(Note: This post was delayed due to Blogger being down. That's a shame; I was rather eager to talk about this one.)
The green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is one of the most notorious snakes in popular culture. It is the heaviest snake in the world, one of the longest (second only to the reticulated python), and both the longest and heaviest extant boa. They are aquatic hunters; like crocodilians, they have eyes on top of their heads as opposed to on the sides.
This makes them look dopey, not evil.
I could rant on and on about how the anaconda's reputation has been over-exaggerated. The snake only grows about 20-30 feet maximum. Reports of anything longer may have resulted from tanned or shed skins, which can stretch substantially longer than the actual snakes. Similarly, any reports of man-eating are unfounded and probably false. They make even worse pets than Burmese and reticulated pythons due to their often erratic tempers and specific husbandry requirements.
Besides their massive size, the green anaconda has several other claims to fame. Like all boas, they give birth to live young (or, rather, the eggs hatch inside of the mother -ovovivapary). In all boas, but particularly noticeably in this species, the females are larger than the males. Green anacondas have the greatest sexual size dimorphism of any tetrapod, with females being almost twice as large as males.
This difference in size becomes crucial during mating season. During April-May, a female anaconda will remain motionless as up to 12 males follow her scent. They then proceed to cluster around her in an attempt to mate. Sometimes the biggest and strongest make it to her cloaca; other times, she handlessly-picks the male herself.
Other times still, some exceptionally horny males get confused for the massive female. This may or may not be accompanied by a pheromone shift; some males just mistake a larger male for the huge female, but in other types of aquatic serpent breeding balls, 'she-males' are quite common and deliberate. This is not only amusing, but favors small size in the males.
Anacondas are not the only snakes to make mating balls; other types of water snakes, such as the red-sided garter snakes native to Canada, have a similar behavior. Garters also bear live young. It has also been reported in a few more land-based snakes, leading to sexual size dimorphism in favor of the female...
...which is why it kinda pisses me off that female constrictors get so little love in popular culture. If any constrictor is big enough to swallow someone, it's probably a female.
I know, I know: Why am I doing another common creature? Chickens and pheasants do not sound particularly impressive, but these two have an interesting relationship that is worth a look.
The ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) is a pretty bird. As with most galliformes, the male is flashy, while the female is considerably more drab. You have probably seen a million of these birds in old hunting portraits. That's hardly surprising; they have traveled across the world as popular game birds. Wherever humans go, the pheasants go. (Note: As of right now, I have seen no info about these pheasants in Australia.)
Now, meet the Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido). It is native to Illinois. The males and females are about the same size, but, as with the pheasant, the males are considerably brighter. Males have bright yellow neck patches, and fill them with air to 'boom' as shown in the video. They are one of the few birds that mate in leks- short, organized competitions to win the hearts of hens. They are very wary of human development; they avoid power lines, and many of the flat areas used for their mating rituals are threatened by habitat loss.
With just a LITTLE more acid, this thing could fit on Pandora.
What the hell are these two galliformes doing on the same page? For the love of green apples, why do they both matter?
Long story short, the invasive pheasants are douchebags to the prairie-chickens and many other birds. The female pheasant lays her own eggs in the nest of the prairie-chicken. Since the pheasant chicks hatch out first, the female assumes the nestling is hers, and her own eggs die. If you know anything about cuckoo birds, this should sound familiar.
Humans have a history of wrecking other species' lives. It's one thing to introduce a species that replaces another's ecological niche, but a whole new level of sick to introduce a nest parasite. Sure, doing so took some burden off of hunting North American birds, but this COULD get as bad as rabbits in Australia.
The prairie-chickens will probably be gone within a decade; enjoy them while they last. Those air sacs and crests on the male could easily be monster fodder. While you're at it, when was the last time that a monster creator put enough effort into their ecology to design interspecific relationships like this? Get creative!
...What? YOU GOT A HUGE, COLORFUL ARTICLE TODAY. Don't complain.
Holy cats. I hate to sound racist, but...wait...are those black people? That video is from the African country of Tanzania, and those people look light-skinned, but they certainly aren't Caucasian. There are other traits that make them look African. Again, no offense meant.
The people in that video up there are albinos. That is not a racist term. That is the exact same sort of albinism that you see in Burmese pythons, that white gorilla, lab mice, and those white frogs at Wal-Mart. It just so happens to occur in people as well. Even so, not all white people, or animals, can be properly called albinos. Why?
