The Huge, Bee-Decapitating Hornet That Can’t Survive Group Hugs

Asian giant hornets trying to make friends with some honey bees just kidding they're going to massacre the little things.

Thirty Asian giant hornets, following a scent laid by their scout, descend on a hive of honey bees and get straight to the decapitations. The hornets snag the tiny bees and pop their heads right off using their enormous mandibles. Here a head, there a head. Desperately, the bees try to sting the hornets, yet they can’t puncture the giants’ armor.

Here a head, there a head—pop pop pop. One by one the bees fall, a single hornet taking down as many as 20 victims a minute. At that rate, the tiny band of marauders can wipe out a colony of 30,000 bees in a few hours, a glut of beheadings that makes the French Revolution look like Dance Dance Revolution.

The remarkable Asian giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, grows to almost two inches in length and can sting through a rain jacket. And unlike a honey bee, it can sting repeatedly, its venom breaking down flesh and overloading kidneys. The hornet is formidable, to say the least, but the native honey bees it menaces have an ingenious defense: They form a ball around the scout hornet and vibrate to cook the invader to death, keeping the colony’s coordinates out of the hands of the scout’s soldiers back at base.

The Asian giant hornet is in many ways a modern winged T. rex. It’s an apex predator, capable of taking down any other insect and incapacitating any mammal dumb or unfortunate enough to disturb it. Should you come across one, don’t move, as the good doctor Grant always said (OK fine, maybe he was wrong about that).

Just ask actual doctor Stephen Martin, an entomologist at the University of Salford. Once while observing a nest, he and a colleague—sans suits—displeased the hornets and got themselves attacked. “You close your eyes, you close your mouth, you grit your teeth, because it’s quite frightening,” he says. “The other guy just couldn’t cope and he ran away, and he got stung several times. I was fine.” If the hornets don’t take you to be a threat, they’ll leave you alone. No sense in wasting venom and risk getting squashed, after all.

Get stung, though, and you’ll want to go ahead and start considering a trip to the hospital. The hornet’s venom breaks down flesh cells, leaving you with a divot, while neurotoxins glitch nerves, resulting in an intense, searing pain that one victim described as having a hot nail hammered into you. (Had he actually ever had a hot nail hammered into him? Seems like a really specific comparison.) Because of its size, the hornet can inject a whole lot of venom—you can end up with a teaspoon of the stuff in your system if a swarm jabs you 30 or 40 times. Catch enough stings and your kidneys will shut down, or even your heart if you have a weak ticker. If you happen to be allergic, it’ll be anaphylactic shock instead.

What makes the Asian giant hornet particularly problematic is its size. Because this thing is so huge, so is its nest, which can weigh more than 20 pounds. That would snap a tree branch, so instead the hornet holes up in, well, holes in the ground—where unsuspecting humans can stroll too close. If you do, don’t bother running. These things can fly at up to 15 miles per hour, and even faster if they’ve got a good tailwind.

This is a lot like a stork delivering a baby except it’s the exact opposite.

While an Asian giant hornet can ruin your day, it can ruin a honey bee’s life. But the native bee it menaces has evolved a rather unconventional way to fight back: group hugs.

Should a hornet scout find itself a beehive, the occupants won’t rush out to intercept it. Instead, the bees will let the scout in to mark the location with pheromones for its comrades to follow. It’s a trap: On cue the workers swarm, forming a frantic, living ball around the intruder. The bees vibrate, revving up their body temperatures to begin cooking the hornet to death. All the while, carbon dioxide builds up inside the ball.

The bees also exploit a unique bit of insect anatomy: The hornet doesn’t have a heart—literally and I suppose kind of figuratively when you think about it—and instead pumps blood with contractions of its body. “The bees just crowd it and crowd it and crowd it like a boa constrictor, so they prevent the hornet from being able to pump blood around its body,” Martin says. This further raises the hornet’s body temperature.

“So it’s this combination of heating them, building up the carbon dioxide in the middle of it, and then restricting their blood flow by effectively squeezing them,” Martin adds. The hornet scout eventually dies, taking with it the coordinates of the hive. It may have picked off a bee here and there in the struggle, and some of the workers themselves may have been crushed or asphyxiated, but the hive is saved.

It’s a remarkable countermeasure that has evolved over millennia. That’s time the introduced European honey bee ain’t got. It hasn’t stumbled upon the swarm countermeasure, so the hornet scout inevitably marks a European bee nest and returns with its friends. The marauders slaughter every adult, yet don’t bother eating their relatively calorie-poor bodies. Instead, the hornets take the bee larvae back to their nest to feed to their own larvae, shuttling back and forth. The hornets will even post guards at the hive entrance to protect their booty overnight if they haven’t finished looting in one day.

Beekeepers tending the European variety in China and Japan don’t so much appreciate all this. Some attach special guards to their hives to keep the hornets out, while others take a rather more active approach, hiring people to volley the things with tennis or badminton rackets. (At least one overachieving beekeeper in Japan employs the enviable trap-plus-badminton-racket technique.) In wealthier Japan, beekeepers actually pay some brave soul to remove nearby hornet nests—apparently they’ve got solid health care over there or something.

The hornet’s apparent attitude problem isn’t exactly great for PR. “With hornets, people ask us often what use are they, they just sting us, they hurt us, we should just get rid of them all,” Martin says. “We’ve got the bees, they make honey, they work really hard, they’re really good.”

Read more at Wired Science

Meet the Bird That Lies and Tricks Its Way Into Sex

Disneyland’s a lie. Mickey Mouse, for instance, isn’t a mouse at all, but a costume with a person inside. The architecture, too, is deceptive. That giant castle isn’t as tall as it looks, because designers deployed something called forced perspective, making the windows near the top smaller so they seem farther away.

It’s some next-level sneakiness that the great bowerbird would find laughable. It was deploying its own visual tricks long before Walt Disney came around. The male great bowerbird constructs a beautiful tubular structure out of twigs, depositing bones and snail shells to make courts at either end. He arranges these in a very specific way, though, opposite of what’s going on in Disneyland: By deploying forced perspective, the male bowerbird actually makes his court look smaller. Also very unlike Disneyland, he does it to help him get laid.

This is the saga of bowerbird hanky-panky, a romance packed with more lies, illusions, and thievery than a soap opera—with none of the insufferable soft focus.

In Australia and New Guinea, 24 species of bowerbird undertake some of the most bizarre mating rituals among avians. Some males build big cave-like structures—known as bowers—out of sticks, clearing a court in front where they hoard objects of very particular colors. A pile of blue junk, for instance, might include berries and the odd piece of blue plastic. Other bowerbirds build simpler, smaller “avenue” bowers—two rows of sticks arranged vertically to create a kind of tunnel.

The male great bowerbird is in this latter camp. Among the builders, his bower is kind of meh if I’m being honest: He chooses drab rocks and snail shells and bones to decorate his court.

The female bowerbird doesn’t really care, though. Here’s how the seduction goes down. The male flutters into a bush above his bower and calls to the female. Should she join him, he’ll drop down to his crib and take up position in one of the courts. “He starts strutting about and then she goes inside [the bower], and he struts about a bit more and makes a funny sound,” says evolutionary ecologist John Endler of Australia’s Deakin University. “It’s sort of like, tick tick tick tick.”

Now pretend you’re a female great bowerbird. The tight walls of the structure direct your attention to the court. If the male had placed objects of any size willy-nilly throughout the court, to your eye the court would seem fairly large: Objects farther away of course look smaller and give a sense of depth.

Notice the arrangement of larger objects farther away from the bower. This tricks the female into thinking that the court is smaller or, at the very least, that she’s on acid.

But that’s not what you see here. The bones and stones and such all look to be the same size because the male is tricking you. He’s placed the larger objects farther away from your eye and the smaller ones closer to you. “The effect of that is to make a more even pattern,” says Endler. “It would probably have an effect of making the court look smaller and therefore the bird itself might look larger.” He’s using the art of forced perspective to show off.

That’s not the only visual illusion the bowerbird uses. In another part of the mating process, he takes up a position off to the side of the bower entrance, popping just his head into view to wave objects at the female, real needy-like. The males who find the best, most colorful objects are the most desirable, after all.

