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Strangest Animal

JudeB

New Member
What is the strangest animal you've ever seen in your life, both in real life or pictures of? The strangest one that I've seen pictures of is the barreleye fish, shown below.
Barreleye fish • MBARI
 
I live in a country filled with bizarre wildlife from fish that climb trees to turtles that breath through their bumholes while feeding on aquatic plants to mammals that still lay eggs. Some look stranger than others.

 
What is the strangest animal you've ever seen in your life, both in real life or pictures of? The strangest one that I've seen pictures of is the barreleye fish, shown below.
Barreleye fish • MBARI
Ocean biomes and the sea life within have high concentrations of strangeness. It has so often captured both my interest and imagination.
 
The Thorny Devil. These strange little lizards are quite harmless, they live in deserts and eat ants. Those spikes are soft and flexible and they're not just to prevent birds from eating them. Their skin has patterns of surfaces specifically to attract dew in early mornings and channels between the spikes channel those drops of dew in to the lizard's mouth.

Australian-agamid-lizard-Thorny-Devil-Moloch-horridus-1024x668.webp
 
A field full of strange neolithic monuments?

termite-mounds-in-lightLR-1024x683.webp


No, they're Magnetic Termite mounds. All of them are on a North/South alignment. Some of our early explorers weren't terribly bright though, the direction of these mounds is decided by the sun and not magnetism. During early morning and late afternoon the sun hits that flat face full on and heats it up on one side, during the middle of the day when the sun is at it's hottest it's only striking those flat surfaces at a steep angle and not turning the mound into an oven.

magnetic-termites-5[2].webp
 
A field full of strange neolithic monuments?

View attachment 149404

No, they're Magnetic Termite mounds. All of them are on a North/South alignment. Some of our early explorers weren't terribly bright though, the direction of these mounds is decided by the sun and not magnetism. During early morning and late afternoon the sun hits that flat face full on and heats it up on one side, during the middle of the day when the sun is at it's hottest it's only striking those flat surfaces at a steep angle and not turning the mound into an oven.

View attachment 149405
Sometimes, it feels like nature is better at architecture than humans.
 
Sometimes, it feels like nature is better at architecture than humans.
It's a little bit eerie walking amongst them, like a giant's grave yard.

It's not just termites that live in those mounds either, they share their home with bull ants. The bull ants provide protection from predators and the termites provide protection from the elements.
 

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