About: We assume that we know a lot about animals: birds, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, etc. Are you certain? This is to clear some cobwebs of myths about them and learn many a lesson; maybe apply animal instincts in our lives. Call it Part-I: I have more coming. Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with Dragonflies, Wolves, Sloths and Sharks – in that order![Image Credit: Canva AI]

WOLVES

The ‘two wolves’ story is a popular parable about the battle between positive and negative minds within a person. The classic version is: an old man tells his grandson, a fight is going on inside me-and inside every person. It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is dark-evil: anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is light-good: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The grandson asks which wolf wins. The old man replies, “the one you feed.”

That’s the story of wolves that we have been fed, but actually wolves are in a league of their own and we can learn a lot from them. Let’s hunt them down.

A Wolf is generally a monogamous animal spending its entire life dedicated to a single partner. It does not mate with its mother or its sister; it does not cheat. If its partner dies, the wolf often remains alone for the rest of its life-though some, ‘out of necessity’, do find another partner. They are opportunistic carnivores, eating dead animals-scavenging-only out of necessity, but mainly feeding on hoofed herbivores such as moose, elk, and deer. They prey occasionally on domestic livestock and pets-a conflict with some people, that has earned wolves a bad reputation. They generally keep away from humans and rarely eat dead humans. And it’s a myth that wolves do not eat dead animals – they eat carrion if they have to, for survival.

Wolves recognize their young, and is perhaps the best example of an animal that cares for aging parents who can no longer keep up with hunting. Younger adults bring food for them and often regurgitates meat for the older or injured ones in the pack. Other animals that look after the elderly are Elephants and Chimpanzees, working as a cooperative community.

Wolf pups are born blind, deaf, and with blue eyes that typically change to yellow-amber as they mature. They share about 99.8% of their DNA with domestic dogs. Wolves have an extraordinary sense of smell-about 100 times better than humans. They can detect prey or other animals from over a mile away, under clear conditions. Their hearing is also highly acute, capable of picking up faint sounds over long distances.

Wild wolf packs function more like nuclear families than rigid-dominance-hierarchies. The so-called, ‘Alphas’ are typically just the breeding parents, and the rest of the pack consists of their offspring from recent years. Younger wolves usually disperse to form their own packs rather than fight for leadership. The breeding pair mates for life and stays very close-within about 100 meters of each other, much of the time. That’s unmatched intimacy, all through. Howling is a sophisticated long-distance communication. And not directed at the moon, as is made out to be! Individual howls can help pack members identify one another, and the sound can carry 6–10 miles or more, depending on conditions. It serves to locate pack-mates, reinforce bonds, and advertise territory.

A hungry adult wolf can consume up to about 9 kg of meat in a single feeding and can survive without food for a few weeks, or longer. Wolves can manipulate objects in ways that may qualify as simple tool use, such as pulling on ropes and buoys attached to crab traps to access bait.

Wolves remind me of Lee Falk’s famous comic-strip about the masked vigilante crime-fighter, Phantom (the Ghost who walks)- My favourite childhood hero. Devil is the loyal Gray Mountain Wolf companion of the Phantom. The 21st Phantom found him as a cub-under his dead mother’s body after hunters killed her-and raised him. Devil’s father was a feared wolf named Satan(rightfully). He chose to stay with the Phantom rather than lead a wolf pack, becoming his constant, highly intelligent, and fiercely protective partner who has saves his life many a time. Devil travels with the Phantom on all his adventures and is one of his most reliable allies alongside Phantom’s horse, Hero.

Then there are the Direwolves – an enormous and intelligent species of canine, genuine Ice-Age animals, made famous in modern culture by the popular Television Series, ‘Game of Thrones’, but they have been extinct for over 10,000 years. Recently, in April 2025, using gene-editing and ancient DNA, Scientists produced (not ‘brought-back’) three Direwolf pups naming them Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi. They genetically modified Gray Wolves to resemble the traits of Direwolves- that’s the closest they could get to ‘bringing back’ Direwolves.

BULLS

Bulls, and cattle in general, are partially colour-blind, specifically to red. They had what we call dichromatic vision. They have only two types of colour-detecting cone cells in their retinas which is blue and yellow (unlike humans who typically, have three – red, green, and blue). Their cones are mainly sensitive to shorter wavelengths of blue/violet. They lack the long-wavelength cones needed to perceive red distinctly. To a bull, red appears as a muted shade of gray, yellowish-gray, or dull brown-similar to how a person with red-green colour blindness might see it. Bulls can distinguish blues and yellows reasonably well, but do not see red as a vivid colour.

