Children's Web magazine...
Entertaining , Educational, Fun,Informative and MORE

The BBC documentary ‘Super cute and special animals’ seeks to explain why we are attracted to some of the cutest creatures of the animal kingdom whilst also revealing the true animalistic survival guide which lies behind those cute puppy dog eyes!

One of the animals whose features are carefully analysed in the documentary is a funny creature which attracted global attention when a picture of a slow loris took the internet by storm obtaining over 6 million hits. The world couldn’t resist this wide-eyed tiny animal which became an overnight celebrity. The slow lorises are very rare in the wild and only began to be noticed by the mass when the video went viral. The most appealing thing about the loris is its big eyes which we perceive as incredibly cute. Only when alone in the wild is the hunting feature of those cute eyes truly revealed. Slow lorices are nocturnal creatures and stalk and catch their prey once the sun has gone down. These animals may look intensely cute but when they are hunting they became incredibly vicious as the rip the heads off of insects. But it isn’t only insects that become prey for lorises, they also hunt birds. The most striking thing is that lorises have a long back with a black stripe, they move like a snake and if you get in their way they will hiss at you just as a snake would. Lorises emit oils from their elbow that, when mixed with their saliva, creates a deadly liquid which has left many heavily wounded. In this case, our overwhelming emotion of love toward the loris is misleading as the world’s only venomous primate it is illegal to buy lorises. Due to the high demand for lorises after the cute videos, lorises have become instinct in some regions were they once lived.

Another special animal we find very cute is a species of fox which lives in the Sahara, an area where finding something to eat can be endlessly difficulty. These animals however have two big advantages:  the big ears are so sharp it is said they can hear a mouse’s heartbeat underneath the sand; secondly, even when the temperature reaches 200degrees, their skin is so thin that the heat from the blood is lost into the air allowing the animal to keep his cool temperature. The two characteristics are critical surviving tools.

Our judgement of what is cute relies on physical factors, one of the most important is that animals are furry and fluffy – the furrier the animal the better! On America’s west coast one of the cutest furry animals lives in California and is actually the furriest animal in the world. It is the sea otters, with their round faces and long whiskers. A sea otter can have up to 800million hairs on its body and this makes it the furriest animal on the planet. There are 12 other species of otters across the globe but their Californian cousins have the most hair. Sea otters spend 95% of their lives beneath the sea; whilst other seals have flubber which protects their body from the heat all these seals have is their dense underfur. By rolling around they trap air in their fur which acts like a dry suit.  Otters eat up to 65 different types of food tend to use rocks and bottles to crush open their food.

Image: http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01504/slow-loris-6_1504820a.jpg