Why does a snake flick its tongue?

To collect scent particles and deliver them to an organ in the roof of the mouth

To sense air temperature ahead of it

To startle prey before striking

To help it balance while moving

Elephants communicate over long distances using what?

Calls too low in pitch for people to hear

Clicks too high in pitch for people to hear

Sound made by striking their tusks

Why is a dog's sense of smell so much better than ours?

It has vastly more scent receptors and far more brain devoted to them

Its nostrils are set further apart

How can a honeybee work out where the sun is when it is behind cloud?

By reading the polarisation of light in a patch of open sky

By sensing the earth's magnetic field

By following scent trails from the hive

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Animals & Wildlife Hard ⚡ 10 Questions ⏱️ ~8 Mins +100 XP

Animal Senses and Abilities

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Almost every animal in this quiz is reading information that is simply not available to us. The hard part is not that the senses are strange, but that they are precise enough to hunt and navigate with.

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Questions

~8m

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Hard

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+100

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About this topic

We tend to describe animal senses as sharper versions of ours, which is usually wrong. A shark is not smelling harder than we can; it is detecting the electric field of a muscle twitch. A snake is not seeing better in the dark; it is measuring heat with a pit that has no lens. These are different channels, not louder ones. This is the hardest quiz in the category, and a few answers deliberately correct claims that get repeated a lot, including the one about bats and the one about mantis shrimp seeing colours we cannot imagine. The truth in both cases is more interesting than the version that goes around.

Questions & answers

Animal Senses and Abilities: all 10 questions and answers

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1How do most insect-eating bats locate prey in the dark?
- A By detecting body heat
- B By sensing magnetic fields
- C By smell alone
- D By echolocation Correct
Answer: D. By echolocation

Why: They emit high-frequency calls and build a picture from the returning echoes, precise enough to catch a moth in flight. Bats are not blind: every species can see, and the large fruit bats rely mostly on their eyes.
2Sharks find hidden prey partly by detecting what?
- A Ultraviolet light
- B Ultrasound
- C Weak electric fields Correct
- D Infrared heat
Answer: C. Weak electric fields

Why: Jelly-filled pores around the snout, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, pick up the tiny electric fields that muscles produce. It lets a shark find a fish buried in sand. Rays and skates have the same organs.
3Which animal has the most types of colour receptor in its eyes?
- A Housefly
- B Mantis shrimp Correct
- C Octopus
- D Chameleon
Answer: B. Mantis shrimp

Why: Mantis shrimp have around a dozen or more photoreceptor types where we have three. Experiments suggest they use them to recognise a colour fast rather than to distinguish finer shades than we can, which is the opposite of what people usually assume.
4Why does a snake flick its tongue?
- A To collect scent particles and deliver them to an organ in the roof of the mouth Correct
- B To sense air temperature ahead of it
- C To startle prey before striking
- D To help it balance while moving
Answer: A. To collect scent particles and deliver them to an organ in the roof of the mouth

Why: The forked tongue picks up airborne molecules and wipes them onto the vomeronasal organ in the palate. The fork matters: comparing the two tips tells the snake which side the scent is stronger on.
5The facial pits of a pit viper detect what?
- A Electric fields in water
- B Ultraviolet light
- C Ground vibration
- D Infrared heat from warm bodies Correct
Answer: D. Infrared heat from warm bodies

Why: A membrane inside each pit senses heat, letting the snake aim a strike at a warm animal in complete darkness. Many pythons and boas have a simpler row of heat-sensing pits along the lips.
6Elephants communicate over long distances using what?
- A Scent carried on the wind
- B Sound made by striking their tusks
- C Calls too low in pitch for people to hear Correct
- D Clicks too high in pitch for people to hear
Answer: C. Calls too low in pitch for people to hear

Why: Much of an elephant rumble falls below the range of human hearing and carries for kilometres across open country. Some of that low-frequency energy also travels through the ground, and elephants appear to pick it up through their feet.
7Why is a dog's sense of smell so much better than ours?
- A Its nose stays wet
- B It has vastly more scent receptors and far more brain devoted to them Correct
- C Its nostrils are set further apart
- D It breathes more quickly
Answer: B. It has vastly more scent receptors and far more brain devoted to them

Why: A dog has hundreds of millions of olfactory receptors against roughly six million in a human, plus a far larger share of the brain given over to processing them. It also exhales through slits at the sides of the nostrils so the outgoing air does not blow away the scent it is sampling.
8Which mammal uses a ring of fleshy tentacles on its snout as its main sense organ?
- A Star-nosed mole Correct
- B Naked mole-rat
- C Aardvark
- D Pangolin
Answer: A. Star-nosed mole

Why: The twenty-two appendages around its nose are packed with touch receptors and map the world by feel, since the animal is effectively blind. It identifies and swallows prey in a fraction of a second, faster than almost any other mammal feeds.
9How can a honeybee work out where the sun is when it is behind cloud?
- A By sensing the earth's magnetic field
- B By following scent trails from the hive
- C By measuring air temperature
- D By reading the polarisation of light in a patch of open sky Correct
Answer: D. By reading the polarisation of light in a patch of open sky

Why: Sunlight scattered by the atmosphere is polarised in a pattern that points back to the sun, and bee eyes can read it. A small gap of blue sky is enough to fix the direction.
10Sea turtles are thought to navigate across oceans largely by sensing what?
- A Star patterns
- B Sound from distant coastlines
- C The earth's magnetic field Correct
- D Water temperature alone
Answer: C. The earth's magnetic field

Why: Experiments with hatchlings show they respond to magnetic signatures that vary with location. The leading explanation for females returning to the beach where they hatched is that they imprinted on its magnetic signature as hatchlings.

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