The red cloth used in bullfights is mainly for the human spectators rather than to provoke the animal. Then, what actually makes the Bull to charge? The bull reacts to movement, not colour. The matador’s waving, flapping cape creates a moving target that the bull perceives as a threat or challenge. Fighting bulls are selectively bred for aggression and will charge almost any rapidly moving object in the arena.

We have been cheated all along, in the movies, showing a bull unleashed on a beautiful red-saree wearing woman – wish I could tell her!

Dogs too have dichromatic vision with only two types of colour – blue and yellow- seeing cone cells in their eyes, similar to Bulls.

ELEPHANTS

Elephants, the largest living land animals, are packed with ‘tons of features’. They have the largest brain of any living land mammal: 3 to 4 timers the size of the human brain. They are highly intelligent, passing the self-awareness-mirror test with flying colours. They have empathy and can grieve over a loss; can use tools, have social learning, long-term memory, including recognizing individuals and locations after years, and complex problem-solving skills.

Elephants have massive molar-teeth that are ridged for grinding tough vegetation. They use a horizontal-conveyor-belt-tooth replacement technique: new molars emerge at the back of the jaw and move forward as worn ones fall out at the front. They replenish about six sets, over a lifetime.

Columnar, pillar-like legs support enormous weight with relatively little muscular effort. Feet have a unique fibrous fatty pad-with a shock-absorbing kind of heel-under the toes. This enables nearly silent walking and helps detect seismic vibrations from the ground. That means Elephants can tip-toe effortlessly and sneak-up behind you.

Elephants (the African ones) have the largest ears of any animal: a dense network of blood vessels allows heat dissipation when the ears are flapped-acting like radiators. Elephants also use mud-bathing, dusting, and specialized skin ‘thermal windows’ for cooling given that they have limited sweat glands.

Elephants live in highly complex, matriarchal family groups with multi-tiered social networks; strong lifelong bonds and cooperative care of calves. Remember, an Elephant remembers!

OTHERS

Polar Bears aren’t truly white: they only appear white. Their fur consists of hollow, transparent hairs that scatter light making it appear white, while their skin is actually jet black, to absorb heat. Polar bear cubs are born with pink skin that turns black as they grow. Polar bears spend more time on ice than land. They have a clever way of hunting a herd of walruses: causing a stampede resulting in the young and the old left behind, for them to coolly walk-over for the kill.

Horned lizards, often called horned toads, are small, spiny reptiles that have flattened, rounded bodies, short tails, and prominent horn-like spines on their heads and backs that provide camouflage and defense. Horned Lizards can squirt foul-tasting blood from their eyes, up to several feet, as a defense mechanism. The blood can confuse or irritate predators. Another means of defence is, they can swallow air to puff up to twice their normal size making them look like a sharp, un-swallowable shiny balloon. They harvest rain water through microscopic skin channels and flatten their toad-like bodies for desert camouflage. They can eat up to 100 harvester ants per day and possess tolerance to ant venom.

Star-Nosed Moles-a small semi-aquatic mammal- have one of the fastest foraging systems. Their nose has 22 fleshy appendages/tentacles that can identify and decide on prey in a fraction of a second-faster than a human blink. Its touch system is about 100 times more sensitive than human fingertips. The tentacles radiating from its snout, like a star, make them unique and one of the most weird looking animals in the world. They have a rare capability of ‘smelling underwater’ by blowing air bubbles onto objects and re-inhaling them to track scents.

Sloths are sloth is almost every sense. They are special because of their ‘odd’ upside-down lifestyle, ultra-slow metabolism and their fur that acts as home(sweet home) for green algae and moths -a living, breathing microcosm. Their multi-chambered stomach works like a slow cooker; it can take up to a month to digest a single meal!

They are incredibly fussy about personal hygiene and climb down from their trees to poop about once a week. While pooping upside down seems so easy, they make a slow arduous journey from the tree they hang, to the bottom of the same tree in order to defecate or urinate on the forest floor.

They are surprisingly good swimmers and can hold their breath for up to 40 minutes by slowing their heart rate. They spend most of their lives in ‘suspended animation’, hanging motionless or slowly moving between tree branches using their long, curved claws. Everything about them happens in the trees (except the pooping part).

