Creature Feature: Leaproach.

Sure, they'll never get an awesome story glamourizing how awesome they are at surviving, but you still have to admire that cockroaches are so good at surviving that they've been around, and will be around, longer than we have or ever will.

Oh, and they have evolved to leap. Wait, what?



Yes, in 2011, a leaping cockroach (Saltoblattella montistabularis) - "leaproach," if you will- was discovered in Africa. If it's any comfort, it feeds on grasshopper droppings. Come off it- anyone who has done research beyond the school books knows that plenty of animals literally eat crap. It is not even an inch long, so should you be in South Africa and come across one, there's a good chance you will not even notice its existence.

This creature is not a grasshopper. It is, however, an astounding example of convergent evolution - looks like a grasshopper, hops like a grasshopper, but isn't a grasshopper. Instead, it is a cockroach with grasshopper traits and the astounding superpowers of cockroaches. It can jump up to 50 times its body length, and living entirely on excrement is also quite the feat.

Believe it or not, leaping cockroaches used to be a common thing. Until this discovery, they had not been seen since the Jurassic Period. Part of me also wonders if some of them might have survived long enough to make it into the Bible and appear as one of the plagues in Exodus - even though locusts are totally another creature. This is still a horror-roach that deserves some terrifying mention.

But wait, is it? This cockroach is hardly a pest. It feeds off of the crap of pests, but is not a pest in itself. It's tiny. I daresay it's almost cute. And hey, roaches aren't all that bad; they're just better survivalists than we are. Maybe we should embrace the cute roach and treat it as a peace offering - riiight before the insects conquer us for real. Yeah, still waiting on that.

Creature Feature: Monito del Monte.

In the rudimentary biology classes that most American schools offer, we are taught very few things about marsupials. They basically cover kangaroos, koalas, and maybe wombats. Marsupials give birth to babies that develop in pouches. All of them are native to Australia. That is the extent of our weird mammal knowledge.

Well, the weird can always get weirder, right?

Sourcing is cool.

This is a monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides). It is a mouse-sized mammal native to South America, but is not a "little mountain monkey" as the name would suggest. Specifically, it is only native to the Andes Mountains of Chile and Argentina, which are not usually talked about when it comes to unique species. Its diet consists of insects and fruit- more on the fruit later. It has nothing to do with the brand of canned fruit on American grocery shelves.

So, why am I mentioning a South American mammal after that shtick about our limited knowledge about marsupials? Monito del monte is a marsupial. A South American marsupial. Consider your mind blown if you thought all marsupials were only in Australia's immediate vicinity. The opossum is commonly taught as an exception to the rule; monito del monte is not.

But it should be!

How did this happen? Long story short, Australia and the southwestern edge of South America were once very close together on a supercontinent called Gondwanaland.  For a long time, biogeologists were expecting to find ancestral marsupials in South America. They found the bones of a small marsupial, dubbed Djarthia,  in Queensland, but never found a living specimen until they found the monito del monte. Genetic evidence proved that the 11 million-year-old bones and the monito were almost the same organism. Fascinating, no?

The unique features of the monito del monte keep piling on. It is the only mammal that stores fat in its prehensile tail. It hibernates in little nests of waterproof leaves and moss when the weather gets too nippy in the mountains.  This is sounding more and more like a gecko; remember how cresties were once thought extinct? Are we sure the Geico gecko isn't wearing a fursuit? (Actually, finding a gecko in that area would be even more surprising!) Talk about weird, primitive animals!

This little fuzzball is also important for a plant called Tristerix corymbosus, a type of mistletoe native to the same area. The monito del monte eats the fruit of the plant. When the fruit is digested, out comes a seed of that particular mistletoe. The monito del monte is the only thing that disperses the seeds of this plant; it would likely go extinct along with the marsupial. Although the monito del monte is not in critical danger, it is near-threatened...but look at that face. Someone has to be captive breeding these...right? Right?

(P.S. - Apologies - these last few days have been spent with relatives in Minnesota.)

Creature Feature: Purple Burrowing Frog.

With the exception of designer reptiles, it's really hard to color-coordinate things with animals. Purple is particularly rare in nature, despite it allowing creatures to blend in with flora. In some cases, however, it just makes us humans wonder what nature was on.

Why this purple burrowing frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis) is, well, purple, is a complete mystery. It is native to southern India and feeds exclusively on underground insects. Although numbers in the wild are still unknown, we are currently working under the assumption that the frog is endangered.

For the record, nobody seems to know exactly why this frog is purple. It does not seem to be camouflage; this frog spends 90% of its time underground. The color is actually the least interesting thing about the purple burrowing frog, in any case.

Since its (re)discovery in 2003, the frog was treated as being in its own family. Looking at skeletal evidence tells otherwise. Looking at fossil evidence, the purple burrowing frog looks very similar to the extinct Seychelles frogs, which were last seen 120 million years ago on Gondawanaland. The purple frog would have evolved independently from there; in other words, the purple frog is a living fossil. Always cool to have more of those. 

So, how did this frog evade scientists for so long? Short answer: It didn't. Almost a century before the adults were discovered in 2003, the tadpoles had been described in 1918. These are weird little buggers with suckers to help them deal with turbulent river currents. The adult frog was not visible at that time, so the chubby purple freak did not go on record until recently. 

