Art direction by the awesome Cindy Olson | text by Anne Cissel
If you were to go back in time and track child-me down:
a) you’d absolutely have better ways to spend your time in the 90s and
b) I’d probably breathlessly share Animal Facts at you. What kid didn’t/doesn’t have a handful of these ready to go?
So getting to illustrate the HEARTS spread for Ranger Rick’s February issue was just a true gift to braces-wearing “did you know gators can rearrange their lungs to swim better?” Andrea
Some more heart facts:
1. Unlike mammal hearts, alligator hearts have a built in protection system against abnormal heartbeats. So where a rabbit, say, plunged into freezing cold water, could suffer a messed up heartbeat, a gator’s heart will keep the beat, no matter what. The trade off is this guardrail caps a gator’s max heartbeat so while a rabbit can speed off, heart pounding, in an emergency, a gator can’t. They’re still surprisingly fast, though.
(https://news.gatech.edu/news/2021/02/15/study-finds-alligator-hearts-keep-beating-no-matter-what)
2. Octopuses have 3 hearts! 2 push blood around to their gills, and the 3rd pushes blood to the muscles and organs and this one shuts off when they swim. Which means octopuses might prefer crawling to swimming and can you blame them when their heart stops while they’re doing it??
(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-wild-facts-about-octopuses-they-have-three-hearts-big-brains-and-blue-blood-7625828/)
3. Instead of a multi-chambered heart, earthworms have a series of aortic arches that pump blood around their bodies in a closed circulatory system. You can sometimes see them pulsing near their head section. (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~rlenet/Earthworms.html)