The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Bullshit Animal Facts

Why You Know This "Fact":

As you can tell by this, this, this, this and this, here at Cracked we're big fans of Teddy Roosevelt as he is without a doubt the most awesome person ever to live. Basically, any factoid about Teddy's life contains enough testosterone to kill an ox, and this is no different.

Archive photo of Roosevelt using Thor's magic hammer to battle Satan in the final days of WWII.

The year was 1913, and Teddy was touring the Brazilian Amazon. At this point, his reputation for badassery had become globally recognized, and the Brazilians realized that to impress someone like Roosevelt, they had to step it up a notch and show him something incredible. So before he came, they roped off a small lake and tossed a couple hundred piranhas in without any food; by the time Teddy arrived, the fish were starving and completely crazy.

When the guides lowered in a juicy cow, the piranhas went after it like tiny guided missiles and reduced it to bones in a little less than 60 seconds. Teddy was quite impressed, and wrote about the ferocity in his 1914 book Through The Brazilian Wilderness, which is how everyone else learned about it (when Teddy Roosevelt tells you something, you fucking pay attention.)

We like to imagine that as soon as Teddy returned to the U.S., he started breeding his own piranhas in an attempt to finally find an animal that could stand up to him in a fight. Like all other such attempts, this was doomed to failure from the start.

Plenty of cartoons and short stories took Roosevelt's report and ran with it, portraying any body of water rumored to have piranhas as a cross between a hot tub and a garbage disposal. Dip your toe in, on come the boiling piranha jacuzzi jets, and off comes everything but bone. Hollywood picked this myth up in 1978 and created Piranha and Piranha 2, which [SPOILER ALERT] outfitted the piranhas with fucking wings.

Why It's Bullshit:

Piranhas are really freaking good at eating shit, there's no question about that. In a large school, they specialize in efficiently organized group-eating that utilizes a system of constant rotation. They're also very fast eaters but, even with all of that in mind, they're still very small, and they still dine almost exclusively on other fish. (For a fish, growing dependent on eager-to-impress Brazilians lowering cows into your home isn't the most reliable dietary plan.)

Waiting for cows--they're already dead.

Yes, despite their fearsome faces, piranhas are just scavengers, going after the weak and sick and destroying them. If you're wondering, technically, in cases of extreme drought, schools of piranhas can turn into those swarms of pointy teeth we've all heard about. But (and this is a big but) every animal faced with starvation will do the same thing. In Roosevelt's case, the group of piranhas was much larger than an average school and the Brazilians intentionally starved them.

Also, like all animals, piranhas are inherently predisposed to want to impress Roosevelt. You may act all above piranhas, but if Teddy Roosevelt walked into your house, you'd eat the shit out of a live cow if you thought it might make the big guy smile.

Why You Know This "Fact":

It all started at a college dinner in Gottingen, Germany. Unsurprisingly, plenty of strong German beer was served, and, as the professors and scientists got drunker and drunker, one aerodynamicist decided to work out the principles behind bee flight as a party trick. He did some quick figuring, a few calculations and, astonished, announced that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly at all, as they simply didn't generate enough lift relative to their size. Preferring the "BEES ARE WITCHES" theory to the slightly more conventional, "Look, they're flying so they probably have it figured out" principal, a biologist started shouting this discovery from the rooftop for all to hear.

Science? More like lience! Get it?

The next morning, when the aerodynamicist woke up and realized his mistake (getting incredibly drunk and talking about bees), it was too late. The excitable biologist had already spread the story around like wildfire.

I did what with a bumblebee? Oh, shit.

Since then, this myth has become a staple of motivational speeches, as it shows that you should never give up, no matter what anyone says about you. It's also popped up in all sorts of random places, from Doctor Who to the Jerry Seinfeld animated vehicle Bee Movie, which would be disastrous to the bumblebees's reputation, had anyone seen that movie.

Why It's Bullshit:

It's confusing how something with such a comically rotund body can even get off the ground with such tiny wings, never mind fly. And it's true that, compared with birds, there's no way a bumblebee should be able to fly at all. But that's exactly the point: The bumblebee isn't like a bird, a plane or even Superman. As it turns out, the bumblebee has a lot more to do with a helicopter than anything else; and when you start thinking of its wings as miniature propellers, everything makes sense aerodynamically. So the bumblebee isn't a buzzing example of scientific failure after all (though that biologist up above certainly is).

You win this time, science.

The funny thing is, physicists figured out bumblebee flight 80 years ago, realized there was nothing special about it, and went back to work, figuring that the controversy would blow over. A half-century later one of them took his nose out of a textbook long enough to realize that people still believed that shit, and promptly disproved it by showing that the bumblebee's "propeller wings" created a "low-pressure vortex" to produce lift, which we think means that bumblebees can create mini-tornadoes which, if true, carries a lot more horrifying possibilities than arguments about lift and body weight.

Why You Know This "Fact":

This lie was first started by a Greek named Antigonus of Carystus. The odd thing is, the considerably more famous Greek philosopher Aristotle had correctly linked chameleon color change with emotion a century before, so there's no reason anyone should have believed Antigonus. But apparently the word of a Antigonus carries more weight than Aristotle, despite the fact that, according to The Book of General Ignorance, Antigonus was famous for his "entertaining stories" based on personal observation and, according to the world, Aristotle was famous for "discovering fucking everything."

Stone cold badass.

No one really knows why this particular myth happens to be so pervasive, but, as we always do, we choose to blame Culture Club's song "Karma Chameleon" and its delightfully androgynous singer Boy George.

Just to give you some context, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" made it to #65 on the US Billboard, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" made it to #6 and John Lennon's "Imagine" peaked at #3. "Karma Chameleon" made it to #1. Where it stayed.

For three weeks.

Normally we would make a joke about this, but we're just too outraged.

If It Were True:

Chameleons would be the ninjas of the animal world. Able to instantly blend into their surroundings, they could sneak into and out of any high-security location virtually undetected; the only indication they had ever been there would be a sudden lack of flies, and possibly a lack of precious jewelry as well. There could be a chameleon standing right in front of you right now, and you wouldn't notice until your keyboard started typing itself.

Why It's Bullshit:

Chameleons can change color; in fact they do it all the time. But it has nothing to do with camouflage. As you learned above from Aristotle (as everyone else should have learned a billion years ago), the color of a chameleon depends on what emotional state it's in: If he sees a lovely lady lizard, he turns a shade of light blue, while when he's furious he goes jet black. If you're thinking that last one sounds kind of badass, just remember that this makes the chameleon nature's mood ring.

The opposite of badass.

In fact, now that we think about it, being a chameleon would suck in that everything you think literally shows up on your face. So if, for example, your creepy, annoying uncle tells you he's going to die soon and you turn bright green with happiness, you can count on not getting any bugs from his will. Similarly, if your wife confronts you about cheating on her with that bug-eyed beauty on the tree next door and you turn dark pink with guilt, you'll probably be looking for a new mate come morning.

Occasionally, chameleons change color because of light or temperature, so if you are caught in either of of those two scenarios, you could pass it off by saying, "It's just the heat." But we doubt anyone would buy that.

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For more ways that your younger years were a complete lie, check out The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class and Your Mom Lied: 5 Common Body Myths Debunked.

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