You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

You've seen pictures and videos of whales (and manta rays) breaching. It takes a huge amount of energy to lift that kind of weight out of the water. So why do they do it? They do it for a number of reasons:

When in pods, it's a form of communication; "come here, I found food." If it's done near a school of fish, they can stun/kill a whole lot of them at once. When loners do it, it's a way of removing parasites from their skin.

[Lee Stewart]

There’s no need for the pinecone fish to blindly rummage around for food in the dark, thanks to a special adaptation. Fish in the family Monocentridae — which are typically found in the Indo-Pacific — have two organs located on the lower side of their jaw that are colonized by luminescent bacteria.

The result? Mother Nature’s very own version of headlights. This adaptation helps the little fish — which can reach 8 inches in length — attract zooplankton and shrimp at night. The headlights appear orange in daylight and a green-blue at night.

[Lee Stewart]

Pufferfish 'crop circles.' A tiny Japanese pufferfish creates a grand sand sculpture on the featureless seabed by using his fins to dig furrows. He uses this to attract the attention of passing females.



It takes him about a week to create one of the "crop circles" which run about 4 to 5 feet in diameter. He's between 15 and 20 inches long.

[Lee Stewart]

OK - this one is pretty disgusting. It's called a Tongue-Eating Parasite.

It's the stuff of nightmares, or science fiction: a parasite that wants to get inside an animal's mouth, where it attacks — and replaces — the tongue. That's the incredibly specific, terribly icky job of the tongue-eating louse.

"This parasite detaches the fish's tongue, attaches itself to the fish's mouth, and becomes its tongue," the wildlife agency said, expounding on a photo showing the isopod curled inside a croaker's mouth. "The parasite then feeds on the fish's mucus.

[Lee Stewart]

Octopuses are colorblind but use their uniquely shaped pupils to separate wavelengths. By adjusting the depth of their eyeballs, they can focus on any wavelength individually. That means if they want to see everything in red or any other color of the spectrum, they can. Just not all at once.