Category Ask the Psychologist

Because they have something important to say, and they want every animal within five miles (8 km) – the range of a lion’s roar – to get the message. The sole social members of the feline family, lions roar to communicate with the rest of their pack (called a pride). A male lion on patrol will roar to let the females (called lionesses) know that the pride’s territory is free from rogue lions (or lions without a pride), or he might roar to tell other lions to keep their distance. Although not as loud as lions, lionesses roar to call their cubs home or shout for help in the hunt. Tigers, which are solitary animals like all other cats, unleash their roars to convey a simpler message. Keep out of my territory.

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Bats aren’t strong enough to take off from the ground like birds. By hanging upside down, they can drop right into the air and start flying. High-up tree branches and other roosting spots also give bats a place to hide from predators during a day. Unlike your hands (which require muscle power to hold a tight grip), bats’ feet close automatically on branches the instant they start hanging upside down.

By hanging out where few animals would think to look — and most can’t reach anyway — bats can enjoy a safe snooze. You might think bats would have competition from birds and other flying creatures, but the places where bats roost are not typically areas where it would be possible for birds to build a nest.

Bats have developed a special adaptation that makes sleeping upside-down as easy and effortless as sleeping in a bed is for humans. If you clench your fist around a baseball, your body uses muscles and tendons in your fingers, arms, wrists and hand. As the muscles in your arms contract, they pull on tendons, closing your fingers around the ball.

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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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