Fish

Octopuses are the closest to aliens, on Earth and are fascinating creatures. They have three hearts: two of them pump blood to the gills, and third to the body; and a systemic heart, which stops when they swim. Their blood is blue, being copper-based, compared to the red, iron-based of humans. They have a lot of brain: effectively nine brains -a central one plus a mini-brain in each arm that can act somewhat independently. They can also change colour or texture in milliseconds and squeeze through any opening as long as it is larger than its beak. Yes, they have a hard, sharp parrot-like beak hidden in the centre of their tentacles on the underside of their body. You did not know this, did you?

Pistol Shrimp, a tiny crustacean, also called the ‘snapping shrimp’ is among the loudest animals. Its claw snap creates a cavitation bubble that collapses (speeds reaching 100 km per hour) with a sonic boom up to about 230dB and generates temperatures (4,000 degrees centigrade) nearly as hot as the surface of the sun for a split second-enough to stun or kill prey. Despite being only about 2 inches long, it is the most formidable and loudest creature in the Ocean.

Then there is this Immortal Jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle and potentially avoid death from aging. When stressed or aging, it transforms back into an early stage-polyp- and potentially restarts, theoretically allowing indefinite regeneration, However, it can still die from injury or disease. It retracts its tentacles, reabsorbs its body, sinks, and forms an unstructured cyst-a blob of tissue. Through transdifferentiation, specialized adult cells transform into different cell types needed for the polyp stage. Within roughly 1–3 days, a new polyp colony develops, which can later bud new, genetically identical Jellyfish. This process can theoretically repeat indefinitely, making the species biologically immortal.

SHARKS

The Shark is a kind of encyclopaedia. Shark ancestors date back about 450 million years: before trees, Dinosaurs, Saturn’s rings, or the North Star as we know it. They survived all five of Planet Earth’s major mass extinctions and they have been around, perhaps the longest. Their basic body plan has proven highly successful and adaptable, carrying them along this far.

They have six senses, and they can, sort of sense electricity in the atmosphere. They can smell blood from miles away. The five senses of, Smell, Hearing, Sight, Taste, Touch, and the Sixth of Electroreception -tiny jelly-filled pores on their snouts, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, detect faint electrical fields from muscle movements, heartbeats, and the Earth’s magnetic field.

Sharks do not have bones. Instead, they have a cartilaginous skeleton, which is lightweight and flexible, made of cartilage-the same tissue as in human ears and nose tips. This reduces weight, improves manoeuvrability, and allows more body mass for muscle.

Their skin is covered in dermal denticles (skin teeth)-tiny, tooth-like scales that provide armour, and feel like sandpaper; the scales point towards the tail, reducing drag for efficient swimming (inspiring designs for boats and aircraft).

Sharks are capable of endless tooth replacement they have multiple rows of teeth that act like a conveyor belt-new ones move forward as old ones are lost or worn. A single shark may go through tens of thousands of teeth in its lifetime. Some have fluoride-rich enamel that resists cavities. No need for a Dentist Shark!

In many species, the upper jaw can move independently and protrude, enabling powerful bites or suction feeding. They lack a swim bladder and instead rely on a large, oil-filled liver for controlling buoyancy.

Sharks use internal fertilization for breeding. Some species practice intrauterine cannibalism, where the strongest embryos eat their siblings. Certain females can reproduce by asexual cloning in captivity. Some live-bearing species even have temporary ‘belly buttons’ from an umbilical cord.

Sharks play vital ecological roles as apex predators that help maintain healthy ocean ecosystems. Most are not aggressive toward humans; unprovoked bites are extremely rare.

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster movie – Jaws-, based on Peter Benchley’s Novel portrayed a great white shark as a deliberate, relentless man-eater terrorizing a beach town. This created or greatly amplified the ‘Jaws effect’—widespread irrational fear of sharks as mindless killers. And gave the Sharks an awfully bad reputation. Both Spielberg and Benchley later expressed regret over the real-world harm. Benchley became an advocate of conservation.

Over recent decades, attitudes have shifted toward greater respect, interest in coexistence, and conservation efforts, though negative stereotypes and media sensationalism persist.

Birds

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards, hover, and fly sideways in flight. Their wings beat extremely fast, and they can enter a state of torpor at night that drastically slows down metabolism.

Woodpeckers can endure extreme forces without brain damage. Pecking generates G-forces far higher than what would injure humans, yet specialized skull features, a tongue that acts partly like a safety belt, and other adaptations protect them-even with thousands of pecks per day.

