9 Amazing Facts About Plants and Insects that Will Surprise You

Any trivia fans in the house? Anybody here watch the show Mythbusters on TV? History buffs? Aficionados of useless information? If you answered yes to any of those questions than I have some real treats for you here. Here, I'll look at the 9 most interesting and amazing things about plants and insects that you don't know, or were wrong about to begin with.

1. Moths Don't Like Shiny, Bright Things - Next time you want to ask, "Why are moths attracted to lights?" or "Why are there so many bugs hovering around lights at night?", shut it. Moths and other insects aren't attracted to those shiny, bright objects we call light bulbs; they are confused and bothered by them. These new fangled inventions such as electricity that produce artificial light are very recent developments in the large scale timeline of the planet. Moths evolved to use the sun and the moon to navigate. They haven't yet adapted to manmade, artificial light. So when they see the light it disorients them and they try to change course to keep the light at the correct angle and place. The only way this is possible with such a close source of light is too fly around it in circles. Tragic.

2. Money Doesn't Grow On Trees and Neither Do Bananas - The banana plant is actually an herb, not a tree. The bananas that grow on it are actually the berry from that herb plant. The bananas we eat are chosen for their special characteristics (no seeds, entirely edible and sweet) which have not been changed for many generations due to the bananas' now inability to reproduce without human help. However, wild bananas actually contain large seeds and little of the yummy fruit that we enjoy.

3. The Hottest Part of a Chili - I know, I know, it's the seeds! That's why you might take out the seeds of hot chili peppers to lower the spiciness when you make a delicious batch of chili. Well, not quite. It's actually the white membrane that the seeds are attached to. The membrane contains the highest levels of capsaicin, the component that gives chili peppers their hotness. You think jalapenos do bad things to you? Those get a measurement of 4,500 Scoville Heat Units while there are now varieties of chili pepper available that top out at 1,000,000 SHU. Take heed.

4. Move Over Soy Beans - A new protein king is in town. I'll give you some hints; it's not lean turkey or chicken meat. Not beef. And no, not soy beans. It's a breed of cyanobacteria (algae) known as spirulina, which has a 70% protein consistency. Not just that, but this algae can be grown on land with dirty water that it recycles while producing oxygen for the atmosphere, without the use of pesticides, fertilizers or anything else in addition. Hello super crop of the future.

5. Don't Stomp That Ant Farm - You'd be killing an incredibly intelligent life form... sort of. The ant's brain is a higher percentage of its body mass than any other living animal or insect. Keep in mind, that the whopping 6 percent (a human brain is roughly 2 percent of its total body mass) that an ant's brain represents is still only .3 milligrams. However, an entire colony of ants, acting together as one, has the same amount of neurons as one human being. We're outnumbered and outsized too! There an estimated 10,000 trillion ants on the planet, which combined weigh more than the 6.5 billion or so people on the planet. Gulp. The time for peace is now, before it's too late.

6. Nothing Like Coffee From Fresh Ground Seeds - Because that is what coffee "beans" actually are; seeds. These seeds are taken from the coffee plant which produces coffee cherries. Each cherry has two seeds, although on occasion a cherry only has one. It takes 4,000 coffee cherries to produce each one pound bag of coffee you carry home from Starbucks.

7. If You're Stranded on a Desert Island, You Can't Survive on Coconut Milk - Unless of course you can boil the coconut flesh with water and strain the resulting liquid. The inside of a coconut contains coconut water, not coconut milk. You can survive on just this coconut water however, which is filled with vitamins. The coconut palm is thought to be the most versatile (used for everything from car seats to treatments for AIDS) tree on the planet.

8. Knock On Balsa - Balsa is actually the strongest wood in the world. Yes, little did you know as you were making tiny model airplanes and bridges that you were holding in your hand a wood that is stronger than both oak and pine. Balsa gains this distinction based on its rankings in the categories of stiffness, bendiness and compressibility. You're not going crazy either with your memories of balsa; it is also the softest wood.

9. Nuke Your Apartment, The Cockroaches Won't Survive - The old wives' tale that cockroaches would be the last living animal or insect following a nuclear attack is incorrect. Or maybe it was an old husbands' tale, as in, "Honey, no, I couldn't kill all the cockroaches in our apartment... but not even a nuclear blast could do that!" Radiation is measured in "rads". A human will die at exposure to 1,000 rads and a cockroach would die at 20,000; so they have us beat. But a fruit fly would live until 64,000 rads and a wasp until 180,000. The last survivor would be a bacterium - dubbed as "Conan the Bacterium" by researchers - which can survive 1.5 million rads, and double that when frozen.

Sources: John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance. Harmony Books, 2006.