Here’s where it gets interesting: While the outside of the bower looks fairly plain, the male has painted the inside red by chewing up bits of plants and fruits. He didn’t do that to get the female in the mood—he’s actually messing with her color vision. The male picks up a typically colorful object, which she sees set against the dullness of the court, and gives it a wave. He throws the object away, grabs a new one, and gives that a wave. He’ll also flash the vivid crest on the back of his head every so often for good measure.

All the while the female’s eyes are adjusting to the red paint lining the bower. As this is happening, her retina is comparing the data from its red-sensitive cones and green-sensitive cones in order to sense colors.

But the paint is overwhelming the red cones. “The effect on the bowerbird is she’s going to become less sensitive to red light, which means that green objects are going to be brighter,” Endler says. The battle between red cones and green cones has tipped toward the greens. (Human peepers work the same: You can see how tightly green and red are paired in your eyeball with this demo. By staring at green stripes, you desensitize your green cones, so when you look at something white, red magically replaces the green.) Indeed, the male will wave a disproportionate amount of green objects to red ones in order to impress her.

The male great bowerbird’s beautiful crest is as alluring to female bowerbirds as the human male’s fedora is to women. Wait…

After an average of a minute or so of all this, the male will run around the back. If the female is receptive, she’ll let him mate with her. If not, she’ll just burn him and fly away.

Males don’t only have to worry about how to best seduce the ladies. Opportunistic males will often tear down their neighbors’ bowers or steal objects left unattended. This is relatively rare if bowers are nice and spaced out, perhaps over a half mile apart, but as density increases, so does the marauding. “There’s the other side of the story: If you’re going away to maraud someone, your own bower might get ruined,” Endler says. “Sounds a lot like politicians, doesn’t it?”

Read more at Wired Science

The Mystery of Solenodon, the Mammal That Bites Like a Snake

You’re a mammal, so pat yourself on the back—no, not you, lizard people from outer space posing as high-ranking members of the US government. Mammals have got it made: Fur to keep you warm, milk to nourish your young, relatively big brains to keep you not dumb.

What you don’t have, though, is a venomous bite … unless you are in fact a lizard person from outer space. Or, better yet, a mysterious mammal called the solenodon. They’re one of just a handful of mammals with venom glands that deliver a powerful toxin. But wait, there’s more: The solenodon’s nose has a ball-and-socket joint like the human hip, making it crazy flexible. And a lady solenodon’s teats are … oddly placed. Let’s just leave it at that for now.

If you find yourself in the forests of Cuba or Hispaniola, take a deep breath. It might smell kind of like a goat: musky, earthy, maybe a bit like wet dog, definitely pungent. Now look at your feet. You might find strange conical holes in the dirt, with scratch marks ringing the edges.

Chances are you’re not far behind the aromatic wonder that is the solenodon. Foraging typically at night, it jams its long, highly mobile ball-and-socket schnoz into the soil to root around for invertebrates, things like worms and insects. Its many sensitive whiskers help it feel around the dirt, which is just as well because the solenodon ain’t got much going on in the eyesight department.

“They’ve got tiny little eyes and they don’t seem to have particularly good vision, although they’re really sensitive to light,” says ecologist Joe Nunez-Mino. While not many solenodons live in captivity, the ones Nunez-Mino has come across run like hell if you switch a light on. Clearly, this is an animal most comfortable dancing in the dark.

But should you be lucky enough to bump into a solenodon in the wild, you’re in for a treat. Mildly put, this is a singular mammal. It’s about as big as a large rat with a tail to match. (Looks kind of like a Rodent of Unusual Size, don’t it?) It’s got long, sharp nails and ambles with a wobbly, I’m-just-coming-off-anesthesia gait. Females with their young are particularly awkward. “The teats are sort of in the armpit of the rear legs, and sometimes the females will kind of run around dragging the babies,” Nunez-Mino says.

An adult solenodon at right with a juvenile at left. Between them are rocks of indeterminate age.

All laughing at the expense of the solenodon aside, please no touchy this animal if you happen to find one. Not just because solenodon is endangered, but because it has a venomous bite, an extreme rarity for a mammal. (Shrews have a venomous bite too, and male platypuses have venomous spurs on their hind legs, though the males only use these to fight each other.) Sitting underneath the solenodon’s lower incisors are salivary glands that send venom along grooves in its teeth. All the solenodon has to do is break the victim’s skin—or cuticle, in the case of insects—for the venom to get in there and work its magic.

From the few reports of human envenomations, it sounds like the experience is no picnic. Symptoms are similar to a snake bite, including localized swelling and severe pain, perhaps lasting several days. (Ask your doctor if solenodon venom is right for you!)

If you’re lucky, though, you’ll get what’s known as a dry bite—that is, the critter will nip you without producing venom. And that makes good sense from an energy perspective. Snakes know what’s up here: “Snakes quite often will bite and not inject venom because using venom is actually quite wasteful unless you really have to,” says Nunez-Mino.

Check out the solenodon’s tiny eyes. It’s pretty much the Howard Moon of the forest.

Even if you do get a dose of solenodon venom, you’re getting off easy. The venom incapacitates other victims like lizards, and in laboratory tests, scientists dosed mice with the venom and recorded breathing problems, convulsions, and paralysis. And the solenodon doesn’t stop at prey smaller than it. “There’s one report of a solenodon kept in captivity in London that ate an entire chicken,” says molecular biologist Rodrigo Ligabue Braun of Brazil’s Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. “He bit a chicken and then ate all the parts he wanted.”

If the also-venomous shrews are any indication, the solenodon may not always be killing and consuming its prey outright. Shrews will often bite and incapacitate their victims, then drag them to their dens and come back later and gnaw on the comatose things. The solenodon may well do the same. (Oh relax—it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things. The tarantula hawk is a wasp that stings, well, tarantulas, then drags them back to a den for its larva to devour it alive over the course of several weeks.)

Now the why. Why would the solenodon evolve venomousness while pretty much every mammal on Earth gets along fine without it? Well, it may not be the case of the solenodon evolving venomousness, as much as other mammals losing it.

Mammals have it made right now. But for tens of millions of years, puny little mammals spent the bulk of their time running away from dinosaurs. Many ancient mammals may have enlisted venom so they could better defend themselves.

But the game changed big time when the dinosaurs died out. “From an evolutionary point of view,” says Braun, “you’d be expending too much of your resources producing venom in an environment that did not have the same kind of prey or predators that it had before.” So it might have made sense for mammal lineages to evolve away from venomousness.

For whatever reason, though, solenodon held onto it. Indeed, solenodon is a truly ancient mammal, having diverged some 76 million years ago—not long (in evolutionary time, that is) before the dinos met their match in the form of an asteroid punching Earth right in the face. (Braun notes, though, that debate still swirls around the evolution of venom in mammals. It may be that venomousness was rare in early mammals, as it is today, and solenodon has just always been an oddity.)

While venom can land solenodon a meal and protect it from its natural enemies, it won’t do a lick of good against humans. Habitat destruction on Cuba and Hispaniola has hit the solenodon hard. Add to that the invasive species that humans have brought along and you’ve got a massacre.

Dogs in particular are a problem on Hispaniola, “although we’ve also recorded or heard of cases where the solenodon has bitten a dog and the dog has died from presumably the venom,” Nunez-Mino says. Feral cats, too, aren’t just a potential executioner, but competition: The felines target the lizards and large insects and such that the solenodon relies on to survive.

Read more at Wired Science

This Toad Isn’t Eating a Bug. The Bug Is Eating It

What's the matter, vicious beetle larva got your tongue?

Let me get real about amphibians: The things are cocky. They’re so much bigger than their helpless prey—things like worms and insects—that they tend to indiscriminately snatch up anything that’s a manageable size.

But like the Mighty Ducks rose up to defeat the seemingly unbeatable Team Iceland, one beetle has evolved to put amphibians in their place. As larvae, beetles of the genus Epomis actually entice frogs and toads and salamanders to attack them, then whip around and sink their huge, hooked jaws into the attackers, slowly draining the life out of them. When the larvae transform into adult beetles, they get right back to it, only now they dispatch amphibians even more brutally. Like, a kind of brutality that involves snipping a frog’s leg muscles so it can’t escape.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a toad. You’re hopping along when something catches your eye: a beetle larva shifting its jaws and antennae back and forth. Your brain tells you that anything that moves and that’s small enough for you to overpower is probably food.

So it’s decided. As you draw closer to your victim, its movements get more rapid. You draw closer still, and strike.

