Simple lifeform facts I take for granted that I've now seen blowing people's minds on here:
That sea urchins walk around and have mouths with teeth on their undersides
That corals are related to jellyfish
Barnacles being related to crabs and shrimp
Ants being an offshoot of wasps
Termites being totally unrelated to ants and all similarities just being convergent evolution (they're actually a group of cockroaches, but even science didn't know that part until a few years ago)
Starfish having an eye at the end of each arm
That the bodies of ticks and mites are also their heads, essentially big heads with legs (they even frequently have eyes way up on "the body")
Sperm whales have no upper teeth, and also their bodies are flat from the front
Goats also having no upper teeth
Tapeworms having no mouth at all and just absorbing nutrients over their entire body surface
That flies are bigger pollinators than bees
That moths are bigger pollinators than bees
That wasps are just as important pollinators as bees (more important to many groups of plants) and when we say they're "less efficient" at it we just mean individually they get a little less pollen stuck to them.
That honeybees are nonnative to most of the world and not good for the local ecosystem, just good for human agriculture
That earthworms are also nonnative and destructive to more habitats than the reverse
There being no hard biological line between slugs and snails; all slugs aren't necessarily related to each other and there are gastropod groups where some have shells and some don't
That ALL octopuses (not just the blue ring) have a venomous bite
Most jellyfish and sea anemones being predators that eat fish
"Krill" being shrimp up to a few inches long and not some kind of microbe
Blue whales therefore being the deadliest predators to ever evolve as they eat up to several million individual animals per day
Fungi being no more related to plants than we are, maybe a little bit closer to us animals actually
Venus fly traps being native to only one small area of North America in all the world
Parasites being essential to all ecosystems
Leeches not having a circular ring of teeth anywhere
That algae is not a type of plant
That most seaweed is just very big algae
That enough wood ends up in the ocean that plenty of sea life evolved to eat only wood
Speaking of which the fact that the "ship worms" that make tunnels in wood are just long noodly clams
Rabbits and hares being totally distinct kinds of lagomorph without interchangeability, like how a squirrel and a hamster are different rodents
Butterflies technically just being a small weird group of moths we gave a different name to
That insects only get wings once they reach maximum size and therefore there can never be a younger smaller bee or fly that's not a larva
Spiders not being any more likely to cannibalize their own mates/young than just a cat or dog might, for most species maybe a lot less often?
