The ichneumon wasp is a deeply unpleasant character. Deeply, deeply unpleasant.

No-one likes wasps. No-one sees the point in them. But after reading what follows, this particular wasp will slump even further in your estimation.

The ichneumon injects its eggs into a victim, which is usually a caterpillar. It then paralyses the caterpillar and slowly eats it alive.

Is that bad enough for you to hate the ichneumon wasp? No? How about the fact that it eats all the fat and the digestive system first so that the caterpillar doesn’t die, saving the heart and all the bits it needs to stay alive until last?

What a cad.

It doesn’t seem fair that the creature with the largest penis relative to its body size should be a hermaphrodite. That’s just greedy.

Barnacles have giant schlongs on account of the fact that they don’t leave their shells to mate, meaning the old chap has to venture out on his own. They also have testes towards the back of the head, which seems an odd place to keep them.

Then again, life as a hermaphrodite is pretty weird. There are all sorts of unusual things to contend with. Apparently self-fertilisation is “rare,” but even that seems altogether too likely for most of us.

This creature doesn’t look particularly weird and it’s quite well-known as well, so why feature it?

Well, I want you to spend a little bit of time giving some serious thought the dung beetle’s diet. This is an animal that voluntarily consumes excrement.

Eating faeces is, by anyone’s standards, utterly disgusting. You are completely depraved and repulsive, Mr Dung Beetle. What’s wrong with sandwiches all of a sudden?

Some dung beetles, known as ‘rollers’, form balls of poo and drive them around before eating them. That’s pretty vile, but they’re not the lowest of the dung beetles. That title has to go to the ‘dwellers’ who make their homes within a great pile of crap. And also eat it.

That’s what life is generally like if you happen to share the same bit of murky water with the vampire squid.

This is made even more unsettling when you consider that little light producing photophores in the squid’s skin mean it can turn itself on and off for a laugh whenever it wants. This means it can simply appear out of darkness waving its two arms about manically.

It does this fairly regularly apparently, so god only knows why it looks so glum.

Oooouuuuccccchhhhhh...

Well apparently he left it behind, perhaps as a little token of appreciation to Elliott and the other kids. Strange that he left it in Cuba, but then you always suspected that his own race was made up of quite partisan socialists. Guess that’s why he missed home so much.

No, of course this isn’t E.T’s actual finger! This is just the Cuban Tree Frog that played E.T’s finger in the film. There’s actually nothing all that special about this species of frog, it’s just that this one is chewing on a fairy light – which is more than enough to qualify its inclusion in this list.

Part of me wants to testify in favour of the fox – give it a cuddly character reference and so on. But the other side of me says that we were warned about his behaviour long ago – first by Roald Dahl and then by Wes Anderson.

Mr. Fox (the fantastic one) is probably the most famous fox around these parts, but we must remember that, lovable though he was, he was a vicious, brazen thief.

So next time you find that a fox has hid your remote or keyed your Mondeo, accept it and try not to take it to heart.

The Lions Mane Jellyfish is the largest jellyfish in the world. They have been swimming in arctic waters since before the dinosaurs (over 650 million years ago) and are among some of the oldest surviving species in the world.

The largest can come in at about 6 meters and has tentacles over 50 meters long. Pretty amazing when you think these things have been swimming around for so long.

They have hundreds of poisonous tentacles that it used to catch passing by fish. it then slowly drags in it’s prey and eats it.

They have been causing havoc with Japanese fishermen, ripping and clogging up nets.

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.

So that’s why the coconut crab is a whopping foot and a half long with pincers that look like they could snap you in two.

This one has decided to take someone’s bin, I would guess that there isn’t much the owner could do about it other that stand helplessly nearby.

Apparently they are sometimes kept as pets in Tokyo, but require special cages that the pincers cannot cut through.

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.