One of two things is going to happen at this point, neither of which will end—how should I say—well for you. You’ll get the larva in your mouth and it’ll sink its jaws into your tongue, or the larva will get you somewhere on your skin—your lips or throat or flank. The larva is just too fast for you, and may be so smooth that it can repel that famous tongue of yours.

The second outcome, though, is you manage to swallow it. Not that that will do you any good. Scientists once watched a toad nab and successfully swallow a Epomis larva, only to throw it up two hours later. At first the larva lay motionless, but then suddenly it snapped out of it and attacked the toad again.

So … you’re screwed. That larva ain’t about to let go. In fact, it starts digesting your tissue. But strangely, none of your blood is coming out, and indeed “when you slice a larva open you don’t see it full of red blood,” says Gil Wizen, an entomologist at the University of Toronto. What’s probably going on here, Wizen reckons, is the larva is secreting enzymes onto the toad to melt its flesh. “So you can say that the digestion is already beginning before the food enters the mouth,” he says.

Those double hooked jaws sink into amphibian flesh and don’t let go. How’s that for attachment issues.

All the while, you go about the life of a toad. You take a swim and gobble up insects. You will not, however, turn into a prince, because after two days, you’re so weakened you can no longer move. It’s at this point that the larva enters what Wizen calls “the predation stage.”

The larva begins chewing more, says Wizen, “and what we see is that it sort of tears tissues from the amphibian’s body. After a few hours the amphibian is reduced to just a pile of bones and just a little bit of skin.”

But this was no crime of passion. The larva is more like a serial killer. Over the course of its development, it can take down as many as nine toads, frogs, newts, or salamanders. It’s got such an appetite because it goes through three phases, known as instars, in which it needs ever more food. During the first instar, when it’s relatively small, it’ll take down just one victim. In the second instar, though, it’s two or three. In the last, as many as five.

And like a serial killer, its methods grow ever more complex as it matures. The adult beetle ups its game into some seriously sadistic stuff. While it isn’t as picky an eater as the larva, feeding on worms and other insects and even injured rodents and birds, it too loves it an amphibian.

The adult beetle doesn’t lure the victim like the larva, but instead goes full-tilt rodeo with it, jumping on a toad’s rear and sinking its jaws into the flesh. These jaws are different, though. “The jaws of the larva are hooked, modified to lock onto the amphibian’s skin,” says Wizen, “whereas with the [adults], they have serrated jaws.” The adult’s mouthparts aren’t modified to hold on tight, so it has to work fast.

The beetle has jumped onto the rear of the toad for a reason. Once the victim stops bucking, the beetle makes a small incision on the lower back. “We don’t think they damage the spine of the amphibian,” Wizen says. “But what we do think—we still need to confirm this—is that they cut the connecting muscles [of the legs] so the amphibian doesn’t have any way to escape.”

With the bronco incapacitated for good, the beetle can take its time gnawing on the victim alive. When it fills up, it trots off. If the toad isn’t yet dead, something like a bird or mammal will happily finish it off.

The whole weird circus defies belief—and bends the rules of nature. In only around 10 percent of cases is a predator smaller than its prey. Beyond that, the relationship between the Epomis beetle and its amphibian victims may in fact be unprecedented (as far as science knows). Wizen and his colleagues cite only one other case in which a prey becomes the predator: A scientist in the ’80s transferred rock lobsters, which eat snails known as whelks, to an environment with an abnormally large population of the prey, which flipped and became the predators. But that was human meddling. Epomis has evolved over millennia to turn amphibians—the eternal enemies of insects—into prey.

The relationship also resists definition. While Epomis is certainly predatory, it’s also in a way parasitic. As a larva, it doesn’t necessarily kill its victims, sometimes filling up enough and just dropping off (indeed, Wizen has collected toads with the tell-tale scars of an attack). And as I mentioned earlier, adults also don’t necessarily kill their victims either. So Epomis seems to be a kind of predator-parasite hybrid.

Read more at Wired Science

The Voracious Fish That Looks Like a Pug and Stings Like a Bee

The only way a stargazer could turn its frown upside down is if you rotated this picture 180 degrees.

We’ve all had that moment. You get a half hour away from the house and realize, I left the stove on, didn’t I. Or in the case of two particularly irresponsible parents in the early ‘90s, I left Macaulay Culkin in the house, didn’t I. You freeze, you go wide-eyed, and your jaw drops a little.

It’s a kind of terror a fish known as the stargazer embodies its entire life. It may not be worrying about a visit from Child Protective Services, but it does have to worry about eating. The bulging eyes and frowny mouth that make it look like an aquatic pug are brilliant adaptations for an ambush predator. And even beyond its … singular looks, this is one of the sea’s most remarkable fishes—it’s venomous and it shocks like an electric eel.

Unless you’ve got a coral reef to duck into, the bottom of the ocean is a place of constant peril. Death comes from above, sideways, and, with the strategy of the 50 or so species of stargazer thrown in the mix, from below. To get a jump on their prey, the fish burrow into the sand, exposing only their mouths and bug-eyes. This has an added bonus of hiding the stargazers from their own enemies swimming above.

So the stargazer is buried there, biding its time, probably thinking about eating and stuff. Some species even utilize a specially-shaped piece of flesh on the inside of their mouths, which acts like a lure to fish and crustaceans hunting on the seafloor. “They’re able to stick this out of the mouth when they’re burrowed, resembling a segmented worm to draw the attention of other fish,” says systemicist Martin Gomon of Australia’s Museum Victoria. (The anglerfishes utilize a similar ruse, only their lures are actually modified dorsal spines. Also, their sex is kinky.)

Curious fish expecting an easy meal instead get a healthy dose of death. All the stargazer has to do is rapidly open its gaping maw, and the resulting vacuum drags the prey to its doom. It’s so effective, the predator has no need for nasty, big, pointy teeth to snag its prey—its chompers are relatively tiny.

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 But this lifestyle comes with unique challenges. For one, the stargazer has to worry about the water flowing out of its buried gills kicking up sand. If potential prey see the substrate bubbling up around the predator, the ruse is up. So the stargazer has a clever adaptation: Its gill covers are fringed with finger-like projections that may better disperse the water coming out, as opposed to firing it out as a solid jet.

Its mouth, too, has frills around the edges to keep sand from falling in as the fish gulps water. And it’s not just that the stargazer wants to avoid choking to death here. Sand is, of course, super abrasive. “What you want to do is minimize the amount of sand that damages the gills over time,” says Gomon.

While the stargazer’s camouflage may be top-notch, it isn’t perfect. So the fish deploys additional countermeasures in the event of an oh-bother-I’m-in-another-animal’s-mouth kind of situation. First, it has a venomous spine just above the base of its pectoral fins (those would be the ones on the fish’s sides). While its venom is still poorly studied, it’s apparently got some kick, considering stargazers have dropped a handful of humans dead.

Some stargazer species also deploy a second countermeasure: a specialized organ behind their eyes that fires out a blast of electricity. Like an electric eel, stargazers can zap their enemies, though they use it for defense, not hunting. And the stargazers’ blast is far weaker than an electric eel’s—50 volts compared to 600—but the jolt may just be enough to startle a predator into turning the fish loose.

With any luck, that fake worm will attract a fish to its doom. So when a stargazer does the worm, it’s a bit more literal than for humans.

Really, though, the stargazers’ strategy is to go unseen. Which makes one species, Pleuroscopus pseudodorsalis, particularly strange. Other stargazers will swim around as juveniles and settle into the sand once they reach about 2 inches long. But this species’ larva spends an inordinate chunk of its life braving a zone even more dangerous than the seafloor, the open ocean, only settling once it’s reached a foot long.

The juvenile’s body is uniquely suited for this lifestyle. Its eyes and mouth, for instance, aren’t angled as far back on the head, allowing it to better tackle prey straight ahead. “We thought it was a different species entirely,” says Gomon, “but the form of the body changes quite dramatically” between the juvenile and adult stages. Considering boats have brought the young up on baited lines, the fish appear to be active predators as juveniles.

But even though it’s removed from the relative safety of the seafloor, the juvenile is far from conspicuous, having evolved its own form of clever camouflage. The top half of its body is a dark blue, while its underside is paler—the same kind of countershading, as it’s known, that the great white shark deploys. Predators watching from above will have a harder time picking the stargazer out from the dark background of the water below, while predators watching from below will have a harder time picking it out from the sunlight trickling down from the surface.

