Random Animals Blog

OK, so it’s not really an animal in its own right, but it is pretty amazing non the less..

This poor little ant has been infected with Cordyceps Fungus, it transfers itself though spores from host to host, killing any that come into contact with it.

Whats interesting is that once infected, the ant becomes disorientated and starts climbing upwards.. once high up in the trees, the ant eventually dies. The fungus then erupts out of the ants body, flowers, and spreads its spores, which hopefully because of the increased altitude can drift for miles and infect other ants.

Once an ant it discovered to be infected, the rest of the colony reject and even kill it if necessary, and the bodies taken and dumped far away from the nest. Fungi like this are apparently key in keeping any one species from becoming too dominant in rain-forests.

This delightful little monster is the Star Nosed Mole, who’s amazing nose can feel and taste unlike any other creature in the world. It needs this amazing nose because it’s more or less completely blind.

The star nosed mole also has the title of the fastest eater, identifying edible food within 0.1 of a second.. much faster than the 0.2 average for moles. It takes just 0.08 of a second to decide if an item is edeable or not.

The little critter can also smell underwater by blowing bubbles onto a surface an inhaling them quickly afterward. Not much is known about him, but it’s thought that they live in colonies.

No. It isn’t. Nor is it not one of those things that you’re supposed to twat with a mallet in Whack Attack – if you did that you’d be squashing one of the rarest kinds of octopus in the big blue sea, the Dumbo Octopus.

Why Dumbo? No other reason than that biologists think it looks like the big eared Disney elephant, apparently.

Not a lot more to offer in terms of details, since this fellow lives four kilometres under the surface. It’s only real feature is that it blushes sometimes. Probably because it’s pissed off its head on champagne at the circus, hallucinating about pink elephants.

If you were asked to name it, I doubt you come could up with anything more appropriate for this critter than Red-lipped Batfish, apart from Miserable Clown-faced Cornish Pasty Fish perhaps, but the lucky people whose job it is to name fish went with the former. Shame.

This fish spends its days swanning around on the ocean floor like a hideous toddler that’s been in its mum’s make-up drawer. They like the dark and the don’t have many friends, partly because they like to eat them.

Apparently the only suggestion anyone has had for those ridiculous clown lips is that the fish can recognise their own kind when it comes to mating. Lovely.

There are a lot of weird looking animals and the deep seas have got more than their fair share of them. Nevertheless, the beautifully-monikered blobfish must be a challenger for the title of “world’s ugliest bastard”.

How has the blobfish survived? If you looked like the blobfish, you wouldn’t mate. If that’s what its face looks like, imagine its genitals.

Nothing about this fish is glamorous. It is gelatinous and slightly less dense than water, which it helps it bob about without actually swimming properly. It doesn’t really have any muscle and just swallows anything edible which happens to drift by.

That’s not living.