Cool School Buses

Some people argue that a vegetarian diet can’t support a large life-form. They obviously haven’t met the blue whale (Balenoptera musculus), a massive creature that survives on plankton.

Plankton consists of phytoplankton, bacterioplankton AND zooplankton: (from Greek zoon, or animal), small protozoans or metazoans (e.g. crustaceans and other animals) that feed on other plankton and telonemia. Some of the eggs and larvae of larger animals, such as fish, crustaceans, and annelids, are included here.

So, the Blue Whale is most definitely not a vegetarian!

plankton includes animals as well, so it's not a vegetarian diet.

sloths can swim pretty fast.

Thank you, Retrokatze, I was just about to say the same thing (more or less).

Hehe, so was I :)

same here :D

Rhinos are not the thickest...you should see some of the people I work with. :lol:

150 tons for a bluewhale - that is a lot of olankton to eat :-)

This article is filled with inaccuracies. period. check your facts.

Sloths move so slowly on land that they only come down from the trees to poop once every (I think) 3 days (it may be longer, but it's definitely not shorter). They can't just poop in the trees because predators would smell it and kill them 'cuz they'd still be in the same tree. So they climb down to the ground, dig a hole, poop in the hole, and BURY the poop.

BURY!

They poop in a hole and cover it with dirt because they're too lazy to have evolved the ability to move quickly on land.

The male platypus is one of only two known venomous mammals.

Actually while not common there are several venomous mammals including the Eurasian water shrew, Southern Short-tailed Shrew, Northern Short-tailed Shrew, Cuban Solenodon, and Haitian Solenodon. And of course the platypus.

Also there is the sort of venomous Slow Loris. These mammals have poison glands on their elbows which they suck on to get poison in their mouths subsequently delivering a poison bite.

I agree w/algonkin ;)))

Blue whales eat krill not plankton which are animals so the moral is to get big and strong you have to butcher and eat mass quantities of meat!!

Viva la beef

Would also be interesting to discover which animals have the highest IQs

Mitheral beat me to it. There are more than two. In addition to the Loris and the species of shrew mentioned, solenodons are also venomous.

Could the "author" of the article please respond regarding the inaccuracies pointed out in the comments? I'm not criticizing - just curious and confused.

Re blue whales,

The major reason why blues and other whales can get so big has nothing to do with their diet. It is that water supports their weight, so their skeleton doesn't have to.

The weight of an animal goes up with its volume, which is measured in meters cubed, while the strength of its bones goes up (roughly speaking) with its cross section, which is measured in meters squared. As an animal gets bigger and bigger, the bones required to support its weight must get bigger, faster, until eventually the animal reaches a practical size limit, where as much of it is bone as possible (and it is virtually a stationary tower.) (And that, by the way, is why you cannot have an ant the size of a skyscraper, 50's horror movies aside. If you just scaled up the ant, the weight would go up faster than its structural strength. A skyscraper ant would collapse on its belly, immobile.)

But with whales and other creatures whose weight is supported by water, the limit is set by availability of food, and that is a very high limit. I imagine even larger animals than blue whales could evolve, eventually.

Incidentally, that is also why bigger dirigibles are more cost-effective than small ones. You can double the fabric in a dirigible, and get much more than double the lifting power.