Post Punk Kitchen Forum

The star nosed mole is a tenacious creature, able to withstand severe cold and burrow easily through ice to make its home and find food. It lives in Canada and the East Coast of the United States. It favors a high protein diet of clams, snails, small rodents, mollusks and worms. It’s not a very big creature - about the size of a hand. But its 22 nose tentacles are hard to miss. They help the mole find food.

The Chinese giant salamander can grow to be nearly six feet long.

Pangolins are nocturnal animals, and use their well-developed sense of smell to find insects. The long-tailed pangolin is also active by day. Pangolins spend most of the daytime sleeping, curled up into a ball.

I love you.

fork you all. I read interrobang's?! sig, read through all of these creepy photos to try to understand sig, found sig to be quite funny, and NO ONE posted what a damn goanna was.
So...I present to you the goanna:



Goanna is the name used to refer to any number of Australian monitor lizards of the genus Varanus, as well as to certain species from Southeast Asia. There are around 30 species of goanna, 25 of which are found in Australia. They are a varied group of carnivorous reptiles that range greatly in size and fill several ecological niches. The goanna features prominently in Aboriginal mythology and Australian folklore. Being predatory lizards, goannas are often quite large, or at least bulky, with sharp teeth and claws. The largest is the perentie (Varanus giganteus), which can grow over 2m (78.7 inches) in length.

Or, perhaps the poster was referring to a member of the goanna rock band.... I don't know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna_(band)

I wanna snuggle it!

Well, I *am* a snarky crasshole....what's not to love? ;)

"Cymothoa exigua, or the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 in) long. This parasite enters through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper's (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue. It extracts blood through the claws on its front, causing the tongue to atrophy from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish's tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish.[1] Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host's blood and many others feed on fish mucus. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ."

NOTE: I just copied that from wikipedia. It's badass, though, right?

Pastabake wins this thread.

Really? Not even an honorable mention for the goanna? Or a mention, not even honorable?
All that vom for nothing but a great laugh. Eh, totally worth it.

The goanna is pretty cool. Still, it would be better if it had a parasitic louse for a tongue.

How about the yeti crab?



"Its silky white looks may make it seem more at home in the Himalaya, but this unique creature was recently discovered in the deep darkness of the South Pacific.

Divers using submersible vehicles were about a mile and a half (more than two and a quarter kilometers) below the surface when they spotted the animal near hydrothermal vents.

The creature, dubbed the "yeti crab," is so unusual that a whole new family of animal had to be created to classify it. Its official name is Kiwa hirsuta, and even after a year of study scientists say there's still much about it they don't understand."

This is really quite amazing!

Pacific Barreleye fish! Cute and with a see-through head!


These fish are named for their barrel-shaped, tubular eyes which are generally directed upwards to detect the silhouettes of available prey; however, these fish are capable of directing their eyes forward as well.
Also present in some species are a number of luminous organs; in Dolichopteryx there are several along the length of the belly. These organs glow with a weak light due to the presence of symbiotic bioluminescent bacteria.
The barreleyes also have flat fins that let them remain motionless in the water - any sudden or intense movement can upset their fragile "headgear."
The green pigments in its eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey (such as a drifting jelly), the fish rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.
Like living drift nets, jellyfish trail thousands of stinging tentacles, which capture copepods and other small animals. The researchers speculate that barreleyes may maneuver carefully among the siphonophore's tentacles, picking off the captured organisms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barreleye_fish

Since I'm an animal nerd, I've heard about most of the animals on this thread, but my jaw literally dropped at the barrel-eye fish. A see-through head!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


How about the Pink Fairy Armadillo, that lives in the playa of Argentina and is only 3-4 inches long?

Oh, my god. I can't even. New pipe dream: Never going to happen, but nice to think about.

Yes! The water bear's my favorite; those little dudes are crazy!

Sea Pig:


They live down in the deep deep sea. Believe it or not, "the sea pigs are not considered as a threat to humans. . ."

And perhaps my favorite organism: the magical photosynthetic sea slug. This little dude eats a particular algae once in the larval stage, steals its genes (through horizontal gene transfer), then photosynthesizes for the rest of its life and never needs to eat again! I wrote a two page paper on him, if anyone is interested ^_^.

This thread cannot be complete without the naked mole rat.



The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber), also known as the sand puppy or desert mole rat, is a burrowing rodent native to parts of East Africa and the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus.
The skin of naked mole rats lacks a key neurotransmitter called substance P that is responsible in mammals for sending pain signals to the central nervous system. When naked mole rats are exposed to acid or capsaicin, they feel no pain. When injected with Substance P, however, the pain signaling works as it does in other mammals, but only with capsaicin and not with the acids.
A single tuber can provide a colony with a long-term source of food—lasting for months, or even years, as they eat the inside but leave the outside, allowing the tuber to regenerate.
The naked mole rat is also of interest because it is extraordinarily long-lived for a rodent of its size (up to 28 years) and holds the record for the longest living rodent. Naked mole rats appear to have a high resistance to cancer; cancer has never been observed in them.