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At work today for some reason I wound up talking about poisons and the advantages of certain poisons as opposed to others - After all, if you are prepared to murder someone you might not want to inflict a quick and painless death.

One such example of a poison easily to hand I used as an example was nicotine. A cigar contains more than enough nicotine to kill a person if it were to be injected into them rather than smoked (where most of it is just burnt off rather than inhaled), obviously part of the issue is distilling it into a “useful” form. Once distilled though it’s quite handy. It can be absorbed through the skin so it could potentially be used as a contact poison.

So that’s another way cigarettes can kill.

Unlike the blue poison dart frog, who can be slightly poisonous but not enough to prove fatal - Most poison dart frogs aren’t actually that poisonous and ones kept as pets even less so. Poison dart frogs don’t make their own poison they get it from their food and so in captivity they don’t get the right foods to allow them to become poisonous, so the one pictured above from the Horniman Museum is perfectly harmless.

Even in the wild where they are toxic the idea behind it is to just leave a foul taste in the mouth of anything that tries to eat it rather than kill anything that tries to eat it. Out of over 170 species of poison dart frog only a few have actually been documented as used for poisoning darts.

Although I would like to ask if the artist has any basis for the claim, or if he is just claim is based on a logical progression based on the starting point of elephants never forgetting?

Now the title of this post may incur the wrath of the incorrect apostrophe use brigade, as I don’t know if I should have used an apostrophe or not. I suspect that  shouldn’t, but it didn’t look right without it.

About the picture itself it’s a fruit bat, or more specifically an example of a Pteropus Medius which was formally a resident of India before becoming an exhibit in the Horniman Museum in London. So bat fans, as I only have a picture of 5/8’s of a fruit bat here are 8 facts and only five of them are true. Can you guess which ones?

1. The “English” name of the pteropus medius is the wurbagool.
2. Fruit bats can’t land gracefully, and instead must crash into bushes or trees to come to a stop, or try to latch onto a branch as they pass by.
3. Fruit bats use echolocation to navigate.
4. Fruit bats don’t just eat fruit, they also eat flowers.
5. There are only 500 Livingstone Fruit Bats left in the world and Bristol Zoo are helping with the conservation efforts by capitively breeding them.
6. Fruit bats are the largest bat family, in terms of physical size (not number of species).
7. All members of the fruit bat family are considered endangered.
8. On average, Pteropus Vampyrus is the largest species. It’s wingspan of just under 6 feet (or approx 1.7 metres in new money).

Scroll down for the answers…

1. True.
2. True.
3. False, fruitbats do not use echolocation and actually have rather good eyesight.
4. True.
5. False, there are actually 1000 of them left. Bristol Zoo is involved with a programme to save them though.
6. True.
7. False. In 1989, 7 species of fruit bat were put on the CITES endangered list, the rest merely made it onto the threatened list.
8. True and it weighs about 1.5 kg (2.4lb).

… I would have screamed when this ran past my hand earlier.

Luckily I am not scared of spiders, I just dislike them (despite the useful role they provide in pest control) and so instead of screaming I reached for my camera - Once I’d got the photo though it was time to find a glass and a piece of paper to evict Boris the Spider. I’d usually treat my models with more courtesy, but then again my models don’t usually have 8 legs.

…Because this was the first thing I saw this morning when I woke up looking at the ceiling in my room and although the photo doesn’tconvey much of a sense of scale, it’s body was just under an inch long.

Don’t get me wrong I am not a big fan of spiders and I’d sooner not have this one in my room, but thanks to my father making me get spiders out of my siblings bedrooms I have kind of got used to them - Or at least catching them and releasing them outside.  This spider however must have been psychic as I left the room to get a glass to catch him in and by the time I came back he’d hidden himself.

Unfortunately as I won’t be able to get to a computer until Friday you’re all going to have to wait for the photos from last night a little longer. So until then here’s a picture of a dog…