Weird Animals

Lots of pterosaurs in the news lately: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/monkeydactyl-jurassic-pterosaur-oldest-fossil-opposable-thumbs

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/conservation-cant-just-be-a-popularity-contest

Save the Numbat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coyix7w4u_c

also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/n0bdch/the_tallest_mallard_duck_to_have_ever_lived_since/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/science/instagrammable-bird-frogmouth.html

“I thought this method, the I.A.A. score, will be a great tool to investigate bird photographs in terms of aesthetic appeal and inform people which birds are the most photogenic,” said Dr. Hayn-Leichsenring, also a postdoctoral researcher at University Hospital Jena. “Or possibly, I just wondered why nobody likes my own bird photographs.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/05/giant-wood-moth-found-queensland-australia-school
fuuuuu
http://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f12614c6b69bbf1443fd074f37c55d4b1557a64f/0_54_720_432/master/720.jpg

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
http://i.imgur.com/nrubdtl.png

Content 4 U

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2021/5/5/22408390/crazy-jumping-worms-invasive-earthworm-garden-soil

https://www.kqed.org/science/468582/the-once-in-a-lifetime-ladybug-love-in

http://livescience.com/marine-worm-with-100-butts.html

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/environment/552711-beachgoer-stumbles-on-rarely-seen-deep-sea

Also the polybutt worm definitely makes our threat to make a quiz out of weird animal butts that much closer to reality.

butts ahoy

Now more than ever

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/evolution-butts/618915/

ICYMI

Fungus full of psychedelic drugs could cause Indiana Brood X cicadas' butts to fall off

it's a hot butt summer

Yeti crabs eat bacteria:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgH0ThP0qtY

Hoatzins, the clawed (barely) flying cows of birds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HytWfqWYUQ

Yeti crabs eat bacteria

Who amongst us etc etc

and LO! there came THE TEETH OF THE WANDERING MEATLOAF to make your 3D printer more efficient

http://i.imgur.com/9VwBSme.png

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/science/mollusk-wandering-meatloaf-santabarbaraite.html

The gumboot chiton is not a glamorous creature. The large, lumpy mollusk creeps along the waters of the Pacific coast, pulling its reddish-brown body up and down the shoreline. It is sometimes known, not unreasonably, as “the wandering meatloaf.” But the chiton’s unassuming body hides an array of tiny but formidable teeth. These teeth, which the creature uses to scrape algae from rocks, are among the hardest materials known to exist in a living organism.

Now, a team of scientists has discovered a surprising ingredient in the chiton’s rock-hard dentition: a rare, iron-based mineral that previously had been found only in actual rocks. Tiny particles of the mineral, which is strong but lightweight, help harden the root of the mollusk’s teeth, the researchers reported in the journal PNAS on Monday.

I should have been a meatloaf, wondering the floors of silent seas

good shots in here
https://www.bigpicturecompetition.org/2021-winners

Vocal mimicry is reasonably common in birds, but European starlings are particularly gifted mimics. As this clip shows. Just incredible. https://t.co/pbfGD8sT9b pic.twitter.com/9sLenFJ1az

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 5, 2021

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-sea-snot
charming

Sea snot is more scientifically known as “marine mucilage,” and it’s an ecosystem of its own. In a 2009 paper in the journal PLOS One, a team of scientists led by Roberto Danovaro, a marine biologist at Italy’s Polytechnic University of Marche, described it as a “gelatinous” stage of marine snow, the jumble of organic material—such as feces and fragments of dead plants and animals—that drifts from the surface to the ocean floor.

The snot is produced by a bunch of microorganisms, one Turkish research team explained in a UNESCO bulletin called Harmful Algae News, especially microalgae known as diatoms. These petite algae are known to exude polysaccharides, sugary carbohydrates that can get quite sticky. Sampling sea snot that clotted several locations in the Sea of Marmara in 2007 and 2008, the researchers also identified species of dinoflagellates and more.

welcome to my nightmare
i think you're gonna like it

📹 Watch a moray eating on land, caught on video for the first time!

🎣While most fish need water to feed, a new study by @ucsc researcher Rita Mehta has found that snowflake moray eels have an extra set of jaws in their throats that allows them to grab & swallow prey on land. pic.twitter.com/Pf6Wi4EbCn

— UC Santa Cruz Science (@UCSCscience) June 14, 2021

More wombats and their butts: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/04/wombats-deadly-bums-how-they-use-their-skull-crushing-rumps-to-fight-play-and-flirt

i had no idea!

that moray video blew up thanks to a clever headline which i won't bother repeating and i got annoyed at everyone forwarding it to me.

You should repeat it.

Sigh:
When an eel climbs a ramp to eat meals from a clamp that’s a moray

Ah, it’s ok.

I loved that headline, I did not forward it to anyone tho.

