It has been for a while now that 'educational' animal content most broadly accessible hasn't been overly great. Like much any other topic, zoology too has become subject to the plague of 'junk food content' which has become widely available and circulated on the internet. Articles that make you feel like you learnt something... when in actuality you may have learnt a small amount of something but still not very much.
And I recall about two years ago [or three] it was that A-Z Animals was the biggest producer of subpar content. And I will say, in 2025 - are the articles produced by A-Z Americentric and vertebrate-centric? Yes, they are. But are they the worst of all? I'm somewhat happy to say, that, in 2025, the answer is no. On A-Z at least, the editorial seems to have improved since last time I checked, which isn't saying a whole lot but at least it has.
But that is to say, in place of A-Z's lackluster editorial that was there before, now other journals have come to take its place; particularly with the use of AI which has sped up the process of writing and putting together an article by a great deal. And so we enter 'Animals Around the Globe', which is perhaps the most-circulated of all of these 'junk food blogs' at the moment, which features on MSN and publishes many articles each day.
And so with something so widely available, I took it upon myself to analyse eight articles of theirs, in the hunt for mistakes. And as you may have guessed, finding a mistake in an article of theirs is to find a piece of straw in a haystack. There were quite a few of them. And I have attatched a link to a document with my findings... but this post will be more of an overview sort of thing.
Animals Around The Globe - Errors and Mistakes
So the grading system I came up with is to grade each sentence of information with a point. If the sentence gets a positive point, there is no error in the sentence, but if there is an error in the sentence, it gets a negative point. There are two other types of negative points an entry can get - the picture scores a positive point if it depicts what it is supposed to, or a negative point if say the entry's about cheetahs and it shows a leopard. An entire entry can also score a negative point by proxy if it is non-condusive with the article's title, such as a herbivorous animal in an article about 'hunters'.
Expectedly, all eight of the articles [couldn't find the motivation for much more] had at least one mistake; ranging from two at a minimum to eleven. As I said you can read about that in what I have attatched. But what I will focus on here is the nature of these mistakes.
The most common mistake in my experience is that of the wrong picture. Some of these are the basic mistakes you'd expect from someone who should've gone to Specsavers - a leopard image in an entry about cheetahs, an image of an osprey in an entry about peregrine falcons... But what is especially funny is when the caption even points out what species is actually pictured. So the entry is about the blue marlin, but the picture is of a white marlin... and even the caption says it is a white marlin. I understand that for more obscure taxa it may be hard to find pictures from major stock photo retailers... but many of these cases would be easily substituted for an image of the proper taxon.
And then another type of mistake is an inconsistency with the article's title. And admittedly these titles are done such that I find a good amount of elbow room for interpretation with how they are written. Like the title 'Top 10 fastest killers'. Are the animals in this post going to get to you fast before they kill you or will they kill you quickly irrespective of their actual speed? It's not something we get an answer to... but the general idea is that these animals are fast, and they are killers. Which makes the inclusion of Anna's Hummingbird an entertaining one... because how is a hummingbird going to kill something? Sit on a leaf and kill whatever micro-organisms are already sitting there? Suck a flower to death? And from there the article also mentions a bunch of other herbivores, including the pronghorn. Which I suppose in that case the males at least have a decent chance of killing something.
Then there are mistakes that have nothing to do with the animal themself, but rather to do with a fact stated at some point about something else which is wrong. For example the article titled '11 species that travel thousands of miles to survive' includes the Arctic Tern, which fits the tagline at least. [the article also includes animals which do not] But then the text...
"The Arctic Tern holds the record for the longest migration of any bird, traveling an awe-inspiring 44,000 miles annually from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back."
Did you spot the mistake?
From what I managed to read online, the distance between the two poles is about 20,015 kilometres... which times'd by two is 40,030 kilometres. Note kilometres. And if you stretch it far enough, you could get 44,000 kilometres, or about 27,340 miles. Under no standard measurement is the distance between the two poles 44,000 miles! And the article ends as it begins... with another metric mistake. The title clearly specifies that the animals in this article travel thousands of miles to survive. And it closes with the red crabs of Christmas Island... an island barely twelve miles between its widest points! The crabs could never travel thousands of miles!
And of course there is the old-fashioned getting things wrong. Like stating that anglerfish are cartilage-based fish. Or implying that colugos use echolocation to measure distances. Or stating that camel spiders can survive for months without food. They do not. All of which are mistakes which I think are worse than big mistakes - at least with big mistakes there is some chance that whoever is reading the article will go 'aha!' and catch onto it... but when the mistakes are subtle, they are easier to believe. And some mistakes are a bit trickier to unpack... like where the article about dangerous predators in North America [who are they dangerous to? A bald eagle is harmless to people but deadly to trout] states that grizzly bears weigh up to 1500 lb.
The bottom line is that Ursus arctos horribilis grow to about 600 lb maximum. Some brown bears do get up to 1500 [but more often, polar bears do] but this is a number attained by Kodiak bears. Even so, some authorities consider Kodiaks... to be a kind of Grizzly? Like Bart the bear, who himself was a Kodiak bear but marketed often as a grizzly and as a grizzly he is remembered. Are kodiaks a type of grizzly? Your answer might not be my answer. And then another one with a kangaroo for speed records... the picture is of a grey kangaroo, but the record is given for a red kangaroo [for sustained speed]. But depending on how you measure the top speed of a kangaroo the grey kangaroo could be considered... faster? So is here the fact wrong or the picture?
So... that's about my thoughts on it. The articles are not horribly inaccurate, but they are just inaccurate enough for me to be somewhat uncomfortable with how widely accessible they are. People read these articles, they take them for granted, and go on in their life. And I cast no judgement upon them... I just wish this sort of junk food content didn't exist.