Read more at Wired Science

The Magnificent Bearded Vulture Only Eats Bone. Metal, Dude

Bearded vultures tend to stick to mountainous regions, where they have plenty of rocks to drop bones on. Plus, mountains are definitely the most metal of habitats.

Legend holds that the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, fearing a prophecy that a falling object would kill him, spent an inordinate amount of time out in open spaces. So naturally an eagle picked up a tortoise and killed the playwright by dropping it on his noggin, having mistaken the man’s bald head for a rock that could break open the prey.

The story is almost certainly not true (that would have been one hell of a shot), but eagles will indeed drop tortoises on rocks like that. There’s even another kind of bird that does the same, only it doesn’t bother with live prey. The beautiful bearded vulture feeds almost exclusively on skeletal fragments, swallowing bones whole when possible. What pieces it can’t swallow it takes into the air and drops onto rocks, shattering them into manageable pieces.

That’s all kinds of clever. Like any other vulture, the bearded variety—which typically flies over mountainous regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe—provides an indispensable service to the ecosystem, checking the spread of disease by consuming corpses. But the bearded’s diet is 95 percent bone. It can wait for the other scavengers to strip the body clean, then stroll in at its leisure to take its fill.

Typically it’s after small to medium ungulates—the hoofed mammals. (It’s also known as the lammergeier, literally “lamb vulture.”) “Anything that’s the size of a domestic sheep,” says ecologist Sonja Krüger of South Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg Park. “They can swallow the bones of that sized animal quite easily.”

But the bearded vulture isn’t about to pass up the bones of larger animals. Its beak and claws are too weak to break these into small bits, so instead it grabs a bone and hitches a ride on a rising column of air called a thermal. With its supreme vision the vulture targets a patch of rock and lets loose. If its aim is true, it will kill a Greek playwright—or the bone will shatter to pieces on the rock. The bird then swoops in and swallows the shards whole. If it misses, or the bone bounces on impact, the vulture will try again and again until it succeeds.

The next time someone calls you a vulture, say, “Oh, you mean the beautiful bearded vulture? That eats bone, which is metal as hell?” Then tell the person to walk away before you eat their bones.

What it gets is a surprisingly nutritious meal. The bone itself of course is packed with calcium, but the real prize is the bone marrow. Fatty, energy-rich bone marrow.

For pretty much every other creature on Earth, bone is indigestible. Hyenas will chew through the odd bone here and there with their powerful jaws, but that’s by no means their main source of food. Owls, which eat things like mice whole, have to regurgitate the bones. Bearded vultures find this unacceptable: They dig bone so much they’ve been known to eat owl throwup.

You might expect that the bearded vulture’s gut would have a problem working through all of this stuff. But its solution is a metric crap-ton of powerful acid. The bird’s digestive system isn’t even elongated to handle the load, nor is there any special grinding going on. Thanks to all that acid, it only takes 24 hours for a bearded vulture to turn solid bone into poop.

And all it eats is bone, day in and day out—save for when two bearded vultures fall in love and have babies. Them feeding their sensitive young ‘uns bone would be like you feeding yours … well, bone, I guess. So “you’ll find adults picking pieces of meat at certain times of the year, and even pieces of fat, off the carcass to get [the chicks] into breeding condition,” says Krüger.

But if the bearded vulture is clearly capable of eating meat, why go through all the trouble of eating bone? Two reasons. For one, nothing else, save for the occasional hyena, is going to bother with the stuff, and that’s a huge advantage when it comes to survival. And secondly, unlike other scavengers that have to consume a corpse before it spoils, the bearded vulture can and does return to skeletons time after time to cart away bones. So in effect it keeps pantries scattered across the mountains.

Vultures play a pivotal role in ecosystems as the cleanup crew. Think of them like janitors. Or don’t. Doesn’t matter to me.

Birds of a Feather

From all these photos of the bearded vulture you may have noticed that the bird actually has feathers on its noggin, which vultures normally don’t, and that those feathers are a beautiful red hue, or burnt sienna if you don’t have problems determining subtle colors like me.

Those feathers are there because they can be. The bearded vulture just doesn’t eat like other vultures. “The others don’t have feathers on their heads so they can get into the carcasses and it won’t get matted with all the liquid or blood,” says Krüger. That helps spare them the inconvenience of carrying around diseases. Because the bearded vulture swoops in later to pick up the bones, it can afford keeping a luxurious head of feathers.

As for the color, they actually apply it by rubbing themselves against cliffs and rolling around in the mud. “It’s that iron oxide in the soil that gives them that color,” says Krüger. “Birds that are in captivity for a long time that aren’t provided with the facility to have a mud bath, they’re basically snow white.”

So what’s the point? One theory holds that it’s a signal of strength—well, at least it’s a roundabout signal. Theoretically, the birds with the most deeply stained feathers spend the most time rolling in the mud. This would signal to potential mates that they’re more fit because they’re feeding well enough to have the time to fart around.

But a more likely theory, according to Krüger, is that the mud helps keep parasites at bay. An additional bonus may be that the vulture picks up minerals from the mud as it preens itself, like it’s wearing a coat of multivitamins.

Read more at Wired Science

The Wasp With a Metal-Reinforced Needle on Its Behind

A wasp lays her eggs in a fig—and uncomfortable images in your subconscious.

Few trees in recorded history have been as useful as the fig. Its leaves covered Adam and Eve’s naughty bits, for example, and the Buddha supposedly found enlightenment under one. But in India, the cluster fig tree is responsible for something far more fascinating than spiritual journeys and what must be wildly uncomfortable undies.

This tree’s figs play host to a battle between two remarkable insects: a harmless pollinator wasp and its enemy, a parasitic wasp with a metal-reinforced, serrated drill for a bum. The ultra-strong drill is thinner than a human hair, yet its owner can somehow pierce through the tough hide of an unripe fig to deposit its eggs inside—seriously ruining the day of the pollinator wasp’s own kids that are also (surprise!) hiding within. It’s like a shaolin monk throwing a needle through glass and then babies come out of the needle and OK maybe it’s not entirely like that.

A fig tree’s flowers are actually encased in the figs, as opposed to something like a highfalutin orchid’s hey-look-what-I-can-do blooms. This presents the tree with a reproductive problem: It can’t rely on the wind or a variety of insects to spread its pollen around, so instead the cluster fig enlists its own species of pollinator wasp hyper-specialized for the job.

Here’s how it goes. When a female pollinator wasp manages to sniff out a receptive tree, she lands on an unripe fig and makes her way into a tiny passageway that leads to a hollow core. The entrance is so tight, in fact, that as she crawls through her antennae and wings snap off. But that’s no bother, really. She won’t be needing those things anymore.

In the inner chamber the wasp roams about laying her eggs, spreading around pollen she picked up from the tree she was born in, and dies. (If you’re a vegan and you’ve been eating figs, that could be … bad news. But it’s not like you’re consuming whole wasps. As the fig ripens it digests the dead pollinators, so really you’re eating wasp jelly, if that helps any.) Her eggs hatch into larvae, which feed on the fig before turning into adults and mating with each other. The ever-chivalrous males chew a hole through the fig and die, allowing the females to escape and carry the pollen to new figs and start the process all over again.

Notice the ovipositor’s sheath pop off as the wasp drills deeper.

It’s an elegant illustration of coevolution between beast and plant—two species evolving side by side for millennia. “The pollinators help the fig reproduce and the fig provides the wasp with a nice nursery where her larvae can develop,” says Namrata Gundiah, a biomechanics researcher at the Indian Institute of Science.

Of course, that beautiful partnership can’t just exist in a closed symbiotic loop. That would be too easy. The parasitic wasp, Apocrypta westwoodi, would love to get inside the cluster fig as well to lay her own eggs, so her rambunctious young can devour the baby pollinators already in there.

Problem is, when the pollinator wasp climbed into the fruit, a sap-like goo sealed the entrance behind it. So the parasite has to get in the hard way—literally. She wields a super-elongated ovipositor, meaning “egg-placer.” After tapping around the fig with her antennae to confirm her victims are inside, the parasite positions the ovipositor with an impressive arch of her body and begins drilling into the fruit.

