Category Kids Queries

Because it couldn’t fly over it. No matter how hard they flap their wings, chickens can hope for little more than a short glide and a soft landing. They aren’t really “flightless birds,” a group that includes ostriches, emus, and cassowaries. The breastbones of these birds can’t support the powerful muscles required to pump wings and achieve liftoff. (Penguins, meanwhile, are a different type of flightless birds built for underwater “flight.”) Flightless birds lost their ability to fly through evolution, but chickens became flightless over time through selective breeding, which made them too heavy for liftoff. After all, farmers hardly want their prized poultry soaring north for the winter. The chicken’s ancestor – the red jungle fowl, which is still around today – has retained the ability to fly.

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These tree-climbing natives of the South and Central American rain forests live their lives like they’re on permanent vacation, creeping so slowly that some sloths actually grow moss on their backs. (Although they always look sleepy, sloths doze for only a reasonable 9.6 hours a day, according to a 2008 study.) Their diet – which consists of leaves, flowers, and bits of fruit – is to blame for their slow-motion lifestyle. After all, imagine how sluggish you’d be if all you ate were salad greens, and you had to climb to every room in your house.

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Jamaican Olympic Athlete Usain Bolt is the fastest human. This aptly named sprinter has reached speeds above 23 miles an hour (37 kph). Bolt has the unique muscular build shared by most of the very best sprinters. All human muscles are made of a mix of slow- and fast-twitch fibers—as well as some that are undifferentiated, and will become slow- or fast-twitch depending on how we use them most often. Slow-twitch fibers are built for efficiency and use oxygen to generate energy from sugar. They’re most effective for activities sustained over a long period of time, like distance running. Fast-twitch muscle fibers are used to generate huge amounts of force, but they don’t use oxygen and as a result can’t carry us far. Training can help shape undifferentiated fibers into either slow- or fast-twitch, but for the most part the best runners were born with an imbalance of one or the other. Elite marathoners have way more slow-twitch fibers, and sprinters like Bolt have an abundance of fast-twitch ones.

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Hummingbird is the fastest animal based on body size. A dive-bombing hummingbird is speedier (relatively speaking) than the space shuttle on reentry. Scientists have declared these birds the world’s fastest animals relative to their size. Hummingbird dives at nearly twice the speed relative to its body size than the peregrine falcon, which flies at a maximum velocity of about 200 body lengths per second. The hummingbird is also faster than the swallow, which dives from high-altitude migratory flights at a speed of about 350 body lengths per second.  It also eats small insects to supplement its diet. Males are adorned with a brilliant red crown and their rounded tails have white tips on the outer feathers.

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Peregrine Falcon is the fastest animal overall. This master raptor achieves speeds over 240 miles an hour (386 kph) when it dives, making it the fastest creature on Earth. Peregrines are light in weight, aerodynamically shaped, and have robust respiratory systems; all of which allows them to be the fastest birds of prey, and animals in general. Peregrine falcon numbers took a massive hit during much of the 20th century in North America. The chemical made the falcon’s—and many other birds — eggshells thinner, preventing the embryos from developing, in addition to poisoning adult falcons.

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Marlin is the fastest fish. This shimmering spot fish can zoom to 80 miles an hour (129 kph) when trying to escape the hook of a fishing line. Black marlins are highly prized; hence they are fished for commercial reasons. The black marlin feeds on other smaller fish. Its main diet consists of cephalopods and various fishes. Black marlin is considered a recreational fish. Sports fishers use this fish species for gaming purposes. For example, off the coast of Australia, the black marlin is mostly caught when there is moonlight. This kind of fish resides mostly in warmer regions of the ocean waters such as the Gulf of California, and mostly along the coasts rather than in the deep seas.

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