Strange But True: 10 Unusual Animal Behaviors That Will Amaze You

Don’t leave your drinks unattended, and hold on to them tightly since vervet monkeys have been reported to steal booze from bar customers. Apparently, these monkeys share several traits with humans, including a liking for alcohol, making them a fascinating research subject. This led to scientists developing a treatment that decreased drinking by 50% in alcoholic vervet monkeys, potentially offering a future solution for individuals struggling with alcoholism.

Ants often have their own versions of farm animals, however, in the form of aphids (greenflies or blackflies). However, no one is kept hostage; the relationship between ants and aphids is symbiotic. Aphids are kept on hand to provide honeydew substance for the colonies to feed on. In exchange, the farmer ants protect aphids from predators.

Like humans, honey bees may also “over” indulge and become drunken when given an occasion. Bees can get a “buzz” from fermented tree sap like humans do from alcohol. According to studies done on bees, alcohol consumption affects bees similarly to how it affects people: They move considerably more slowly, and as their intoxication increases, they become less mobile and environmentally aware.

“How sharks communicate who is in charge. They basically swim parallel and square up to each other to see who got bigger gains.”

The horned lizard takes the expression “blood in your eye” to a whole new level, so if you’ve ever been so enraged you saw red, back up. A horned lizard’s final means of defense against a threat is to shoot blood out of its eye sockets. As a result, the predator often becomes terrified and runs away. And honestly, who wouldn’t?

Since army ants are blind(!), they use chemical (pheromone) trails to navigate their environment. If the trail they follow gets looped in a circle, army ants will all continue to follow the looped trail until they die from exhaustion. This phenomenon is called an ant mill or “death spiral.”

If you’re a white-throated snapping turtle, you could think that every breath you take and every move you make is… a little odd. This is because this kind of turtle is well-recognized for being able to breathe through its rear end. The word “cloacal respiration,” which describes the turtles’ ability to absorb air through tissues on their backsides, conveys that more elegantly.

There are relatively few animals outside humans that appear to mourn in a humanesque manner. Elephants have highly close-knit social groups, so when one of them passes away, the entire group experiences grief. Elephants grieve their deceased in a highly ritualistic way. It has been seen that they lay their trunks over the body, cover the body with leaves and branches, or stand nearby as if on guard.

With so many limbs, it makes sense that octopuses make excellent pitchers. Using pieces of underwater debris, they may even attack other octopuses directly. Though they don’t literally throw with their arms like people do, in 2022, for the first time, researchers have seen cephalopods purposefully throw clumps of sand, fragments of algae, and even shells at one another.