It’s no small task, considering the fig is unripe at this point. But this is no ordinary ovipositor. Incredibly, Gundiah and her colleagues found that its serrated tip is fortified with zinc, making the wicked-sharp needle strong enough to drill through the fig without shattering. Because of the toughness of her ovipositor, the parasitic wasp can drill through figs over and over, perhaps as many as 20 in her lifetime.

“The thing that caught our attention is one, [the ovipositor] has to be extremely hard to cut inside,” says Gundiah. “But also it needs to be flexible because it has to be able to maneuver within this substrate—and she doesn’t have eyes inside.”

The formidable ovipositor of the parasitic wasp. That knob at center and the little holes left of it are the sensors that let the wasp guide the needle.

Gundiah found that the tip of the ovipositor is loaded with different kinds of sensors. “Some of them we think are chemical sensors,” she says, cup-like structures each “with a neuron that would fire if the right chemical hits it.” Theoretically, this would allow the wasp to “taste” the different layers of the fruit’s skin as she drills deeper. The ovipositor also seems to come equipped with mechanical sensors that let the wasp feel around. Think of it like a finger with tongues all over it—and now try never thinking of that again.

Even more incredibly, the parasitic wasp is able to feel and smell her way specifically to the developing young of the pollinator wasp in the wall of the chamber, depositing an egg on each. All the while, the long ovipositor is bending like mad, yet does not snap. At play here, Gundiah reckons, may be tiny pits studding the ovipositor where it bends the most. These could help arrest cracks hell-bent on spreading across the structure.

It’s all the more impressive when you consider that the drill is thinner than a human hair—we’re talking some serious mechanical engineering on evolution’s part. But what’s also interesting from an evolutionary perspective is how different the parasite’s ovipositor is from the pollinator’s.

“The pollinator has a more spoon-like structure, and it’s much shorter than what you’d find with the parasitoid,” Gundiah says. Plus, “there’s a much wider repertoire of sensors on the parasitoid because she needs to sample several different aspects of her environment,” whereas the pollinator is on the inside embedding her eggs in the soft wall of the chamber, and therefore has no need for a super-sensitive ovipositor.

Read more at Wired Science

The Littlest, Most Adorable-est Seahorse Fits on Your Fingernail

Because they were a bit gullible, the Ancient Greeks believed a tiny race of humans known as the pygmies did eternal battle with cranes—which, in fairness, can be pretty jerky. Today, “pygmy” lives on in zoology to describe any number of species smaller than their peers, things like pygmy hippos, pygmy goats, and even pygmy killer whales. The most magical among the pygmies, though, is a miniscule creature that’ll punch you right in the face with cuteness, given you can even find it: It’s the charming, fantastically camouflaged pygmy seahorse.

For my money, this is the most confounding camo in the sea. While plenty of ocean critters blend in with their surroundings—the aptly named stonefish, for instance, looks much like a fish, and even more like a stone—and the cuttlefish famously changes its skin color and texture on the fly to match its surroundings, the pygmy seahorse goes about things differently. As a young ‘un, it’ll settle on coral, then adopt one of a number of colors to match and live the rest of its life in that outfit. That’s really, really weird for an animal.

Swimming the reefs of Australia and Southeast Asia are seven species of pygmy seahorse measuring between a half inch and an inch long, small enough to fit on your fingernail. But from here on out when I say “pygmy seahorse” I’m referring to just two, Bargibant’s and Denise’s pygmy seahorses, which stick to coral sea fans known as gorgonians. The other species are great and all, but these two are the most spectacular.

Gorgonians come in a range of colors, and this presents a problem for the seahorses. If, say, they were pink and could only find orange gorgonians instead of pink gorgonians, their camo would be worthless. So when a pygmy seahorse lands on a gorgonian as a black-hued juvenile, it begins an incredible transformation. “It lives on some gorgonians that are kind of warty and branched, and some that are smooth and a little bit darker red, or more pale,” says Steinhart Aquarium biologist Matt Wandell, who was the first to breed pygmy seahorses. “And so it’ll adapt to that color and that texture,” warts and all, over the course of a few days.

Wandell’s seahorses were orange because that’s what color they wanted to be and if you can’t handle that I don’t know what to tell you.

That transformation appears to be permanent, as opposed to the cuttlefish’s on-demand camouflage. To test this, Wandell dropped already-transformed seahorses into tanks with gorgonians of a different color to see if they’d re-adapt, but nothing doing. “It seems like, as far as we know, it’s a one-time switch,” Wandell says. “You can think of it maybe like language in that sense for a child, where it’s a one-time period where it can adapt to a certain type of gorgonian.”

The cuttlefish’s camouflage trick is easy to figure—it’s covered with cells called chromatophores (as are other cephalopods like octopuses and squids), which rapidly expand or contract to flash certain colors. But how the pygmy seahorse is pulling off its color change, scientists haven’t a clue. It does appear, though, that the seahorse is using visual cues as opposed to something like nomming on the gorgonian to assume its color (since the pygmy perfectly imitates the coral’s warts as well).

It’s baffling. From an evolutionary perspective, the development of camouflage is simple: Individuals that look more like their surroundings have a better chance of avoiding predators and surviving to pass down their genes for this effective camo. Over time, a species accumulates these changes into something epic like the satanic leaf-tailed gecko looking exactly like a leaf … and only mildly like Satan. But why would the pygmy seahorse opt to “choose” the appropriate camo for its surroundings when other animals are born with theirs? Mysteries abound.

What is clear, though, is that the camouflage is legit. Divers have reported just a few instances of predation on pygmies, and humans didn’t even find the things until 1969, and it was an accident at that. It was only when a scientist carted a gorgonian back to his dissection table did he notice a pair of pygmies. A no doubt confused pair of pygmies.

“Hey Hon, You Up for Some Role-Playing?”

By this point in your life you’ve probably learned that seahorse sex is backwards, with the male role-playing as a female to give birth to their young. And that’s true to a certain degree. “In pygmy seahorses, the males are the ones that get ‘pregnant,’ and I put pregnant in quotes because it’s not quite like the way we think of pregnancy,” Wandell says.

When a pair comes together, the female transfers her eggs to a pouch on the male’s belly, perhaps whispering now let’s see how YOU like it. He fertilizes them, and the eggs develop inside him and hatch into tiny seahorses, which he pops out one by one, as many as 70 of them (at least in Wandell’s experience with captive seahorses—in the wild it could be different). The kiddos, which sport spikes that will eventually turn into those warty bumps, seem to be attracted to light, and will make their way to the surface to feed on plankton—stuff like fish eggs and creatures so tiny they’re at the mercy of the current—for two or three weeks, dispersing far and wide. Then they’ll head down to a reef, snuggle up with a gorgonian, and begin their transformation.

Here the pygmy waits for food to come to it, or, more specifically, to the gorgonian, which is made up of individual tentacled polyps that snag plankton. “The plankton has hundreds of thousands of different animals in it,” Wandell says. “So we assume there’s this sort of amalgamation of gunk sticking to the polyps, and the seahorses are eating that.”

And indeed, this exploitation may have been what drove to pygmy seahorse to evolve to be so tiny. “One thing we know about evolution in general is that any time there’s a niche where energy can be derived and exploited, something will fill that niche,” Wandell says. “And that coral surface was something that wasn’t exploited by any other animals.”

Read more at Wired Science

The Strange Saga of the Harlequin Beetle and the Pseudoscorpion

A comically long-legged harlequin beetle. To its right is the miniscule pseudoscorpion, which spends most of its time mating on the beetle's back. One might argue, then, that this baby does indeed have back.

Say what you will about the calamity that is air travel, but at least the planes have roofs. And at least the other passengers aren’t trying to throw you out mid-air because of said problem with the roof. At least no one is having sex all around you, and at least when you land, your plane doesn’t up and start getting busy with another plane.

Welcome to Harlequin Beetle Airlines, where the skies aren’t so much friendly as they are sexually awkward. The passengers are teeny-tiny arachnids called pseudoscorpions, which crawl under a harlequin beetle’s wings and latch on with their claws and strap in with silken seat belts. The dominant males among the pseudos shove other males off and get busy with a harem of females right on the back of the harlequin—itself a bizarre creature whose males tread on wildly elongated front legs.

It’s hard to imagine an odder couple out there. So this, ladies and gentlemen, is an Absurd Creature of the Week twofer: the strange saga of the harlequin beetle and the pseudoscorpion.

