41 Weird Animal Facts You’ll Find Hard To Digest

The male mice have a tendency to woo the female by directing their urine in the female’s direction. Their urine contains pheromones and if a pregnant female rat is exposed to the scent of an unfamiliar male, she will automatically abort her child if she has conceived one. This phenomenon is called 'The Bruce effect'.

27. Oxpeckers, the small birds you see in photos perching on antelopes and wildebeests (elephants shake them off usually), were once thought to be helping these animals by eating illness-causing ticks. It was later found that these birds open wounds wider and drink the blood of their hosts, so they're parasites themselves.

28. The Emerald Cockroach Wasp is a parasite. First, it stings its host, the cockroach in the thorax to paralyze it. Then, the second sting goes to the roach's brain to a precise spot to more permanently and thoroughly paralyze it. Then, the wasp leads the roach back to the wasp's burrow by tugging its antennae like a leash. The roach can't initiate walking on its own, because of the venom, but the actual neuromuscular circuitry that physically controls the legs is just fine, so a little tug from the wasp and the zombified cockroach follows its new master to its doom. There the wasp lays an egg in its abdomen, then its larva eats the organs in a specific way to keep the roach alive before it cocoons and leaves its body.

29. The green-eyed wasp turns ladybugs into zombie babysitters. Three weeks after a wasp lays its egg inside the hapless beetle, a wasp larva bursts from her belly and weaves itself into a cocoon between her legs. The ladybug doesn’t die but becomes paralyzed, involuntarily twitching her spotted red carapace to ward off predators until the adult wasp emerges a week later. Researchers have found that the wasp uses a virus to attacks the beetle’s brain.

30. While mating, hermaphroditic species of flatworms engage in penis fencing, battling violently to decide which of the two will be the father. The winner stabs his penis into the loser to inseminate it.

The Orange Clown Fish family consists of several males living with a female, which is the largest fish in the group. She harasses her female offsprings and denies them access to food to control their size to deter sexual competition. The largest male exclusively reproduces with the largest female until she dies. Then, the largest male develops female reproductive organs, turns into a female and the next largest male becomes the breeding male.

32. Koalas have a scent gland on their chest that they use to mark their territory by aggressively hugging trees. At the culmination of the violent tantrum which is koala coitus, the male leaves a seminal plug which blocks the female's multiple vaginas from being entered by the hemipenis of another koala. Female koalas are also infamous for engaging in lesbian sex. Females often overlook males and participate in sexual acts with other females, sometimes in orgies with up to 5 female koalas. Also, koalas are riddled with chlamydia.

33. Beaver’s teeth are orange because they are fortified with iron which makes them strong and cavity-resistant. Their teeth also continuously grow and self-sharpen, which is why they are always chewing on wood.

34. Honey bees initially have up to 21 virgin queen bees, who fight to the death until there is only one left. Then when male honeybees mate with the queen, their penises explode (which is audible to the human ear) and they die. During the queen's nuptial flight, she'll mate with about a dozen partners and leave a trail of dead, penisless bees in her wake.

35. Wombat poop is cube-shaped. Wombats produce 80-100 cubes per day, and carefully place them on rocks, logs, and in front of burrows to mark their territory. The unique shape prevents the droppings from rolling away.

Osedax worms a.k.a. zombie worms are deep sea worms that eat the bones of a whale fall, and the microscopic males live inside the females to save themselves the trouble of searching for a mate. One female zombie worm was found to have 111 males living inside her.

37. Berry Bugs (chiggers) don't burrow into your skin. They drill holes and inject their enzymatic saliva that liquefies your skin cells which they then feed on.

38. Silverfish have an elaborate mating ritual that involves three steps. In the first step the male and female silverfish stand head to head, facing each other, their wiggling antennae touching. During this time the two silverfish repeatedly retreat from each other and then return to their former position. Once this first stage is the over the male runs away and the female chases after. The third stage occurs when the female catches the male. Once the female has caught the male, the two silverfish stand head to tail, side by side, while the male vibrates his tail against the female. This mating ritual can last for up to 30 minutes.

39. A tiny fruit fly species named Drosophila bifurca produces gargantuan sperm cells that are 6 centimeters or 2.4 inches long. That’s 20 times longer than the fly itself, and a thousand times longer than the average human sperm.

40. Sea otters are known to drown baby seals and rape them. They also rape dead female otter corpses. Apparently, their mating ritual is to claw the female and often push the female's head into the water until they submit. Sometimes the females drown and the male just keeps going because he thinks the female is submitting. In fact, otters engage in necrophilia so much that it is beginning to impact their populations.

Slow loris tears are used in traditional Asian medicine. To obtain tears of these big-eyed lorises, skewers are inserted into the animal’s anuses and run through their bodies until they exit the mouth. The still-living animals are then roasted over a fire and the tears that stream from their eyes are collected.