Attenborough's Ark Trivia Quiz

Answer: Brazil

New World monkeys are found in South America, Central America, and southern Mexico. The black lion tamarin, also called the golden-rumped lion tamarin, lives only in the Brazilian state of Sao Paolo. It is an example of a lazarus species - thought to be extinct, it was rediscovered in 1970.

Its current population is believed to be under 1,000. Living usually in groups of five to ten, they feed on fruits and tree sap, as well as the spiders and insects which they find by foraging on the ground, in tree cavities, and under loose bits of bark. Small as it is (an adult can be expected to weight around 600g, or 21 oz), the black lion tamarin is the largest member of its genus.

Answer: Indonesia and Malaysia

Once found as far west as the mountains of India and Bhutan, and across the rainforests and cloud forests of southeast Asia (including the Sichuan region of China), Sumatran rhinos are now found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, and on the Malaysian peninsula. Being solitary animals, like most rhinos, they are scattered throughout the regions they inhabit, so it is hard to get an accurate population count, but it may be as low as 200. Sadly, it is not habitat loss which poses the greatest threat to the Sumatran rhino, it is poaching.

Their horns fetch thousands of dollars per kilogram on the black market, for use in preparing traditional Chinese medicines for the treatment of fevers and convulsions. The three extant subspecies actually have fairly small horns (the nasal horn may be up to 25 cm (10 in) long, and the posterior horn is often little more than a stub), so it takes a lot of rhinos to supply the market demand.

Answer: venomous saliva

Venom is much more commonly found in reptiles and fish than in mammals. Other venomous mammals include vampire bats, some moles and shrews, and the male platypus. Both the Cuban solenodon and the Haitian solenodon have grooves in their second lower incisors through which the venom produced in mandibular salivary glands is delivered. The venom is strong enough to kill a mouse, but their diet consists mainly of insects and earthworms.

Solenodons, as peak predators, did not have highly-developed defenses, and quickly fell prey to the mongooses introduced by European colonists to keep rats and snakes under control. Dogs and cats also found them easy targets. Due to their small size (an adult is about 30 cm (12 in) long, including its elongated snout) and reclusive behaviour, they were at one time thought to have been hunted to extinction, but there are still isolated colonies of both species to be found.

Answer: Cave salamander

The olm lives in the underground water found in mountain caves and the karst region of central and southern Europe, and is adapted to a life of complete darkness. This includes regressed eyes (compensated for by acute senses of smell and hearing) and very little skin pigmentation. There is a subspecies, the black proteus, endemic to a small area in Slovenia, which has dark brown skin and nearly-normal eyes. They are thought to have moved to an underground existence more recently than other members of the species.

Because the olm spends its life entirely in the water, adults retain external gills as their primary means of obtaining oxygen, unlike most amphibians. Their limbs are very small - at first glance, an olm looks quite snake-like - and have fewer toes than is the case for most amphibians. Since it lives underwater, the olm is quite vulnerable to pollution of the water table, including runoff of agricultural pesticides, leaching from industrial waste deposits, and accidental chemical spills.

Answer: courtship display to attract females

The long tail feathers, up to four times the bird's body length, are seen only in males. In courtship, the male hovers in front of his chosen female and waves them furiously, but briefly - the energy required means that a few seconds of display may need up to an hour for recovery.

The female is a quite attractive small green and gold bird, without the brilliant blue crest, turquoise throat and black-striped white belly of the male. They are found only on the edges of forests along the Rio Utcubamba in Peru.

In 2006, a conservation zone was designated for them, and several thousand of their favourite trees and bushes were planted to help support them.

Answer: in the male's vocal sac

These frogs were first mentioned in European records by Charles Darwin, who spotted them during his voyage on the HMS Beagle (1831-1836), but they were first thoroughly described by the French zoologists Andre Marie Constant Dumeril and Gabriel Bibronin in 1841. The female lays eggs in the leaf litter on the forest floor, where the male guards them until they are about to hatch, at which time he swallows them, storing them in his capacious vocal sac (which extends most of the length of his body, as can be seen in the diagram accompanying the question). They stay there until metamorphosis occurs, when they jump out and start an independent life. Darwin's frog is one of the best-known species of mouth-breeding animals, most of which are fish.

There were two species of Australian frogs for which the juveniles were incubated in their mother's stomach. Both species were declared extinct in the 1980s, but projects are underway to recreate them using cloning techniques and preserved DNA samples.

Answer: scales

If you can get close enough, you will see that there is some hair mixed with the keratin scales, but it is the scales which set this genus apart from most other mammals, for which keratin is found only in nails and claws. Pangolins are hunted for meat, but also for their scales, which are supposed to have medicinal powers when made into appropriate amulets. Pangolin skin is also made into leather for high-fashion shoes. The Royal Armouries in Leeds (UK) has an armored coat on display made of pangolin scales decorated in gold - not a bad idea, considering that the pangolin uses its scales as an effective defense against predators by rolling up into a scale-covered ball.

As you might guess from its elongated snout, the pangolin eats ants and termites, using its powerful foreclaws to dig up their nests. Like a number of other ant-eating species, they have no teeth, just a long sticky tongue which they use to collect their chosen food. They can be up to 65 cm (2 ft) long, well over a metre (3 ft) if you include the tail, and weigh up to 10 kg (22 lb). The picture used for this question is actually an example of M. pentadactyla, a similar but slightly larger species of pangolin.

Answer: Australia and neighbouring islands

The adult only lives for around ten days, but what glorious days! Also known as the common birdwing, the Cape York birdwing, and the northern birdwing, Ornithoptera priamus is abundant in the northeastern parts of Australia, as well as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and an assortment of Pacific islands. Males have brilliant iridescent green and black wings (although some subspecies feature electric blue coloration) with a wing span up to 20cm (8 in). Females are larger, but not nearly as colourful, having wings in shades of brown. Around a hundred subspecies have been identified, based primarily on where they are found, but these classifications are fairly fluid, and not all taxonomists agree on them.

While the species as a whole is not endangered, some subspecies found only on a single island are very much in danger of extinction.

Answer: carnivorous marsupial mammal

These cute marsupials are (at their largest) about the size of a domestic cat, with a diet that is composed almost exclusively of invertebrates (beetles, spiders, grasshoppers) and small vertebrates (bandicoots, brush-tail possums, skinks, frogs). They occasionally eat bird eggs and fruit, and love to rummage through human garbage. Unfortunately, the spread of cane toads into their territory has had a serious impact on the population - when eaten, cane toads release a toxin which is lethal to the quoll. Feral cats and foxes also pose a threat to their continued survival.

Quolls have an unusual reproductive pattern for marsupials. At around one year old, females usually produce their first litter of around seven youngsters, primarily male, about half of whom will survive until weaning. Her second litter, a year later, will have fewer offspring, most of whom will be female. Few females live long enough to have a third litter, but they still have a longer life expectancy than males, most of whom die after their first breeding season!

Answer: shrimp

Found in the Pacific Ocean near Japan, the Philippines and some other islands, Venus's flower basket (also known as glass sponges because of the translucent silica spicules which form the cup-shaped body of the sponge) are used as a shelter by shrimps. A male and female pair inhabit one of the cups, keeping it clean and feeding off the waste products released by the sponge. When the shrimp breed, the offspring head off to find their own basket. In some Asian cultures, a dried Venus's flower basket was a traditional wedding gift, symbolising the partnership being established.

Scientists are more interested in their capacity to produce glass fibres from seawater - if they can work out how it is done, it promises a new technique for manufacturing optical fibres more cheaply and efficiently than is now possible.