Arachnids do a lot of things really well (like straight-up murder). But one thing they can’t do is fly to new resources. A lot of spiders will do something called ballooning, simply letting out a line of silk for the wind to pick up and drag it into the sky, but pseudos live in the rainforests of South and Central America, where foliage is too dense for wind to penetrate. Plus, they only hang out in dead ficus trees. So they need some way to get to the next fallen plant.

A closer shot of the pseudoscorpion on a lovely backdrop of harlequin beetle.

Luckily the harlequin beetle also loves itself a dead ficus tree, specifically as a place to lay its eggs. When these hatch, the resulting larvae bore into the wood and begin pupating. Meanwhile, pseudos in the tree are milling about hunting.

“They tend to favor termites, and they tend to favor larvae of termites, which are slow moving,” says biologist Melvin Bonilla. “So they’re not super agile in terms of their hunting prowess.” Pseudos do, however, come equipped with those claws. And while they don’t have the famous stinger of actual scorpions, they use their claws to inject prey with paralyzing venom.

After several months of pupation, the harlequins emerge as adults—and the pseudos stand ready. The tiny arachnids swarm the beetles, pinching their bellies to get them to open up their wing covers, known as elytra. When the gates open, the pseudos clamber onto the beetles’ backs and hold on tight as their rides take flight.

To avoid any unscheduled skydives, the pseudos grasp at ridges on a beetle’s cuticle. Their claws also produce a silk that the pseudos will attach to the surface as a kind of safety harness (in that sense, Spider-Man firing silk from his wrists is more like a pseudoscorpion than a spider, which produces silk from its bum, but whatever).

Next comes the pseudoscorpion free love. Several males and females can end up riding one beetle, which is alright by the females, but not so great for any male that isn’t the alpha. “Usually the largest male will try to push the other males off so that he can then dominate the mating arena and use that as a way to access the females,” says Bonilla.

The male harlequin is unique among beetles in looking like it’s mad flexing in flight.

Lesser pseudos vanquished, the largest male shacks up with the females in a way that can only be described as unorthodox. Right there on the beetle’s back he’ll deposit a sort of stalk, topped with a ball of fluid that holds the spermatophore—the package of sperm. All of it looks a bit like a translucent flower, or maybe the Eye of Sauron.

Next the pseudo male grabs a female by the claw—not aggressively, mind you, just suggestively—to pull her over. If she’s into it, she’ll position herself over the flower and do a dip. “What’ll happen then is that ball of fluid will push against the spermatophore and into her sexual aperture,” Bonilla says. “And that ball of fluid will help the spermatophore stay there while the sperm is being transferred.” The male will do the same with as many other females as he can manage.

Eventually the harlequin beetle reaches its destination: another dead ficus tree. When it lands, the female pseudos disembark and develop their eggs in an external brood sac on their bellies, while the male typically stays on the beetle. The pseudos waiting in the tree climb aboard, males and females alike. Our triumphant male fights off any new males, as he did before, ideally winning the right to mate with the arriving female passengers.

Male harlequins also have to battle for females, just in a rather more dramatic way. They have those super-elongated front legs compared to the females’—limbs the males use to punt their rivals, “kind of like a hook and catapult type of device, where they try to hook the other male and catapult him away,” says Bonilla. “And usually if they do it well enough and catapult the male far enough, then that ends the battle.”

Read more at Wired Science

The Octopus That Does Incredible Impressions of Fish and Snakes

No schoolyard insult is more dreaded, more cruel, more head-turning than calling someone a copycat. Copycatism is adolescent plagiarism, through and through, and potentially devastating to one’s social standing. But in the animal kingdom, natural selection loves a copycat. Being something you’re not could well keep you out of a stomach.

And no copycat is stranger or more accomplished than the mimic octopus. True to its name, it impersonates a variety of other animals on the fly, morphing from an octopus to a banded sole to a lionfish to a sea snake. But this is no random assemblage of impressions: All of these creatures are toxic or venomous. The mimic octopus isn’t just a copycat—it’s a copycat that’s evolved a strategy far more brilliant than would appear at first glance.

Long ago, the ancestors of octopuses, and indeed the ancestors of all other cephalopods like cuttlefish and squid, took refuge in the safety of their shells. Then something went awry—perhaps a more powerful predator appeared that could make short work of the shells—and the cephalopods were forced to evolve more novel defenses (the nautiluses are the only cephalopods to have retained their shells). The cuttlefish, for instance, is a master of camouflage, blending seamlessly with its surroundings, while squid opt for sheer speed or, you know, growing to over 1,000 pounds in the case of the colossal squid.

But the mimic octopus—not to be confused with the similarly striped but even-better-named wonderpus—has in a way adopted the defenses of venomous and toxic creatures it shares a habitat with. “When they swim up into the water column and hold all the arms around them,” says marine biologist Mark Norman of Australia’s Museum Victoria, “that I believe is mimicry of a lionfish with its banded spines.” And lionfish are not to be messed with. Their dorsal spines deliver a venom powerful enough to cause breathing difficulties in humans.

A mimic octopus making its getaway while impersonating a lionfish. It is still unclear how lionfish feel about this sort of sendup.

During all of this mimicry, the octopus is not only contorting its body, but transforming its color to fit the part. This is a famous trick of the cephalopods (oh, and that cranky dinosaur in Jurassic World that was laced with cephalopod genes because are you kidding me), and it’s all thanks to cells called chromatophores. Muscles open and close these sacs of various colors, allowing the octopus to rapidly change its hue from a pale sandy color to those noisy black and white stripes—and everything in between.

When the octopus is down on the seafloor it seems to mimic at least two other not-to-be-trifled-with critters. One is the banded sole, a variety of flatfish that looks a bit like a flounder, only it has poison glands at the base of its fins. For this impression, the octopus pulls all of its arms back, forming a sort of teardrop, and jets over the sand.

The other animal is a snake called the sea krait, whose wildly powerful neurotoxic venom can kill you (it’s actually docile and its deadliness isn’t its fault, to be honest—it needs be able to quickly incapacitate the fish it hunts or the things will just swim away). To mimic this one, the octopus shoves six of its arms into a hole in the sand and holds its other two out, giving them a slight wiggle.

Here a mimic octopus impersonates a sea snake as a fish is all like “eh never mind.”

Now, the octopus doesn’t just throw that snake impression out willy-nilly. It deploys whenever a particular kind of fish starts getting up in its grill: the damselfish, which is a favorite prey of sea kraits. This suggests that the octopus actively chooses which mimic works against which potential predator.

And that seems to fit right in with science’s conception of octopuses as particularly intelligent—except that’s all a bit problematic. “Intelligence is a really difficult issue with octopuses,” Norman says. “I’ve gotten into trouble before by saying most of the tests on octopuses demonstrate the lack of intelligence in the researchers.”

The thing is, the notion of intelligence is a human construction, and what might be smart for people isn’t necessarily smart for animals. So what tests should scientists give to octopuses? Having the creatures solve mazes is nice and all, but it’s not like octopuses are scurrying about mazes in nature.

That’s no banded sole–it’s a mimic octopus that wishes so bad it was a banded sole.

“I think our biggest problem is that we almost give an English language test to an octopus,” Norman says. “I think we’re failing to ask the right sorts of questions, or understand the nature of the intelligence or the kind of sharpness of their responsiveness.” (That said, Norman has seen other octopus species pull off incredible tricks of their own, such as one octopus that cleverly faced down an intruding bristle worm. The octopus couldn’t attack the intruder directly, what with the bristles and all, so it tried pushing the worm away with a wave of sand, kind of like a bulldozer … with eight too many arms.)

Of course, it would seem smartest for the octopus to hole up in a crevice like other octopuses. But their mimicry may have evolved in a very “smart” way to help the octopus procure food, not just avoid becoming it.

A creature would be a damn fool to venture out on the seafloor in daylight without some sort of defense. So the sea krait has its deadly bite, which doubles as an offensive and defensive weapon, while the lionfish has its spines. And they advertise this unpleasantness with that wacky-ass Beetlejuice coloration, scaring off predators so they can roam freely looking for food.

By aping these creatures, the mimic octopus muscles into a market few other octopuses can. “It’s colonized the most dangerous habitat you could have as a cephalopod, in that you’ve got very little in the way of defenses and you’re just meat walking around, very edible,” says Norman. “They’ve found a way to forage over those environments during the daytime, relying solely on their capacity to deter predators by their similarity to other species.”

