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Biology's biggest division is not between plants and animals, nor even between multicellular and single-celled creatures. It is between prokary- otes and eukaryotes.

A tiger's stripes are as unique as a human's fingerprints.

The dolphin is clever, cute, kind, active and inoffensive. Exactly the char­acter of Hong Kong.

The new law that declares the Whang anui river, New Zealand's third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own prop­erty, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. New Zealanders have been joking about whether the Whanganui might now vote, buy a few beers (how old is it?) or be charged with murder if a swimmer drowns.

Intriguingly, though, Komodo dragons appear to be resistant to bites in­flicted by other dragons.

Nature never decieves us.

If, in tens of thousands of years, a future Finn digs a 400-metre-deep well and draws water contaminated with 21st-century nuclear waste, it will be safe to drink.

An octopus's body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog's, but most of these reside in the cephalopod's arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of con­sciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.

A butterfly's wingbeat in one part of the world causes a hurricane in another.

The breast of the standard American turkey has become so en­larged by selective breeding that it can no longer mate because the male's breast gets in the way. Mr Singer describes how thou­sands of such sexually disabled male turkeys are masturbated by workers and the females artificially inseminated using the tube of an air compressor (at the rate of one every 12 seconds at one turkey farm).

He wouldn't know the difference between a bulldog and a billy goat.

Human neurons are distant relatives of tiny yeast cells, them­selves descendants of even simpler microbes.

Why humans became naked apes is still a mystery.

"When elephants mate," says a South-East Asian diplomat, "we ants get trampled." "But when elephants fight," an Australian strategist retorts, "the ants get trampled even more."

Why is bird poo white?

A mammalian brain uses about 70% of its volume for moving in­formation around, 20% for processing it and the remaining 10% to keep everything in the right place and supplied with nutrients. In doing all these things, a human brain consumes about 20 watts of power. That makes it roughly 10,000 times more efficient than the best silicon machines invented by those brains.

At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental chal­lenge facing the world's big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early.

The UN's Environmental Programme also estimates that the harsh climate claims 230,000 lives annually in west Asia (the Ara­bian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent), making it a bigger killer than war. Things are so bad that even Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group, is preaching the virtues of solar panels.

Even the gentle triceratops sometimes used its horns to charge predators.

Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?

Over half of the 1,400 known human pathogens have their origins in ani­mals such as pigs, bats, chickens and other birds.

Success is a delicate flower that can easily be killed.

Giant clams, Tridacna gigas, up to a metre across, required two or even four men to carry. The bivalves spilled out of the holds. Giant clams are one of Buddhism's "seven treasures", along with gold and lapis lazuli. China's new rich prize their shells as showy ornaments.

What is the IQ of a chimpanzee? Or a worm? Or a game-show- winning computer program?

"When you open the window, both fresh air and flies come in," said Deng Xiaoping.

People shed bacteria — from their skin, mouths, noses and other orifices — at a rate of about 1m an hour.