The reason for the delay is that the adult frogs spend their whole adult lives underground. They surface only to mate in monsoon season. Otherwise, they're feeding on underground insects (particularly termites). Locals and lesser herpetologists had already known of the frog for decades; scientific literature had a hard time catching up. I guess "pig-faced purple frog" just sounded too crazy for them.

Found on Wikipedia. License unclear.

By the way, if you happen to see two purple frogs getting it on? The male is on top of the female, and he is tiny.

Unfortunately, this bizarre frog is also highly endangered. Less than 200 have been found by science. The main actual risk lies in deforestation. There is a very low chance that these frogs will be bred in captivity, although no doubt scientists are trying. If they get popular enough, they might even get their own color shade.

Creature Feature: Triops.

At some point in your life, you have probably heard of Sea Monkeys. Sea Monkeys are a hybridized, selectively-bred form of brine shrimp that does not remotely resemble the race of freakish anthros on the packaging:

At least they ADMIT to wanting world domination.

For those of us that want to breed something a little bit more intense than Sea Monkeys, there are a number of other types of shrimp that go into diapause - that is, they do not hatch until the water conditions are juuust right. This, for example, is a more Lovecraftian version of Sea Monkeys.



Triops shrimps - also called long-tailed or tadpole shrimps - are not the same sort of shrimp that you see at cocktail parties. They instead resemble mutant trilobites that somehow survived through the Carboniferous into the modern day. Triops shrimp have literally gone unchanged for 300 million years, and, even though we keep them in fish tanks today, they are probably laughing at us from behind the glass for being stupid whippersnappers. They can be found everywhere except the coldest regions of the world.

Eldritch horror in a box.

 

The same process that makes triops oh-so-marketable is also its key to success in the wild. The natural habitat of triops is temporary ponds. They can only live that sort of life by making their eggs go into diapause every time the puddles dry up. In this state, they can survive extreme temperatures up to 98 degrees Celsius (ALMOST boiling water- think about that) for 16 hours. All they have to do is wait for it to rain until they can grow, quickly breed, and die after the water leaves.

The name "Triops" literally means "three eyes." Yes, they do indeed have three eyes. Nowhere says this better than the perfectly silly song by They Might Be Giants, complete with some cool videos of Triops in action.



Triops are easily available online from www.triops.com. They originated from a doctor's stock. He was studying their amazing diapause abilities. In theory, they could stop aging and possibly lead to the Fountain of Youth. Also, y'know, dealing with Cthulhu's underlings is a lot safer than messing with any cnidarians that actually do have eternal youth. We would rather deal with shrimp that definitely die than hydras and jellyfish when it comes to looking young and pretty all the time. Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

When Homo sapiens sapiens goes extinct, the Triops will still be here. Y'know, if the world has not become a swimming pool by then.  Even then, they will probably be only a diapause away from world domination.

Creature Feature: Aardvark.

Well, that's that. In an attempt to expand my vocabulary, I have procured a dictionary. This creature was the first word that came up after the letter "a," so why not make it today's animal? 



If you, like me, now have a song of "a-a-r-d-v-a-r-k!" running through your head, then you have probably seen the cartoon aardvark Arthur. Arthur does not look a thing like an aardvark (he used to); real aardvarks resemble crosses between pigs and kangaroos, or, if you prefer, the Egyptian god Set (although some would call Set a separate or composite beast). The English name comes from the Afrikaans "earth pig," i.e. "that piglike creature that digs in the ground all the time."

Above: Even older Arthur, personification of evil.

 






















Aardvarks dig all night long. Their front feet, armed with four shovel-like nails, break up the earth excellently; their hind feet, which have five toes and webbing, kick sand out of the aardvark's way as it does its thing. Both sets of claws look like a transition stage between claws and hooves.

With their strange, efficient claws, aardvarks dig extensive burrowing systems that look more like they should belong to the aardvark's favorite foods: Ants and termites. These can be simple holes in the ground or networks with 20 entrances or more. The more complex burrows even have a 'toilet!' When these burrows are abandoned, animals such as bats, birds, hyenas and wild dogs use them for their own purposes.


Omnomnom.

The aardvark uses many adaptations to get at eusocial insects like ants and termites. Its ears can hear the scurrying of tiny insects beneath the ground and its piglike nose can sniff them out. Within the aardvark's long, tubular snout is a sticky tongue that laps up ants just like an anteater's. Although its long snout makes the aardvark look a little bit like the Giant Anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), this is just convergent evolution; maaany unrelated animals that eat ants and termites have evolved adaptations similar to those of the anteater.

If you had to guess what the aardvark was related to, you would probably have a hard time. A lucky shot might lead to 'elephant' - yes, the aardvark is another Afrotherian, albeit one of a kind. The aardvark is the only extant member of Tubilidentata, an order known for odd, rootless teeth that fall out and are replaced like a shark's or crocodile's. (The aardvark's only consistent teeth are towards its cheeks.) The aardvark has not even changed much since mammals first evolved placentas. As the only extant member of this nigh-extinct, strange-as-hell order, the aardvark is considered a living fossil.


Blazing Seth by *skorpiusdeviant on deviantART

Oh, and Satan in furry form.