Read more at Wired Science

Silly Caterpillar, You Shouldn’t Be Devouring Snails Alive

A snail-eating caterpillar in its characteristic silk burrito of protection, doing what it does best: tying a snail down before devouring it alive. Damn, now I want a burrito. Not of silk, of course–carnitas, I'm thinking.

That children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar is bullcrap. I mean, there’s no way a caterpillar could eat all that food, not to mention those kinds of foods. Ice cream? Give me a break. And chocolate cake? Now I’m kinda worried this little thing is hypoglycemic.

And sausage? Really? Wait, actually, scratch that. Caterpillars are diehard vegetarians, but no, not me, says Hawaii’s Hyposmocoma molluscivora. Incredibly, it’s got an appetite for snails, and a big appetite at that. As a snail slumbers, this creepy-crawly carefully approaches and spins silk over the snail’s shell, pinning it to a leaf. Then it crawls in there and devours the trapped victim alive.

The so-called snail-eating caterpillar joins just .13 percent of caterpillars that are predatory. And while other meat eaters go after insects, this species solely targets snails (even if it’s starving, it won’t touch plants). “That’s just ridiculous,” says entomologist Daniel Rubinoff of the University of Hawaii. “In an evolutionary sense, it’s like a vampire cow, essentially. You have all these other cows running around eating grass like they’re supposed to be, and then suddenly you discover one that is attacking and sucking the blood of fish. That’s how weird it would be. Not even other mammals, but fish.”

This caterpillar, which is only a bit over a quarter inch long, spins itself a little burrito-like case that it slips into and drags around for camouflage. But around 10 years ago, folks on Maui noticed that some of the caterpillars had stuck snail shells to these cases, perhaps as an extra fashion accessory to kick up their camo one more notch.

The assumption went that the caterpillars were just coming across empty shells. But then Rubinoff caught the things on video actually hunting snails. Even with the evidence Rubinoff still had a hard time coming to terms with the whole thing. “Even though I had video of it, I still really deep down couldn’t believe it,” he says. “It was just such a stretch, such a bizarre thing to see.”

A caterpillar pinning down a snail with its silk. Someone should really tell it that it’s not a spider. Break the news gently, though.

Snails may be slow, but a caterpillar burdened with a burrito is downright ungainly. So the hunter will only approach sleeping snails—if the target is active, the caterpillar won’t bother. If the snail is satisfactory, the caterpillar will start spinning silk over its shell, pinning it to the leaf below. Think of it like that scene in Gulliver’s Travels where our hero wakes up to find that the tiny Lilliputians have tied him to the ground, only Gulliver survives to go on other adventures. The snail won’t. The only adventuring it’ll be doing is sliding through a caterpillar’s guts.

And unlike the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Hyposmocoma molluscivora exercises a little thing called restraint. “We’ve actually got videos of snails waking up halfway through and trying to get away,” says Rubinoff. “The caterpillar doesn’t attack it, just waits. The snail gives up and goes back inside, and then the caterpillar finishes the spin, comes around, and goes into the snail shell.” It then proceeds to consume the victim alive in its own home.

The whole saga so dramatically departs from typical caterpillar behavior that it’s no wonder Rubinoff had trouble believing it. Caterpillars can’t be bothered with delayed gratification—they just gnaw at leaves and gnaw at leaves some more, as any gardener can tell you. Hyposmocoma molluscivora is a zen master of self-control, planning out a sophisticated attack and launching it only if it’s sure to succeed.

This is about where the snail’s life ends. It shall be remembered, though, as caterpillar turds.

And think about what’s going on physiologically with this caterpillar. It should have different mouthparts than a vegetarian caterpillar, yeah? Nope, as it turns out. They’re pretty much the same. Rubinoff is looking to do more work here, but it may be that snail-eating caterpillars don’t need all that different mandibles. For a vegetarian slicing through leaves, scissor-like mouthparts work great. And scissor-like mouthparts could work just as fine for meat eaters too. (Vampire cows, on the other hand, would need something other than a cow’s typical grinding molars.)

Another physiological conundrum is how the snail-eating caterpillar’s tummy is handling the switch to meat. “Vegans get sick when they eat a burger, and we’re programmed or able to eat meat pretty easily,” Rubinoff says. “If you’re a species that doesn’t eat protein like that, how do you make that kind of adjustment?” At the moment, it’s still a mystery.

Hawaii: The Land Where Snails Rule and Fish Poop Out Beaches

Then there’s the why. Why would Hyposmocoma molluscivora give up the vegan lifestyle? After all, Hawaii isn’t exactly hurting for lush vegetation.

The answer may be that the snails had it coming. Hawaii has historically been lousy with the things, scientists having described over 1,000 different species (many, though, have gone extinct thanks to humans, while many are in serious trouble). Island ecosystems tend to be a bit goofy like that: Not every kind of animal will make it there from the mainland—keep in mind that Hawaii is wildly isolated, and accordingly only has two native mammals, a bat and a seal. Among the animals that do get there, some will grow more successful than others by assuming niches they normally wouldn’t bother with.

“In other places, there are lots and lots of things that eat snails,” says Rubinoff. “There are beetles that eat snails and a range of other animals that will go and attack snails. And Hawaii happens to have a really high diversity of snails.” Because of this diversity, the snail-eating caterpillar would have done well to start hunting them, thus filling the niche that other predators may not have been around to fill themselves.

And it’s not just this species that got creative on the islands. The group the snail-eating caterpillar belongs to, Hyposmocoma, tallies some 400 species with all manner of lifestyles. “There are Hyposmocoma that are aquatic, that dive underwater, and eat algae and lichens around streams,” says Rubinoff. “So Hyposmocoma molluscivora is almost par for the course for Hyposmocoma, and that seems to be something that Hawaii brings out.”

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Don’t You Dare Call the Deepstaria Jellyfish a Whale Placenta

Deepstaria jellyfish aren't usually this active–this one is caught up in the wash of the submersible. It looks a lot like a hot air balloon, doesn't it? Or does a hot air balloon look like Deepstaria? Something to think about.

The internet could have sworn it was looking at a whale placenta. Not that many folks could say they’ve ever seen a whale placenta, but it seemed to be a reasonable explanation for the underwater video that popped up in May 2012 of a dancing curtain of flesh. Hell, it could be a NEW SEA MONSTER, as the YouTube title yelled.

That guess was closer, but this was no monster. It was one of the weirdest jellyfish in the sea, Deepstaria. This underwater oddity relies not on long stinging tentacles to catch its prey, but on its entire body. It’s a floating blanket, enveloping victims and then cinching its bottom bit shut to create a balloon of death. And it doesn’t appreciate people calling it a whale placenta.

Roaming the oceans are two species of Deepstaria, named after the submersible Deepstar that first spotted one intact in the 1960s. Deepstaria reticulum, shown at top, features that beautiful red hue, while the other, Deepstaria enigmatica, appears whiter. Otherwise, they look largely the same.

“Most jellies would have a relatively small bell and then relatively long tentacles,” says Steven Haddock, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “These guys have the really big bell that’s almost like a trash bag or something, and pretty much no tentacles.”

Deepstaria are real loosey-goosey, tumbling around the deep. They seem to be able to manage some measure of undulation, but have nowhere near the power of your typical jelly. (Interestingly for such strange jellyfish, their closest known relative is the most typical of jellies, the moon variety, which you’ll find in any self-respecting aquarium.)

The thing is, in the deep ocean, being spry isn’t necessarily an advantage. Deepstaria does just fine by suspending in the water column and waiting for prey to crash into it. “They can be a meter large, so they could certainly have small fish and shrimp end up inside of that bell,” says Haddock. When the jelly detects something in there, it tightens the edge of the bell shut like a drawstring on a fleshy trash bag.

Now the jelly just has to get the food into its gob. How it does so is still a bit of a mystery, but naturalist Ron Larson has a hunch. Like other jellyfish, Deepstaria has stinging cells called nematocysts, he says, only instead of covering the tentacles, they likely cover the bell or other concentrated patches of flesh. Deepstaria also has little hair-like structures lining the bell called cilia, which collectively act as a conveyor belt to ferry the prey toward the mouth.

