Weird Animals

oh whoops, didn't see your post about millipedes!

a toast! to beans!

you mean like this?

https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2017/01/06/08/beansontoast1.jpg

I am okay with eating millions of insects before i die as long as they're dead and they don't catch in my throat and don't taste bad

and aren't poisonous or spoiled and make my breath smell bad or any other monkeypaw catches

https://lifehacker.com/deter-garden-pests-naturally-with-a-diy-caffeine-spray-486055048#:~:text=Gather%20any%20or%20all%20of,placing%20into%20a%20spray%20bottle.

Ed Yong, you rogue:

"That’s why our stories and myths are so full of characters who can transfer their consciousness into the bodies of animals—the Norse god Odin, for example, or Bran from the once-popular series Game of Thrones."

still traumatized by that wasp post fyi

last week i was ripping apart some dates and came across one with that freaky granular interior thing going on, wondered "what's up with that" and remembered fig wasps before i could stop myself

was putting dried fruit in my tea this morning, noticed unidentifiable fruit bits* floating to the top and remembered again

* they were fruit bits. this is settled. this is canon. i did not drink bug tea. i did not. no.

I thought about it while eating out of this big jar of spiced fig preserves, but I mean... it's extra protein, right?

It's usually well absorbed into the fig is my understanding so you're probably not eating wasp thoraxes.

To take your mind off of fig wasps, how about a worm with a hundred butts, each with their own sets of eyes and brain, that can detach and swim around to find mates?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9632hMjUr00

i applaud this enigmatic worm with all of my butts

https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/643305f12500005c00822afe.jpg

Texas park officials are facing quite the conundrum after a “mystery animal” was caught on camera inside a South Texas state park.

Badger?

that is obviously a chupacabra

Behold the Dracula ant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9E-vO4Pkgs

See also https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dracula-ants-snapping-jaws-are-fastest-known-appendage-any-animal-180971061/:

The force generated by this action is so great that it can stun or kill prey, which the ants then feed to their larvae. According to Hannah Devlin of the Guardian, adult Dracula ants cannot eat solid foods, so they survive by feasting on the blood of their well-fed young. This behavior is known as “non-destructive parental cannibalism” because it doesn’t kill the larvae; it just leaves them “full of holes.”

oh dag is that not how parenting is supposed to go

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/science/contagious-cancer-shellfish-dna.html

Contagious cancers in mollusks, which are some of the few examples of multicellular animals evolving into single-celled organisms (see also: Tasmanian devils, and doggos):

Beata Ujvari, an evolutionary ecologist at Deakin University in Australia who was not involved in the study, said that the massive mutations might be explained by the way the contagious cancers reproduce. Instead of combining two sets of DNA from a shellfish egg and sperm, the cancers clone themselves.

In that way, they’ve become more like bacteria than animals. And like bacteria, they might try to beat their competition — other cancers — by mutating faster, Dr. Ujvari said. She noted that the new cockle study revealed that two different contagious cancers will sometimes invade a single animal.

There's hope for chuds:

In the lab, researchers produced images of alternating dark and light stripes, representing the mangrove roots and water, and used them to line the insides of buckets about six inches wide. When the stripes were a stark black and white, representing optimum water clarity, box jellies never got close to the bucket walls. With less contrast between the stripes, however, box jellies immediately began to run into them. This was the scientists’ chance to see if they would learn.

After a handful of collisions, the box jellies changed their behavior. Less than eight minutes after arriving in the bucket, they were swimming 50 percent farther from the pattern on the walls, and they had nearly quadrupled the number of times they performed their about-face maneuver. They seemed to have made a connection between the stripes ahead of them and the sensation of collision.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/science/jellyfish-learning-neurons.html

Doh, forgot to include the part that mentions that box jellies have no brains and yet are still capable of learning.

Poor frog!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKEu90Zsh4A

More beetle but stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFbu21AGSho

Admittedly not weird and falls into the charismatic megafauna tap but it's my thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvM89vyn5pE

Usually, a belly-up fish isn’t long for this world. But video evidence from the deep ocean suggests that some species of anglerfish — the nightmarish deep-sea fish with bioluminescent lures — live their whole lives upside down.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/science/upside-down-angler-fish.html

Oh, has no one yet posted the absolute nightmare fodder that is the bloodworm aka the befanged extruded anus worm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL2p9i0wwNg

There is no god.

counterpoint: god loves all creatures, even the fanged anus worm

I've bought those for bait before, they're pretty scary

Let's see if those embeds:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ad/17/a6/ad17a67682929e201588a804a40d15e8.jpg

Anyway, those are harpy eagle talons, which apparently can be as large as grizzly claws, and these MFs ~fly~.

https://www.audubon.org/news/10-fun-facts-about-harpy-eagle

at first I thought the anus worms from slightly upthread had claws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_epxKOztHH8

1. Some sea slugs can steal (and receive energy from) chloroplasts from algae that they feed on.
2. Some of those same sea slugs can also detach their heads from their bodies and eventually regrow a new body.

Have the Spider-tailed horned viper been posted yet?

(caution - bird hunting)

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

Was that featured in an Attenborough doc (Planet Earth maybe)? Mind-boggling that that mimicry behavior happens through natural selection!

@undeadpresident
4 years ago
Just when you thought spiders couldn't get creepier you discover one that turns out to be a snake.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nine-weirdest-penises-animal-kingdom-180976274/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/nine-weirdest-penises-manhattan-180976274

If you can get past the (IMO very gross) surfeit of limbs, these poorly named tadpole shrimps have some very weird reproductive strategies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucm-ds2DA58

surinam toads...

Wonderful

Caecilians: not just the dick newts of the animal kingdom: their babies eat pays off their mothers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc5Yt7tF910

*pieces of