Nature, WTF?

This is real… AN AMPHIBIAN THAT LOOKS LIKE A SNAKE THAT LOOKS LIKE A PENIS! For more info, check out Grist. 

Bonobos are the swingers of the primate world (see what I did there?)

They practice free love in such a way that makes those 60’s flower children look like amateurs. 

These crazy cephalopods are wicked smart, and not into monogamy (just like your favorite local librarian)

montereybayaquarium:

Midnight Rambler

It was 3 a.m. on June 25, and Security Officer Clara Nilsen was making her regular rounds of the Aquarium’s ground-floor exhibits. Suddenly, she spied what looked like a banana peel on the floor, in front of our Shale Reef lookdown exhibit.

“That’s odd,” she thought to herself. “Our custodial staff is usually so thorough!”

Closer examination revealed that the “banana peel” was actually a live, healthy, fist-sized red octopus (Octopus rubescens) in the midst of a midnight ramble. But where had it come from? A little Cephalopod CSI provided the answer: There was an octopus-sized wet mark on the railing in front of the Shale Reef exhibit, and an eight-foot  “slime trail” leading across the floor. Mystery solved!

Clara, an experienced diver and underwater enthusiast, quickly picked up the escape artist and placed it in the water, where it “inked,” then disappeared under a rock.

Red Octopus Road Trip

But here’s where the story gets really interesting. As it turns out, the red octopus isn’t normally part of the Shale Reef exhibit, which is open on top so that visitors can look down onto an array of colorful invertebrates with the help of large, floating magnifiers.

Our husbandry staff believes the octopus hitchhiked into the Aquarium as a tiny, fingernail-size juvenile, attached to a rock or sponge. Once inside the exhibit, the reclusive, nocturnal octopus hid among the rocks, growing to its current size undetected. Based on the octopus’s size, our aquarists think it has been there—presiding over its own, secret octopus’s garden—for close to a year!

“We’d noticed that there weren’t as many crabs coming out at feeding time in that exhibit,” said Senior Aquarist Barbara Utter. “Now we realize that’s where they’d all been going—into the octopus’s tummy!”

What’s just as amazing is that none of our visitors, poring over the exhibit through the magnifiers eight hours a day, saw it either.

The clever stowaway is now behind the scenes, being readied for display in a Splash Zone exhibit. This time, you can bet that the intelligent, agile animal will be kept in an enclosed space—and closely watched!

Poisonous fake looking mofo right here.

earth-song:

Sapo arlequim

Do you know sloths can grow a type of moss on them because they move so slow? There is even a bird that specializes in eating sloth moss. 

I remember dating a guy like this in college.  

id-rather-be-free:

2012 04 21 - 21480 [3992] (by Chris Liberty)

Have you seen the Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus)? It’s not a crab. These living fossils are more closely related to spiders and scorpions, and just look at them. 

I know right?

Well it turns out that they have life saving blue blood that is an essential component in the making of needed pharmaceuticals.

They are also at risk of extinction. They die, we could die. If you love your own ass you should help save theirs. 

Albert Einstein

Casu marzu is a sheep’ milk cheese that has been deliberately infested by Piophila casei, the “cheese fly.” This casu marzu is an illegal Sardinian cheese that is served riddled with writhing maggots that try to jump into your eyeballs as you eat it.

“Coprophagia or coprophagy is the consumption of feces, from the Greek κόπρος copros (“feces”) and φαγεῖνphagein (“to eat”). Many animal species practice coprophagia as a matter of course; other species do not normally consume feces but may do so under unusual conditions. Coprophagy refers to many kinds of feces eating including eating feces of other species (heterospecifics), other individuals (allocoprophagy), or its own (autocoprophagy), those once deposited or taken directly from the anus.”

-Thanks Wikipedia

That’s right boys and girls, animals eat poo. You might be familiar with Canis familiaris:

Guilty little poo eater, at least this one can be trained not to. 

However, there are some other autocoprophagic (eat their own poo as business as usual) culprits that might surprise you. 

Don’t play innocent, Peter Cottontail… we know what you had for Easter Brunch.

This mom teaches her babies to eat their own poo, and her poo (family bonding time). All for getting the right microbes to digest eucalyptus, sure. 

I can assume the trunk plays a role here. 

Even this adorable baby Pygmy Hippo is guilty. 

This is just a sampling of coprohagic animals that one might encounter. Poo eating seems to serve a function in either maximizing nutrition in a low-quality diet (such as in rabbits) and also the transmission of needed bacteria to help break down food (as with both the koala and pygmy hippos). 

Poo, it’s what’s for dinner. 

I’ll take “Meaty Co-sexual Living Rocks” for 500, Alex.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2012/06/21/pyura-chilensis-the-closest-thing-to-getting-blood-from-a-stone/