: a Great Auk killing spree. On July 3, 1844, in Eldey, Iceland, a museum collector killed the last known pair of Great Auks.

The dodo, a three-foot-tall flightless bird similar to a large pigeon, once thrived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa. The birds had been living on the island for thousands of years. So safe was their habitat that—over time—they lost the ability to fly. Then the Europeans arrived. When the Dutch began using Mauritius as a stop-over on their trade routes in the 1600s, their ships brought dogs, cats, rats, and humans. The flightless birds were no match for the Dutch and their beastly companions. By 1681, barely 65 years after it first encountered “civilization,” the dodo was completely extinct.

How long can a headless cockroach live?