How much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.
If Britain had a favourite wild animal, it was probably not the fox, gallant but verminous, or the hare, magical but moonstruck, but the bright-eyed pointy-nosed hedgehog, suddenly appearing on lawns at dusk like the head of an old brush.
There are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, collectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals. Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth.
You cannot negotiate with nature.
Scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.
In 563 AD a tsunami devastated Geneva.
IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe" (the data created and copied every year) will reach 180 zettabytes (180 followed by 21 zeros) in 2025 (see chart). Pumping it all through a broadband internet connection would take over 450m year.
Many male mammals have a bone, known as a baculum, in their penises to add to stiffness. What is surprising is that many others — men included — do not. What causes a baculum to evolve is not clear.
The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is divided into five basins: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet's water placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid 132km tall.
Biology's biggest division is not between plants and animals, nor even between multicellular and single-celled creatures. It is between prokary- otes and eukaryotes.
A tiger's stripes are as unique as a human's fingerprints.
The dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the character of Hong Kong.
The new law that declares the Whang anui river, New Zealand's third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.
Intriguingly, though, Komodo dragons appear to be resistant to bites inflicted by other dragons.
Nature never decieves us.
If, in tens of thousands of years, a future Finn digs a 400-metre-deep well and draws water contaminated with 21st-century nuclear waste, it will be safe to drink.
An octopus's body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog's, but most of these reside in the cephalopod's arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of consciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.
A butterfly's wingbeat in one part of the world causes a hurricane in another.
The breast of the standard American turkey has become so enlarged by selective breeding that it can no longer mate because the male's breast gets in the way. Mr Singer describes how thousands of such sexually disabled male turkeys are masturbated by workers and the females artificially inseminated using the tube of an air compressor (at the rate of one every 12 seconds at one turkey farm).
He wouldn't know the difference between a bulldog and a billy goat.
Human neurons are distant relatives of tiny yeast cells, themselves descendants of even simpler microbes.
Why humans became naked apes is still a mystery.
"When elephants mate," says a South-East Asian diplomat, "we ants get trampled." "But when elephants fight," an Australian strategist retorts, "the ants get trampled even more."
Why is bird poo white?
A mammalian brain uses about 70% of its volume for moving information around, 20% for processing it and the remaining 10% to keep everything in the right place and supplied with nutrients. In doing all these things, a human brain consumes about 20 watts of power. That makes it roughly 10,000 times more efficient than the best silicon machines invented by those brains.
At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental challenge facing the world's big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early.
The UN's Environmental Programme also estimates that the harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in west Asia (the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent), making it a bigger killer than war. Things are so bad that even Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group, is preaching the virtues of solar panels.
Even the gentle triceratops sometimes used its horns to charge predators.
Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?
Over half of the 1,400 known human pathogens have their origins in animals such as pigs, bats, chickens and other birds.
Success is a delicate flower that can easily be killed.
Giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, required two or even four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are one of Buddhism's "seven treasures", along with gold and lapis lazuli. China's new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments.
What is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-show- winning computer program?
"When you open the window, both fresh air and flies come in," said Deng Xiaoping.
People shed bacteria — from their skin, mouths, noses and other orifices — at a rate of about 1m an hour.
There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of Onthophagus Sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours' underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?
Take leafcutter ants. They have four distinct castes, each with their own life tasks. They practise agriculture with a species of fungus that they have domesticated to the point that it can no longer survive without the ants' care. Their agricultural ways resemble an assembly line, with different ants doing different jobs. The ants have huge colonies with millions of citizens all cooperating. One found in Brazil covered 500 square feet and extended 26 feet below the surface.
If you poke a bear you had better show up with the right sort of stick.
In a competition to find the world's least-loved animal, the mosquito would be hard to beat.
The dinosaurs, as every schoolchild knows, died out 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. But there is an argument about whether they went with a bang or a whimper.
A Go board's size means that the number of games that can be played on it is enormous: a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10170. Analogies fail when trying to describe such a number. It is nearly a hundred of orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is somewhere in the region of 1080.