The mimic octopus needs no introduction, but watch these videos to have your mind blown.
This is insanely beautiful and reminds us that humans are boring.
Also, you know you’re the business when you start mimicking a fish and some other fish mimics you and acts like your sidekick.
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
Editor’s Note: Regarding the title – Could. Not. Resist. Sorry.
The family Dicamptodon is a sweet little packet of goodness. Commonly, they are known as “giant salamanders” even though they are not, in fact, the biggest salamanders around. I was not consulted in this naming process, so don’t blame me. While containing just a single genus and four species, they are few, but mighty in size, bark and bite. Members of this mainly terrestrial (although they can be paedomorphic) family may grow to be just over a foot long. They are known to be voracious eaters and a bit aggressive. “Aggressive salamander” sounds as oxymoron-ish as jumbo shrimp, christian scientist, or Chief Justice William Rehnquist, but check out this video below and judge for yourself.
These guys even eat small mammals (hey, don’t we all) and make a barking noise that sounds kind of like my stomach growling.
Finally, if you spend too much time on the internet looking up “salamander vocalization” (and oh yes, I do) you will eventually stumble upon some disturbing mormon business about a “talking white salamander”. This has me wondering if maybe Joseph Smith encountered a species of Dicamptodon , but it was “barking” and definitely not talking. Also, the correct translation was most likely “you are crazy and I’m not a spirit”. While salamanders are awesome, they are not supernatural.
To learn more, follow-up with this video from some California Conservation Corps members:
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
There are loads of salamanders that don’t necessarily fit into our idea of a salamander. The amphiuma is one example. There are three species of one-, two- and three-toed salamanders and all are fully aquatic. Depending on the species they can be between 33 and 110 cm, but their legs stay T-rex style. They inhabit the southeastern United States, and although relatively common they are sadly understudied.
Here is a video to learn more:
Even though the legs are vestigial, the amphiuma is still able to traverse across land.
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
Within the family Anablepidae, there is a genus Anableps which are known as four-eyed fish. They are found in Central and South America in fresh or brackish waters. These fish are live bearers and interestingly they exhibit a “sidedness”. Males that are left-handed may only mate with females that are right-handed.
Now the fish do not have four eyes exactly, but in both eyes they can see above and below water simultaneously. This is a good super power to have when you spend most of your time on the surface foraging insects.
The retina is specialized so that half receives light from the aquatic environment and the other from the aerial environment. Recent research found that the dorsal and ventral retina have differential gene expression. Click here for a link to the article to learn more.
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
Plants are so often the overlooked underdogs that I wanted to highlight one today. With their weird and wacky genomes, plants come in a variety of shapes and sizes and if you say you love orchids then you haven’t seen enough plants. Also, just recently we’ve discovered a new organelle (tannosome) in plants! A NEW ORGANELLE (yes, it’s in all caps because I’m yelling) -I sort of thought at this point, the whole organelle deal was sorted out. Nope, plants just keep surprising us. This is major news, like rewriting middle school textbooks major.
One of my personal favorite plants is Rafflesia also called “corpse flower” because it smells like rotting flesh. Sending a bouquet of rafflesia is a bad idea not only because of the smell, but also a single flower may be 90 cm in diameter.
Thanks to ARKive we canwatch this stinky, giant flower bloom.
There are 28 species in the genus Rafflesia and they are all found in southeastern Asia. They have no roots and parasitize other plants. Speaking of organelles, the corpse flower has no chloroplasts which perhaps changes the way you define plants. This also provided a headache for the plant systematics world as they use chloroplast DNA to make their phylogenetic trees.
Learn more with this remarkable video from the botanist, Alastair Robinson
“Meet the…” is a collaboration between The Finch & Pea and Nature Afield to bring Nature’s amazing creatures into your home.
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