Albinism (derived from Latin albus, -a, -um, "white") makes any given organism a lot lighter than usual. It is commonly thought of as the trait that turns animals white, and, as such, tends to be incorrectly oversimplified into "any white animal." It is found across many, many species, from fish to humans.
Albinism is a simple recessive trait - that is, something can be 'heterozygous for albinism.' That means that the parents of an albino progeny will look completely normal. There is a 25% chance of getting an albino baby (of pretty much any animal) if both parents are heterozygous.
What I said up there can be roughly translated into this little box.
Although 'albinism' is the common name for this mutation, 'amelanism' would be more accurate. The mutation stops the production of melanin (Gr. melanos, black), a common natural pigment. As the name implies, it determines the amount of dark coloration on an animal. Since albinism essentially turns that one pigment off (making the organism white), why not get more to the point? As you will see, not all albinos are plain white...but they all lack black pigment.
For mammals, melanin is the only pigment that they have to work with, so they end up being uniformly white. This is not so for birds, reptiles, amphibians, or fish - an albino Burmese python, for example, also has some yellow pigments to play with after albinism. The same also went for that crazy albino retic from my reticulated python entry - it had orange, peach and purple, of all things! A lot of people do not realize that albinism is just one giant PhotoShop tool that Mother Nature likes to play around with every so often.
Tweaking pigmentation is an awful lot like editing a picture in PhotoShop. For mammals, you can only work in a sort of sepia grayscale, but everything else has at least RGB to tinker with. This is why a lot of mammals share similar patterns and colors. When was the last time you saw a bright purple mammal?
Albino specimens also have vision problems. As with the light skin typical of albinos, the eyes also lack (or have very low) pigment. This makes them appear anywhere from light blue to the infamous pink with red pupils. Having pink eyes is not necessarily a criterion, but it is still a good rule of thumb when trying to pick out albinism from other types of whiteness.
That said, it's time for that pop quiz I promised. Which of the animals below are albinos?
The first two pictures - the white peacock and white tiger cubs - are not albinos. They are different variations of leucistic (from Greek leukos, white). Leucistics have no hard and fast rules or maladies like albinos. Even the heritability of the various leucistic types can vary. There are about a million types of leucism. Unlike normal albinism, leucism gels perfectly well with black.
So, yes, that infamous albino peacock is leucistic. It is hard to see the dark eyes on the peacock, but that it is not albinism is apparent when a white peacock meets and mates a regular blue peacock:
Remember what I said about albinism being a simple recessive trait? Breeding a truly albino peacock to a wild-type peacock should result in all normals that, when bred together, will yield 25% albino offspring. That's not what we're seeing here. Instead, we got a pied peacock due to that particular type of leucism's incomplete dominance. Eye colors aside, albinism doesn't roll that way.
White tigers are not albino, either. I have heard rumors of albino tigers, but the bold black and white specimens seen in Vegas are not albino. If they were truly albino, they would be completely white - the black stripes should be a warning flag. They have a type of leucism with a similar heritability pattern to albinism (i.e. it's simple-recessive). The gene is linked to a trait for severely crossed eyes; all white tigers are at least slightly cross-eyed. There are, supposedly, albino tigers - pure white tigers with no stripes at all - but the evidence for that is sketchy at best.
The squirrel is a real albino. I was not trying anything sneaky with that one.
These last two were trick questions. The blizzard corn snake (Elaphe guttata guttata/Pantherophis guttatus guttatus, depending on your gender today) is part albino, but true albino/amelanistic corn snakes look like something from Woodstock:
To get a truly 'albino' look, an albino corn snake has to be bred with an anerythristic (i.e. "lacking red") individual. (Since there are two types of anerythrism in corns, I may as well add that, should you desire a blizzard corn, the cross is Anery B/Charcoal x amelanistic/albino. Utilizing Anery A instead yields a snow corn, which usually looks far less pure than the blizzard above. Both are often mistakenly called albinos.) The resulting offspring will all be normal-looking hets for both traits. Breed them again for a 1/16 chance of a whiter snake. The Siamese cat is also a type of albino. In this case, the mutation is incomplete and temperature-sensitive. Like many albino animals, Siamese cats are susceptible to eye issues - mainly, crossed eyes - and tend to prefer daytime hours because they have poor night vision.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around. Keep your eyes peeled for mistakes, and somebody please correct me if I made any!
