This precious little bundle of joy made the list of the Top 10 New Species of 2010. At a length of 6 feet 6 inches, it’s the longest species on the list and lives in the forests of northern Luzon in the Philippines.
Also on the list:
a leech with huge teeth found in a little girl’s nose in Peru
bacteria feeding off of the metal parts of the Titanic
fungi that glow in the dark
cockroaches that jump (::shudder::)
a big ass spider who creates webs that span whole rivers and lakes in Madagascar…up to 82 feet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jesus take the wheel…..
All that is creepy and I cannot just randomly have skin-crawly pictures all willy nilly on my blog, but you can look at the slideshow on LiveScience.
If you live in a Southern state, you might have heard stories about the 13-year-cycle cicadas emerging this year for the first time since, well, 1998. They’ll pop out of the ground, fully grown, sing super loud, find mates, breed, and lay eggs. Then the babies will burrow into the ground and there’ll be no more of those cicadas for the next 13 years. There are also some 17-year-cycle cicadas.
But why do they cycle in such big prime numbers? It’s the best defense against predators.
Let’s say most of the predators who feed on cicadas have 2-5 year cycles. If the cicadas also had such cycles, everytime the little bugs came out to mate, they’d be wiped out by the masses of predators on the same timeclock. And if the cicadas were on a larger cycle that was divisible by a smaller number (say a 10 year cycle), everytime they came out to breed, there’d be a mass of predators on a 5 year or 2 year cycle to wipe them out again. But to get a 13 year cycle to sync up with a 5 year cycle means the cicadas would only be feasted upon every 65 years, giving them over six decades in between to rebuild their numbers.
There would be riots in the streets all summer. Forreal. It would be the Rodney King verdict all over again. A repeat of the March on Washington, AsianStyle. And why all this potential colored folks unrest?
See, this just goes back to what I keep saying about China: They need to slow it down and stop trying to do too much. A bunch of farmers in China have been overdoing it with the growth hormones, and now their watermelons have just randomly started exploding in the fields. Doing.Too.Much. Japan is the same way…you know they’re the ones who came up with square watermelons.
So this is kind of interesting and obnoxious at the same time. Asian-Americans are getting fat so they can fit in with White people. It’s not a conscious decision, but there’s an interesting study showing how Asian-Americans, even ones that were born here and speak perfect English, feel insecure about fitting in with their white peers so much so that they end up changing their eating habits. The studies compare food choices made when just before a meal, some question relating to “Americanness” is presented to the subject. Examples:
Participants are asked to write down their favorite food by an interviewer. For some, the interviewer asks just beforehand “Do you speak English?” For that group, 75% of the Asian-Americans wrote a typically American food, compared with only 25% of the group who were not asked about English. Whites showed no difference.
Participants are taken to a cafeteria with a mixture of Asian and American foods. For half, the interviewer says “Oh, you have to be American to participate in this study by the way.” Again, a larger percentage of that group chose things like hamburgers and grilled cheese, foods that have a much higher calorie count compared to traditional Asian fare.
68% of the Asian-Americans in the study reported being embarrassed to eat the traditional foods of their parents in front of their white peers.
It’s been long established that immigrants will take on the habits and culture of their new adopted country. It just so happens that our habits make people fat. No more Tiny Asian stereotype! Cause we raisin sumo wrestlers over here now.
LiveScience has an article about the Weirdest Moms in the Animal Kingdom in honor of Mother’s Day. Next time you do something and your mom is like “I went through labor for you!!!” just be like “well you didn’t sacrifice yourself for the wellbeing of me and my siblings so we could feast on your carcass so I don’t wanna hear it!”
Chickens dissolve their own bones in order to make enough calcium for the eggshells of their unborn babies. That’s some forreal sacrifice. Giving yourself osteoporosis for your chicks…
Cuckoos hijack the nest of a different species of bird and lay their eggs in it. The cuckoo always hatches earlier and then pushes the other eggs out of the nest so the adopted mom can focus all her energy on feeding the lone cuckoo. Gangsta!
Adetomyrmaant is a tiny ant from Madagascar. When the queen has brand new little larvaes to contend with, she and her workers chew little holes in the babies and feed on them. The babies don’t die and we don’t know why they’re being vamped on, but there it go. Weird ants.
Pacific Gray Whales get preggers and migrate thousands of miles away from the Arctic down to the coast of Mexico. Orcas live in the arctic and eat the baby whales so the moms give birth in safety down in Mexico. In the process they can lose up to 8 tons because there’s not as much food down there, but that’s some dedicated mothering.
Some species of Stegodyphus spiders hunt for the sole purpose of feeding the babies. They eat, throw up, and let the babies eat the vomit. Then, after a month, mom rolls over on her back and lets the babies eat her. Yum!
The poison arrow frog watches her tadpoles hatch on the rainforest floor. Then she carries each of them, one by one, 100feet up to the rainforest canopy and finds individual leaves with pools of water for them to swim in. Little aquatic nurseries in the sky. And to feed em, she just uses her unfertilized eggs. That momma is workin, forreal.
Sea louse give birth by letting the babies chew their way through her body to the outside world. I’m so glad I didn’t have to do that.
This is what happens when you dump a lot of fire ants into a body of water…they link up and make a raft that floats, resists being submerged, and doesn’t let the water in.
My skin is in a constant state of Crawl now. Thanks, Nature!
Look at this photo.