But alas.
And I recall about two years ago [or three] it was that A-Z Animals was the biggest producer of subpar content. And I will say, in 2025 - are the articles produced by A-Z Americentric and vertebrate-centric? Yes, they are. But are they the worst of all? I'm somewhat happy to say, that, in 2025, the answer is no. On A-Z at least, the editorial seems to have improved since last time I checked, which isn't saying a whole lot but at least it has.
But that is to say, in place of A-Z's lackluster editorial that was there before, now other journals have come to take its place; particularly with the use of AI which has sped up the process of writing and putting together an article by a great deal. And so we enter 'Animals Around the Globe', which is perhaps the most-circulated of all of these 'junk food blogs' at the moment, which features on MSN and publishes many articles each day.
And so with something so widely available, I took it upon myself to analyse eight articles of theirs, in the hunt for mistakes. And as you may have guessed, finding a mistake in an article of theirs is to find a piece of straw in a haystack. There were quite a few of them. And I have attatched a link to a document with my findings... but this post will be more of an overview sort of thing.
Animals Around The Globe - Errors and Mistakes
So the grading system I came up with is to grade each sentence of information with a point. If the sentence gets a positive point, there is no error in the sentence, but if there is an error in the sentence, it gets a negative point. There are two other types of negative points an entry can get - the picture scores a positive point if it depicts what it is supposed to, or a negative point if say the entry's about cheetahs and it shows a leopard. An entire entry can also score a negative point by proxy if it is non-condusive with the article's title, such as a herbivorous animal in an article about 'hunters'.
Expectedly, all eight of the articles [couldn't find the motivation for much more] had at least one mistake; ranging from two at a minimum to eleven. As I said you can read about that in what I have attatched. But what I will focus on here is the nature of these mistakes.
The most common mistake in my experience is that of the wrong picture. Some of these are the basic mistakes you'd expect from someone who should've gone to Specsavers - a leopard image in an entry about cheetahs, an image of an osprey in an entry about peregrine falcons... But what is especially funny is when the caption even points out what species is actually pictured. So the entry is about the blue marlin, but the picture is of a white marlin... and even the caption says it is a white marlin. I understand that for more obscure taxa it may be hard to find pictures from major stock photo retailers... but many of these cases would be easily substituted for an image of the proper taxon.
And then another type of mistake is an inconsistency with the article's title. And admittedly these titles are done such that I find a good amount of elbow room for interpretation with how they are written. Like the title 'Top 10 fastest killers'. Are the animals in this post going to get to you fast before they kill you or will they kill you quickly irrespective of their actual speed? It's not something we get an answer to... but the general idea is that these animals are fast, and they are killers. Which makes the inclusion of Anna's Hummingbird an entertaining one... because how is a hummingbird going to kill something? Sit on a leaf and kill whatever micro-organisms are already sitting there? Suck a flower to death? And from there the article also mentions a bunch of other herbivores, including the pronghorn. Which I suppose in that case the males at least have a decent chance of killing something.
Then there are mistakes that have nothing to do with the animal themself, but rather to do with a fact stated at some point about something else which is wrong. For example the article titled '11 species that travel thousands of miles to survive' includes the Arctic Tern, which fits the tagline at least. [the article also includes animals which do not] But then the text...
"The Arctic Tern holds the record for the longest migration of any bird, traveling an awe-inspiring 44,000 miles annually from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back."
Did you spot the mistake?
From what I managed to read online, the distance between the two poles is about 20,015 kilometres... which times'd by two is 40,030 kilometres. Note kilometres. And if you stretch it far enough, you could get 44,000 kilometres, or about 27,340 miles. Under no standard measurement is the distance between the two poles 44,000 miles! And the article ends as it begins... with another metric mistake. The title clearly specifies that the animals in this article travel thousands of miles to survive. And it closes with the red crabs of Christmas Island... an island barely twelve miles between its widest points! The crabs could never travel thousands of miles!
And of course there is the old-fashioned getting things wrong. Like stating that anglerfish are cartilage-based fish. Or implying that colugos use echolocation to measure distances. Or stating that camel spiders can survive for months without food. They do not. All of which are mistakes which I think are worse than big mistakes - at least with big mistakes there is some chance that whoever is reading the article will go 'aha!' and catch onto it... but when the mistakes are subtle, they are easier to believe. And some mistakes are a bit trickier to unpack... like where the article about dangerous predators in North America [who are they dangerous to? A bald eagle is harmless to people but deadly to trout] states that grizzly bears weigh up to 1500 lb.
The bottom line is that Ursus arctos horribilis grow to about 600 lb maximum. Some brown bears do get up to 1500 [but more often, polar bears do] but this is a number attained by Kodiak bears. Even so, some authorities consider Kodiaks... to be a kind of Grizzly? Like Bart the bear, who himself was a Kodiak bear but marketed often as a grizzly and as a grizzly he is remembered. Are kodiaks a type of grizzly? Your answer might not be my answer. And then another one with a kangaroo for speed records... the picture is of a grey kangaroo, but the record is given for a red kangaroo [for sustained speed]. But depending on how you measure the top speed of a kangaroo the grey kangaroo could be considered... faster? So is here the fact wrong or the picture?
So... that's about my thoughts on it. The articles are not horribly inaccurate, but they are just inaccurate enough for me to be somewhat uncomfortable with how widely accessible they are. People read these articles, they take them for granted, and go on in their life. And I cast no judgement upon them... I just wish this sort of junk food content didn't exist.
But alas.