I need to stop doing invertebrates. They have become my comfort zone. Things without spines are just so weird that it's easy to add a little more to them, make them HUGE, then send them on a rampage through Tokyo.
This is what you get for turning my kind into sushi rolls!
Here's something with a spine.
Yes, those little jelly-fish like creatures above are part of Chordata, just like you, me, and that cow in your burger. Tunicates are the most primitive of chordates, only possessing a notochord in their larval stages (if at all). The primitive structures are consumed as the organism grows; much like how one's brain turns to mush if all one does is stare at a television all day, the stationary sorts of tunicate simply do not need their brains and spinal cords. Some types are stationary, some pulse like jellyfish, and some even dwell in the abyss.
The little fellows above are called sea salps (that is not a misspelling). They start their lives as tiny, gel-bodied creatures called oozoids. One oozoid pumps out a swarm of clone-oozoids, and they form a chain as seen in the video.
One aggregated into chains, the individuals are called blastoozoids. These chains can be up to 15 feet long, and are frequently encountered around Antarctica. Luckily, salps are harmless; they feed entirely on plankton.
This would be one of the scariest sights in the world if it wanted to eat you.
Sea salps in a chain start as females, then mature into males over time. The females are thus successfully fertilized throughout the chain, allowing more jelly globs into the seas. There's a reason why tunicates are some of the most common creatures in the ocean, but that is no excuse to not study them as we would any other animal.
In fact, recent research suggests that sea salps might be slowing down global climate change. If you ignore the ads here, you might just learn something.
Some of you are probably wondering exactly what makes this beetle, the green rose chafer (Cetonia aurata), so special. It looks almost like a bigger Japanese beetle, only far less damaging to one's garden. As the video above demonstrates, they start life as part of nature's cleanup crew, and are native to Europe. Honestly, I did not even know that the green rose chafer existed until recently. It's a funny story.
In 2009, I went on a (crappy) trip to Kansas City. In Lawrence, the place where my cousin was going to college, there was a neat little shop that sold a bunch of nature-related things. They had dinosaur skeleton replicas, bug snacks, whole taxodermies of rattlesnakes, and a bunch of neat little gadgets and jewelery pieces with bugs inside. That's where I got my 'higurashi' necklace from. (Note: This was probably a misnomer on my part. Turns out that the 'higurashi' is a very specific type of Japanese cicada.)
Recently, I tried to rediscover the computer mice that I had found in that shop. On one of the first sites I came across, not only did they have the scorpion mouse I had seen, but had computer mice with lucite-preserved rose chafers in them. They were pretty green beetles, but, otherwise, seemed unimpressive.
Then I found out that Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, had had an interesting experience with one of these beetles:
"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."
Woah. That is creepy, cool, and utterly bizarre, all at the same time. A bug similar and related to the Egyptian scarab defied its natural habits in a 'speak of the devil' sort of way; I'd be more confident in my work as a spiritual psychologist if that happened to me, too!
Mind, the beetle in the computer mouse probably is not the exact same type of rose chafer; usually, Chinese bug preservers stick to oriental wildlife. An auction for what must be the most awesome clock ever cites a different insect entirely. One awesome thing still led to another.
There is no such thing as coincidence. The only thing is inevitability.
Why couldn't Jung have been this hot? Thanks for the update, CLAMP!
Cephalopods - the family containing squids, octopi, cuttlefish, and nautili - are some of the trippiest members of the animal kingdom. They squirt ink, glow in the dark, and have some of the best mimicry ever seen in nature. It's as if that whole class of animals had taken a dose of LSD in the Late Cambrian and kept doing it for a few hundred million years.
The blue-ringed octopus (genus Hapalochlaena) also went to the drug-fueled evolutionary rave party. Like many cephalopods, it has has amazing camouflage capabilities. It can blend in perfectly with its habitat (the tide pools of the Pacific Ocean, including those around Australia) by quickly changing the color of its stretchy skin. It is a small octopus that only feeds on crabs and other crustaceans, but size does not matter in this case. If threatened, it becomes a bright, aesthetically-pleasing creature with bright blue rings.
Lady GaGa's next outfit design. *SHOT.*
It is, of course, poisonous.
The little octopus warns you with its blue-spotted, gold-yellow body. Any predators stupid enough to attack something with spots like that are doomed. The poison this octopus uses does not just cripple - it kills. It kills ANYTHING.
Remember that poison from the fugu fish, tetrodotoxin? Yeah. This octopus uses that poison. There was a reason I did not detail its effects last time; I was saving them for this entry.
