Favorite Freaky Species

[Napoléon]

You're going to like this:

[Erinome]

Toungue eating louse, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua

[padraic]

Quote:You're going to like this:

Baby mole?

[popeyespappy]

(10th June 2012 00:27)padraic Wrote:  

Quote:You're going to like this:

Baby mole?

Naked mole rat.


Pic probably belongs in area 69....

---

(9th June 2012 18:31)aleialoura Wrote:  Toungue eating louse, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua

That was the first thing I thought of but zombie creating fungus won out in the end.

[Godschild]

(9th June 2012 07:21)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote:  The platypus - irrefutable evidence for an intelligent designer.

By "intelligent", I mean "completely whacked on cocaine and 'ludes".

Fuck. Ludes? I just dated myself. LOL

Yes you did you old fart.

---

(9th June 2012 07:03)popeyespappy Wrote:  Cordyceps fungi

Now that's what I would call pest control. Morbidly cool.

---

(9th June 2012 15:28)Napoleon Wrote:  You're going to like this:

Can't trust anything with beady little eyes.

[apophenia]

My favourite freaky species — an animal with behaviors so bizarre, we may never fully understand them.

---

---

[liam]

(10th June 2012 09:37)apophenia Wrote:  


My favourite freaky species — an animal with behaviors so bizarre, we may never fully understand them.

---

---

to say the vetruvian man was supposed to have perfect proportions he wasn't really packing was he?

the thing that disappointed me most about the tree lobster is that the picture makes it look like it goes all the way around his hand

[Chuck]

(9th June 2012 07:26)popeyespappy Wrote:  . They create mind controlled zombies.


Zombie shroms anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyc...ilateralis

---

Sacculina is a crustacean turning another crustacean into a zombie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacculina

The truly freakish thing about sacculina is not how completely it controls the crab it parasitizes. It is the truly amazing metamorphosis, totally unparalleled in any other animal we know of, that the parasite itself goes through to accomplish the task. Basically the sacculina starts as a full fledged shrimp like arthropod. It lateches onto the crab and drills through a weak spot on the crab shell to injects a few of its own cells into the crab. The cells than grow into fugus like endoparasite that literally sends tendrils into every part of the crab's body to control every aspect of the Shelly's bio and neuro chemistry. It will even change the crab's sex, so the crab will enable the parasite to grow, and spawn.

This metamorphosis from a full fledged athropod adult into fugus like endoparasite is indeed very challenging to explain.

[Moros Synackaon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsiptera

Quote:Sperm passes through the opening in a process termed hypodermic insemination.[1] The offspring consume their mother from the inside in a process known as hemocelous vivaparity.

From an endoparasite like Sacculina.