Most male birds lack a penis. About 97% transfer sperm via a brief ‘cloacal kiss’ – with some exceptions. The cloaca is a single, multi-use opening for waste, urine, and reproduction. During mating season, the cloacal tissues swell and move close to the surface. The male balances on the female’s back.They touch their openings together to pass sperm.The entire contact takes just a fraction of a second. And we wondered all the time about how birds mated!

Lyrebirds are extraordinary mimics-they can copy other birds, machinery, human sounds, and more, sometimes for hours during the mating season.

INSECTS

These days, Cockroaches are in the limelight and have become extremely popular, especially in India. Some People call themselves cockroaches and are trying to steal their super powers. They even named a kind of Political Party after them. Big Brother is watching!

Cockroaches stand out for their extreme resilience, generalist adaptations, ancient evolutionary success, and a suite of biological traits that let them thrive in diverse, often harsh, environments-qualities that have earned them a reputation as ultimate survivors. Most of the about 4,500 to 7,000 species are not household pests; and only about 30 species commonly live with humans; the rest occupy forests, caves, deserts, mountains, and other wild habitats, often playing ecological roles as scavengers and recyclers.

Cockroach-like insects, called ‘roachoid’ existed for roughly 315–320 million years, while the lineage leading to modern cockroaches dates back about 140–235 million years.

Their rapid escape response is legendary: sensory cerci (appendages) at the rear detect minute air-current changes, triggering a sprint in just a few milliseconds. Relative to size, they rank among the fastest invertebrates, reaching speeds of up to about 50 body lengths per second. Cockroaches can survive for days, sometimes longer, without a head. Their open circulatory system and ability to breathe through spiracles allow this; they eventually die of thirst. Hard to digest?

A quick round-up of what other insects are capable of.

Houseflies taste with their feet, which are roughly 10 million times more sensitive to sugar than a human tongue. Caterpillars have around 4,000 muscles enabling precise, coordinated movement. Some Aphids(Green Fly) – a small sap-sucking insect- are born already pregnant (‘telescoping generations’), allowing extremely rapid population growth. Ants often ‘farm’ aphids for their sugary honeydew, protecting them and even restricting their movement or wings. A fruit fly species produces the longest sperm relative to body size-nearly 6 cm long, about 20 times the fly’s length. Termite Queens can lay tens of thousands of eggs per day (over 40,000 in some species) and may live for decades. Mayflies as adults often live only about a day (or less in some cases), existing primarily to reproduce. Certain Beetles are extraordinarily strong relative to size. The Hercules Beetle can lift hundreds of times its own weight-estimated about 850x in some cases.

DRAGONFLIES

Be warned, you may have never known about this.

The humble Dragonfly is one of the most remarkable insects in the natural world, operating with an evolutionary design that has remained effective for over 300 million years. The ancestors of the dragonflies of today, thrived in a period of biological plenty. They were the original sentinels of a greening planet, a reminder that Earth’s history is one of vibrant, booming life. Dragonflies 3 times the size of today’s lived for 47 million years from about 298 million to 251 million years ago. One of their ancestors even had a wingspan of up to 28 inches! Don’t take them lightly.

The Dragonfly is more than an insect, it is the world’s apex predator in miniature.

Hard to believe, but the Dragonfly remains the most efficient killer in history, with a hunting success rate of over 95%. It does not merely chase prey, it intercepts it. Using a biological ‘on-board computer’ and four independent wings, it calculates trajectories and executes omnidirectional manoeuvres in real-time.

Just one dragonfly can consume over 100 mosquitos in a day; they can fly backwards; they have nearly 360 degree vision. Their wings made of an ultra-thin, flexible sheet of pure translucent chitin (a long-chain polymer-second most abundant in nature only behind cellulose) are unmatched engineering, combining a fingerprint-like geometric vein pattern, a corrugated structural profile, and direct muscle connection that allows all four wings to move completely independently. And their wings inhibit bacterial growth due to their natural structure.

Long before the first bird took flight or the first Dinosaur walked the Earth, the Dragonfly had perfected the physics of the hunt. It is perhaps the ultimate success story of life. While we debate our future using computer simulations, this ancient masterpiece harmlessly zooms over us. When we see them darting through the ghostly yellow light of a moonlit evening, we are not looking at a fragile relic. We’re looking at a champion of endurance. Give it a flying-kiss!

The dragonfly belongs to an ancient kingdom that tells us the Earth is not falling apart. It’s a resilient, self-correcting orchestration of beauty and power. They are actually beautiful. We should keep them around to take them with us to the next Planet we hope to inhabit -Mars? Provided they do not learn to eat us, and increase their body-weight and wingspan!