An Animal Miscellany Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sperm whale

Sperm whales have been recorded at depths of over 4,000 feet (1,200 metres), but their more common range is between 2,000 and 3,200 feet (600 - 1,000 metres). They can sustain this depth for around 45 minutes. They are the largest of the toothed whales and their huge heads comprise around a third of their body length. Among their favourite foods are squid, sharks and any other deep water fish.

Answer: Honey bee

It's the honeybee which dies if it stings a human. Its sting has barbs which make it difficult to pull away from the victim it has stung. It can survive stinging some creatures but any animal with a thick skin, like mammals, will mean that the sting cannot be withdrawn from the victim and flying away causes fatal injury to the bee.

Honey bees are essential to pollination, and the honey they produce has been used as a source of food for thousands of years. Honey is mentioned several times in the Bible.

The photo shows a collection of hives used by beekeepers to collect surplus honey for sale from the bees who live in the hives.

Answer: Roe deer

Although all these deer can be seen in the wild in the UK, the roe and red are the only two species which are indigenous. The fallow deer has been around for a long time, though, and is believed to have been brought to the British Isles by the Normans in the eleventh century. The Sika and Muntjac, along with the Chinese water deer, date from the late nineteenth century or thereabouts.

The roe deer is classed as medium sized with the male known as a buck, the female a doe and the young as kids, not fawns. Only males have antlers, which are three pointed - the antlers can be covered in nodes called 'pearls'. In summer the coat has a reddish hue with a more subdued greyish brown in the winter.

Answer: Charles Darwin

Darwin seemed fond of long titles as the book is called 'The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits', apparently just referred to as 'Worms' which is less informative but snappier.

Darwin found a way of studying how worms can literally move the earth by creating a 'worm stone' and watching it slowly submerge into the ground as the worms went about their business. Gardeners have always considered worms to be their best friend as they aerate the soil and create natural fertilisers. His book was a best seller, confounding those who laughed at the idea of studying such lowly creatures.

Answer: Vietnam

In the 1990s owning a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig seemed to be the height of fashion with George Clooney among the famous people who adopted one. Those cute piglets grow up, though, and the fashion died down, although many pigs are still kept as pets.

The Vietnamese pot-bellied pig is always black with stumpy legs and its stomach, which is best described as low hanging, giving it its name. It has a long tradition in Vietnam, but has been replaced by breeds which mature more quickly, thus being more profitable for farmers. From numbering in their millions, numbers are now at critical levels meaning the pig is classed as an endangered species.

Answer: Quetzal

The quetzal, specifically the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno), is the species that is associated with Guatemala. As you can see from the photo, the bird has green plumage, which has an iridescent shine, with red feathers on the lower part of its breast and with black inner wings. This describes the male - the female is much more subdued in its colouring.

Other varieties have more red feathers, but the green colouring is universal. In Mayan times, quetzal tail feathers were used as currency and the name was adopted in 1925 for the Guatemalan currency.

Answer: Alexandra

The butterfly was discovered by Albert Meek, a British naturalist who was employed by Walter Rothschild (of the banking family) to explore and report of the wildlife of Papua New Guinea in the early twentieth century. It was Rothschild who named it Queen Alexandra's birdwing in honour of Alexandra of Denmark, the wife of the UK's King Edward VII.

The female butterfly has a wingspan of around 10 - 11 inches (25 - 28 cm), with males being smaller. The colouring varies, with the one in the photo being a male. Females have more rounded wings which are brown with white colouring. The species is found only in the eastern parts of Papua New Guinea and is protected by law.

Answer: Western Australia

Looking like a cross between a beaver, otter and duck the platypus is found only in the eastern parts of Australia, which includes Tasmania. Not only does it have a strange appearance, it is a mammal that lays eggs - known as a monotreme. The only other creature in the family is the echidna, which is rather more widespread, land based, and also found in New Guinea.

The platypus is often referred to as the duckbilled platypus, for reasons which the photo makes obvious. It is active mainly at night, foraging at the bottom of streams for invertebrates. Daytime is spent in burrows created in the banks of the waterways they frequent and this is where the mother hatches her eggs. Even in the wild the platypus can live as long as twenty years and even longer in captivity.

Answer: Chinchilla

While all the options are rodents kept as pets, the tail should have helped you choose the right option. Hamsters mostly have minimal tails while those of the most common gerbils are hairless, as are those of rats.

The chinchilla is native to South America, with the only wild population in the early twenty-first century being found in the Chilean Andes. They were used for many years, beginning in the 1500s, for fur - as they are small creatures this meant that large numbers were needed. Hunting is now illegal, but poaching means that the wild chinchilla is under extreme threat of extinction.

As pets, they are popular and entertaining - the one in the photo appears to be plotting its escape.

Answer: Borneo

Colobopsis schmitzi, to give it its scientific name, is also called the swimming ant and the pitcher plant ant with all the common names deriving from their habit of diving into the pitcher plant - like the one in the photograph. Since pitcher plants have digestive juices which are designed to consume insects, this behaviour seems madness but the ants have found a quick trip into the juice means they can survive and pick up bits of food from the bottom of the pool. Most of their time is spent under the rim of the plant with the diving made only to obtain food.

These ants are a species of carpenter ant and are found only in Borneo.