Today’s interesting fact has to do with the oldest living animal found so far.

It is a Quahog clam, scientific name Artica islandica.

Clams are like trees, in that they lay down a new layer of shell every year, just like trees do.

Trees will sometimes lay down two rings a year, but they have never found this discrepancy with clams so far.

This latest specimen is between 405 and 410 years old.

The oldest mammal is thought to be a either a Blue whale or a Bow whale.

As we get older, the lenses of our eyes get thicker; a layer of cells gets laid down every year.

By counting these layers, you can determine the age of the animal.

Bow and Blue whales grow to enormous sizes, and it takes time for an animal to get so big.

Counting these lens layers they have gotten an estimated age of 178 years for one Bow whale, which means that when we were still hunting these animals in wooden boats, at least one of them was an adult.

This could be one reason it is so difficult to get near Bow whales.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with Owls.

Large birds of prey, owls have large eyes that take in whatever light is available.

Most owls hunt at night, in the dark.

Many people think owls use their superior night sight to hunt, but most owls actually use their hearing to hunt and use their eyes to keep from flying into objects.

To aid the Owl in hearing one of the ears is placed higher on the head than the other.

This allows better hearing helping the owl to better pinpoint it's prey.

The circle of feathers found around the eyes are designed to help direct the sound to the ears.

Today's interesting fact has to do with sight.

While those of us who have sight, take it for granted, we don't see as much as we think we do.

We blink about every 5 seconds, which takes about 150 milliseconds.

Studies have shown that when we blink, we don't see, but the visual cortex edits out these blackouts so we never notice them.

About three times a second and lasting up to 200 milliseconds our eyes make jerky moves which are called saccades.

These movements allow the Fovea, to focus on different parts of our environment and to provide the information to the brain that then fills what we see.

During each of these saccades, while the eyes keep transmitting data to the brain, the brain doesn't process about 100 milliseconds of the information.

The average individual will perform up to 15,000 saccades a day and even if we don't include the blinking, this means that while awake and having our eyes open, our visual system is offline for up to four hours every day.

Tomorrow I'll try cover why we still think we see during these four hours.