Deepstaria jellyfish create a balloon of death to overwhelm their prey. They’re available now for kids’ parties at a very low fee.

So say something like a little copepod crustacean makes the mistake of wandering into the bell. “Eventually the copepod is going to hit some of the nematocysts, which will stop it from swimming,” Larson says. “And then the cilia and muscular contractions are going to help get the prey close enough to the lips—the oral arms we call them—so that it can eventually get into the stomach.”

You may have noticed from these here GIFs that Deepstaria has a sort of mesh structure running through its body. And you may assume that mesh is for supporting the bell, which is just a seventh of an inch thick. In fact, these lines are connected to the stomach, and help carry nutrients throughout the jelly’s body. After all, a jellyfish three feet wide has a whole lot of surface area to provide for. The muscle that cinches the bell closed is particularly hungry for energy.

And Deepstaria needs every inch of that surface area. Food is scarce in the deep compared to, say, a bustling coral reef. By evolving to be so big, the jelly casts a bigger net to better its chances of snagging prey.

At least one critter, though, can wander into Deepstaria scot-free: the isopod. These crustaceans aren’t winning any titles for their good manners. One species, for instance, will crawl into a fish’s mouth, devour its tongue, and replace the organ with its body because hey, someone was bound to. It’s a parasite if there ever was one.

Here’s a good shot of an isopod catching a ride in a Deepstaria enigmatica and looking coy as all hell.

The variety that hangs out inside Deepstaria, though, may or may not be parasitic—the relationship between host and parasite here still isn’t clear. “They’re probably just taking a little bit of a tax on what the jelly eats,” Haddock says. “Whatever the jelly captures, the isopod takes its share. It could be parasitic, but if it ate too aggressively it would destroy the jelly and it would no longer have that nice habitat for itself.”

What is clear is that the isopods are great at finding these hosts. “I don’t know if we’ve ever seen one of those jellies that doesn’t have one of those things in it,” Haddock says. And the isopods might be setting up shop in Deepstaria and Deepstaria alone—scientists haven’t found them on any other variety of jelly.

Stranger still, Deepstaria don’t roll in big groups like other jellies might, which would theoretically make it difficult for the isopod to get its offspring to other jellyfish. “If you think about how far between those jellies are from each other,” Haddock adds, “it’s pretty incredible that [the isopods] could find and set up that association.”

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The Mystery of the Arctic’s Toxic, Lethargic Shark

Don't let the motion blur fool you—the Greenland shark is a comically slow swimmer. That blur is probably just the photographer's creative touch. Nice work, Doug.

In Iceland they have this delicacy called hákarl that recently initiated diners describe as “the worst tasting food on Earth,” “the world’s foulest food,” and “the worst thing I have ever had in my mouth.” To say it smells like a urinal would be generous. Not that anyone should be surprised, considering hákarl is rotten shark meat fermented in the dirt or open air for months on end.

Hákarl is no ordinary delicacy, but then again, it comes from no ordinary fish: The Greenland shark has toxic flesh (hence the detoxification via fermentation). It’s also one of the most mysterious, weirdest, and largest sharks on Earth. It dives thousands of feet deep in arctic waters and grows to over 20 feet long. It’s also comically slow, averaging less than a single mile per hour—yet, bafflingly, it seems to be an apex predator.

For the Greenland shark, pretty much everything is on the menu. Surveys of their stomach contents have revealed squid, fish, and whale meat. In 2013, two dudes in Canada found a beached Greenland shark that may have been choking on a piece of, um, moose.

The Greenland shark is a scavenger, and it certainly has the teeth for it. “The upper jaw has sharply pointed teeth, almost like needles, and those are really well adapted for sinking into flesh and holding onto it,” says marine biologist Gregory Skomal of Massachusetts Marine Fisheries. “The lower jaw has teeth arranged in rows that look very similar to what one would see on a saw used to cut wood, and so they’re really nice cutting tools.” The Greenland shark is probably getting a grip on a carcass with its upper teeth, then twisting to gouge out a chunk of flesh with the lower teeth.

But that mouth could also do the shark well for hunting live prey. Consider the cookiecutter shark, which has similar dentition. This small, zippy species gouges flesh like the Greenland, only it targets living fish and whales and at least one unfortunate man on a swim between Hawaiian islands—at night (I mean, I’m not his father, but come on). The Greenland may be doing the same to marine mammals in the arctic. Scientists have photographed beluga whales, for instance, with big plugs of flesh taken out of them.

Then we have the curious happenings on Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Seals here have shown up with corkscrew-shaped wounds spiraling down their flesh, at times with half their bodies stripped of skin and blubber, like peeled potatoes. Some scientists say it could be the work of Greenland sharks, others blame boat propellers. No one has ever caught a shark in the act, so the culprit remains a mystery.

“I have personally been in the water with Greenland sharks and handled them like they were inanimate objects,” Skomal says. “They’re incredibly docile and don’t appear to have any capacity to accelerate and capture a seal.” But consider the fact that seals can sleep in the water, bobbing with just their heads above the surface (known as “bottling,” because why not), to avoid polar bears. That’d make them vulnerable to Greenland sharks.

Lazy, But at Least in a Productive Way

If you ask biologist Peter Bushnell of Indiana University, South Bend, the seals may not even need to be sleeping for the Greenland shark to snag them. Given the presence of so much fish in the shark’s stomach contents—and often a total lack of mud, which you’d expect to find in something that’s just scavenging on the seafloor—he has no doubts it’s an active predator.

When a sheet of ice covers the sea, seals pop in and out of holes to hunt fish—a behavior the Greenland sharks may be exploiting. “I have a feeling they can slowly meander their way up to an ice hole and just park themselves for a couple of days,” Bushnell speculates. “And a naive seal plops itself in and there it is.” Thus could a lethargic predator manage to take down a spry victim like a seal while barely exerting itself.

Live fish, too, may be food for the Greenland shark, Bushnell reckons. The shark’s jaws are somewhat extensible, and like a lot of fish (oh, and a certain 6-foot-long salamander), the Greenland may be able to rapidly open its maw to create a suction effect. Imagine the shark sneaking up on a school of cod in the deep dark sea: “With a little bit of a lunge forward and a suck, you’ve got dinner,” Bushnell says.

What makes this even more incredible? A good number of Greenland sharks can’t see worth a damn, thanks to a parasitic crustacean that bores into their eyeballs and feeds on their corneas because there is no justice in the world. It’s all the rage, really: One study found that 100 percent of Greenland sharks caught near Svalbard, Norway had parasites attached to their peepers.

The parasite can severely damage the eye, either impairing the shark’s vision or snatching it away altogether. But by virtue of being a shark, the Greenland can fall back on its fantastic sense of smell—and indeed it has a massive olfactory bulb in its brain.

Yep, that’s a parasitic crustacean that’s latched on to a Greenland shark’s eyeball. Remember that time you complained about having to put contacts in every day?

Yet if Greenland sharks are indeed going after slumbering seals, or ones that drop into the water right in front of their faces, maybe vision isn’t all that important. On the flipside, though, the Greenland’s “big nose is really effective at finding scent trails from dead animals,” says Skomal, “and therefore supports the notion that it’s evolved to be a deep-water scavenger.”

Clearly, the ecology of the Greenland shark is still somewhat of a riddle. The active predation part is a particular head-scratcher. “It is a bit of a conundrum, but the one thing that is clear is they are active predators,” Bushnell says. “How they do this, I’m not sure.”

What is also clear is that the Greenland shark is well-adapted for the deep, and this may be where its toxicity comes into play.
Greenland Shark Meat: It’s Like Kibbles ‘n Bits, Except It Gives Dogs Explosive Diarrhea

Back in the ‘60s, soon-to-be-regretful humans fed Greenland shark meat to a pack of sled dogs, which suffered convulsions, respiratory distress, and explosive diarrhea. The problem may have been high levels of the compound trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) in Greenland shark flesh. This could help the animal maintain osmotic balance—that is, balancing its internal salt chemistry with the salt chemistry of the water. But why would levels of TMAO be so much higher in a Greenland’s flesh than in other sharks?

It may, Skomal reckons, come down to the uniqueness of the arctic environment, and especially the deep-sea arctic environment: lots of salt. “You tend to have higher salinity areas in northern latitudes,” he says, “because you get this very thick seasonal ice layer and sometimes permanent ice layer that extracts fresh water from the ocean.”

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