Beavers are kinda weird, but mostly just awesome. And this story rules.

A dry California creek bed looked like a wildfire risk. Then the beavers went to work

Seven years ago, ecologists looking to restore a dried-out Placer County floodplain faced a choice: Spend at least $1 million bringing in heavy machines to revive habitat or try a new approach.

They went for the second option, and turned to nature’s original flood manager to do the work — the beaver.

The creek bed, altered by decades of agricultural use, had looked like a wildfire risk. It came back to life far faster than anticipated after the beavers began building dams that retained water longer.

“It was insane, it was awesome,” said Lynnette Batt, the conservation director of the Placer Land Trust, which owns and maintains the Doty Ravine Preserve.

“It went from dry grassland. .. to totally revegetated, trees popping up, willows, wetland plants of all types, different meandering stream channels across about 60 acres of floodplain,” she said.

The Doty Ravine project cost about $58,000, money that went toward preparing the site for beavers to do their work.

In comparison, a traditional constructed restoration project using heavy equipment across that much land could cost $1 to $2 million, according to Batt.

that absolutely rules

“The beaver on land is like a chicken nugget walking through the landscape for predators,” said Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Resource Management at California State University Channel Islands. “They’re fat and they’re slow and anything would be glad to have them for a meal.”

Beavers are crazy. I once came across a huge old tree in the middle of the forest that had been felled by beavers. I imagine the fucker after a week’s worth of chewing, as the tree crashes to the ground, just being totally triumphant. Then, as the reverberations of the crash faded, looking at this massive log lying there and being like “what the fuck do I do with this now?”

A lot of people in Alaska believe that beaver tail has some kind of hallucinogenic properties, or at least that it gets you high in some way if you eat it. This is probably a myth. My uncle Rif claims that it makes you sick but also gives you superpowers; he says that once, when his band was playing in a village, the guitar player ate some beaver tail, got terrible diarrhea, and played the best guitar of his life.

Sigh:
When an eel climbs a ramp to eat meals from a clamp that’s a moray

It's a handy mnemonic tbh

some nightmare fuel here
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/seed-beetle-sex/619369
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MmJCDqn6gJO8dH3UsqBhU2K6C5g%3D/672x840/media/img/posts/2021/07/Photo_by_Johanna_Ronn-1/original.jpg

can't tell if it's more or less nightmare-fueling to know that that's a picture of a penis.

the author had good fun with euphemisms for beetle jizz

There may even be some more instantaneous positives for the females who couple up with superlatively spiked males. Arnqvist’s team found that females who mated with males from the long-spined lineage laid more eggs over their lifetime than those that had hooked up only with the stubby-spined. Males with naturally longer phallic accoutrements are thought to gain better access to the female’s hemolymph—the insect equivalent of blood, flowing outside her reproductive tract—where their seminal fluids can prime her body for reproduction. They might also, thanks to their genes, produce higher-quality ejaculate—top-shelf beetle juice. This rich cocktail can be up to 8 percent of the insect’s full weight (the equivalent of all the blood in the human body, by proportion), and teems with hundreds of ingredients, many of which are thought to enhance egg production, or supply the female’s body with much-needed nutrients. (After seed beetles mature into adults, they stop eating and focus their efforts solely on sex.)

that top shelf beetle juice the kids love

it is a rich cocktail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ5nbfhvV5I

DNW if you don't want sea turtles ruined for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNp7tuZyWBY

https://blog.snapshotserengeti.org/2014/01/17/the-curious-case-of-the-giraffe-and-the-oxpecker/

The images also show that the birds seem to prefer settling between the hind legs of the giraffe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxjIk_vXGlw

Giant fish with bony tongues, sturdy armor, and that breathe air and secrete a milky substance out of their heads to protect their young.

vacuum attack!

Probably mentioned before but some frogs let their offspring develop in their stomachs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce-pt3Da4QA

Thought he'd mention that frog or toad that births babies through it's skin, because that's still the weirdest to me

Is that different from the one where the tadpoles live on the mom and eat her skin?

It's Suriname toads, still one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgROaJY6Xnk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lf3JZw3OMY

Weird Oz duck says 'you bloody fool'

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-58476891

Related: weird Oz duck likes to body surf: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-55836596

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zHmUvUre72ECbRSboWsGK3-970-80.jpg.webp

Hundreds of three-eyed 'dinosaur shrimp' emerge after Arizona monsoon

These tadpole-size creatures, called Triops "look like little mini-horseshoe crabs with three eyes," Lauren Carter, lead interpretation ranger at Wupatki National Monument, told Live Science. Their eggs can lie dormant for decades in the desert until enough rainfall falls to create lakes that provide real estate and time for the hatchlings to mature and lay eggs for the next generation, according to Central Michigan University.