First off, unlike being poked by a puffer fish's spines, the bite of this octopus barely hurts. You probably do not even know that you have been bitten until your lungs stop working, which happens within minutes of a bite. Your body is totally paralyzed, leaving you unable to signal for help as the venom slowly kills you. It doesn't matter whether you are a crab or just an asinine human. It will still ****ing kill you.
MWAHAHAHA! Come into the void!
You are aware of every minute of it. This poison does not knock you out. Instead, it lets you contemplate the dumbass mistake you made of touching the acid octopus as your body slowly shuts down. After all, it wasn't out to get you.
If you DO manage to get medical help, and survive the first 24 hours of poisoning, you are probably in the clear. If you were alone when you got the bite, you're probably fucked. Sorry.
Do not enrage the Great Old Ones, for they have powers of psychedelic EVIL! IA IA CTHULHU FHTAGN!
Mice, although sometimes disease-ridden and shocking to find in one's house, are also cute. Seriously, if they aren't in your base, stealing your grain, they are fairly innocuous, quiet creatures that mean no harm to anyone. They need to feed their families too, after all.
So, suppose you would like to make a mousy monster for, say, a television series. How does one go about removing the cute and emphasizing that, wow, a rodent can chew someone out of house and home?
The first step is to remove the fur. Mammals and birds in general are very ugly creatures without fur or feathers. Sphinx cats are popular as the pets of Powers movie villain Doctor Evil, and any dog can become a hellhound as soon as you take off its fur. Hieronymous Bosch was particularly fond of using featherless baby birds as monsters because, let's face it: If a featherless chicken with a huge head started chasing after you, no matter how big the chicken was, you would think it was freaky.
One example of hairless dog, the Peruvian Inca Orchid. It just needs two more heads to guard the gates to the underworld.
The second step would be to show the teeth. Rodents have huge buckteeth that never stop growing. They need to constantly gnaw at things to keep them filed down, which grants the order its name (rodo = 'I gnaw' in Latin, which rodents certainly do).
Just for yet another hint of Hades, let's put them underground. That's a good reason to make them furless, too. It'll also give them less need for vision; as a certain Avatar review on YT pointed out, squinty eyes indicate something sinister about the individual, even if they are squinty for function. Humans are visual creatures; anything with dissimilar senses seems foreign, creepy and weird to us.
While we're at it, shall we add a hint of social insect colonial structure? You know, the social structure that X amount of movie aliens has?
Including THE Aliens.
Presto. You have just found the naked mole rat.
Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) live in the deserts of East Africa. You probably will not see them most of the time, however, as they live underground in complex burrows. Despite their hugeass teeth, they are herbivores. They also eat their own excrement, but let's not get into why certain animals do that. Let's also not get into 2Molerats1Cup.
As stated earlier, naked mole rats are one of the few eusocial mammals. That means that, like ants, termites, bees, and wasps, they have colonies with a single fertile queen rat, a few fertile males, and a class of sterile working females. Their burrows are more analogous to anthills than the domiciles of other mammals.
These little desert dwellers also have their teeth exposed. This aids in digging out their tunnels. Nature does not intend to freak us out, although some of you may be going "uhhh...really?" after seeing some of these creatures.
As if they were not good horror monsters based on aesthetics alone, naked mole rats also lack Substance P. Substance P is what makes most mammals, like us and other rodents, feel pain. The scientists conducting these studies were testing specifically for the type of pain caused by burning sensations and other lasting injuries. Regardless of exactly what kind of pain we are talking about, the idea that something could be, though not invulnerable, impervious to the sensation of pain makes for a good monster. Even wrist-cutters realize that, if you cannot feel pain, you can feel little else.
Bring it on!
On the plus side, they have the potential to solve all of mankind's longevity issues. These naked animals are the most long-lived of any rodent (around 30 years), and do not get cancer. Period. One of mankind's most-feared diseases is unheard of in this little monster. That was totally not a Lady GaGa reference.
One can easily picture a horror novel written about these guys: An innocent, well-meaning group of scientists experiment with naked mole rats in an attempt to isolate some of their awesomeness. The results? Use your imagination.
Or, alternatively, have a clip from the British television series Merlin:
Your resident lover of weird creatures, foods, etc. Likes going outside and looking for faeries in whatever form they choose to take. Is fascinated by parasites, worms, snakes, and anything with wings.
