trackback bathrobe: flutherother asks: Is there anything bizarre in the animal kingdom you want to share?

For example I learned about ant mills last week where ants get caught in a loop following each others pheromone trail until they die of exhaustion. Odd. Is there anything else strange going on out there?

15 Answers

Oh boy, have I got a website for you. I?m sorry if you don?t get anything productive done today.

I am starting to wonder if the easier question to ask is ?Is there anything boring in nature?? The weird just keeps on coming.

@glacial Weird and wonderful! There are also lemmings as shown in this film. Their behaviour is pretty odd.

@glacial I wondered about that. I thought it might have been the cameraman.

@flutherother Yeah, it?s one of the most famous nature documentary fakes ever. And Disney is supposed to be so ?family friendly?!

There are a lot of odd interrelationships between plants and insects. Check the video on the bottom of this to see male wasps pollinating orchids that lure them by masquerading as female wasps.

Dictyosteliomycota. They are single cell, amoeba like, organisms. When the food supply runs out they join together into a multicellular slug like thing to move to new areas in search of food. Once they find a nice spot they turn into a that produces spores from some of the cells to colonise the new area with the single cell creatures. If you were looking for alien life on earth this would be a good place to start.

I?m with @glacial. Everything in nature is weird if you look close enough. I?m not even going to click on that link they provided, because I already have gotten almost no work done today :-p

The first thing that came to mind for me was the thorny devil. It has a very strange method of locomotion! I found out lots of other strange facts on this site, for instance that they ?drink? directly from the sand because their skin is permeable, water is also channeled to their mouths by the spikes on their backs, they have a false head to throw off would-be predators, and they use latrines instead of defecating just anywhere!

@Lightlyseared: Wow, that?s fantastic. And here I thought that slime molds had just been invented by RPG designers!

@bookish1 Ok, but you have to promise you?ll have a look when you?re done for the night. :)

@glacial: I just looked? Some of that stuff is scary O_O But the video of the sarcastic fringeheads fighting by trying to eat each other?s faces was worth it!

@bookish1 Ha! Aren?t you glad humans don?t fight that way? That would be gross.

Some species of flatworm are hermaphroditic. In mating, two flatworms engage in a contest to determine which can impregnate the other.

THis parasite makes ants behave abnormally through mind control.

Homo sapiens are the most bizarre animal species that I know of and I have a BA in Zoology.

For animal mating behavior you may find this of interest. I remember browsing through the book in a bookstore when it first came out. It has some interesting information, but I found it a bit too cutesy in its presentation.