Oddities in the animal kingdom

[MortenS]

Inspired by the thread on parental care and male pregnancy in seahorses, I figured I should start a thread about oddities in the animal kingdom. Here is the place to describe animals that do things in a way most others don't.

 

Let me kick it off with a few extreme behaviours:

 

Homosexual traumatic penetration in Xylocoris maculipennis (L.)

 

Usually, males of Xylocoris maculipennis pierce the body wall of the female (thats why it is called traumatic penetration), and inject its sperm, which then swim around in the body until they encounter eggs and fertilize them.

 

Sometimes however, males inject sperm into the body wall of a male. The sperm then swims around until it comes to the victims testes, where they wait to be passed on to a female the next time the victim mates (Source: Introduction to behavioural ecology, Ed: Krebs and Davies)

 

 

Death before birth and extreme inbreeding

"Fifteen eggs, including but a single male, develop within the mother's body. The male emerges within his mother's shell, copulates with all his sisters and dies before birth."

" It may not sound like much of a life, but the male Acarophenax (I also see references to Adactylidium sp for the same story, not sure which is correct, but both are part of the same family) does as much for its evolutionary continuity as Abraham did in fathering children into his 10th decade"

- Quotes from Stephen Jay Gould, Pandas Thumb, "Death before birth of a mite"

My comments are in italics.

[Fishteacher73]

Parasitic Male in Deep Sea Anglerfish (Cryptopsaras couesi)

 

The males of this species are about the size of a kidney bean. They attach themselves to females(about football sized) and live as a parasite until the female is ready for breeding.

[Fishteacher73]

My personal favorite....It'll make you squirm the first time your read it...

 

The Vaudellia cirrhosa is a parasitic catfish. It usually ataches itself to the gills of other fish. (Fish exrete nitogenous wastes though the gills). It is this that attracts the catfish. There are many reports of the fish fining its way into the unknowing wader relieving himself. Up into the urethra...Its fins are spiked as to deter being pulled out. Have some good dreams about that one guys.... :)

[MortenS]

Ouch...

 

I guess we can't forget that certain parasites alter their host behaviour:

 

The Lancet Fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum

 

Adults live in the bile ducts within the liver of various herbivores (cattle, sheep, goats and cervids). When eggs are laid (via feces of the host), the miracidia within the eggs must be eaten by a landsnail before development can continue. Inside the snail gut, the miracidium penetrates the gut wall and transforms into a mother sporocyst in the digestive gland. Daughter sporocysts are produced, which in turn turn into cercaria with stylets. Some months after infection, the cercaria start accumulating in the mantle cavity (="lung") of the snail, or on the surface of the body. They act as an irritant on the snail, and the snail surrounds them with mucus, and eventually deposit cercaria-filled slime balls.

 

Now the cercaria waits within the slimeball, until picked up by an ant (the common brown ant, Formica fusca is often the host). If the ant eats the slimeball, or feeds it to their larvae, they get infected by metacercaria. Over a 100 metacercaria may occur in a single ant. When the ant gets eaten by a herbivore, the cycle is completed.

 

Here comes the special part: One or two of the metacercaria in the ant travel up to the brain of the ant and encyst there. These are not infective, but they will alter the behaviour of the ant. Instead of returning home to the ant nest when temperature drops in the evening, infected ants will crawl to the top of grass or other plants, and attach to it with their mandibles. When they warm up in the morning, they resume normal behaviour.

 

This behaviour increase the chance that the metacercaria will enter the definitie host.

[Fishteacher73]

A bit off thread, Morten, but do you know if most flukes have an intemediate host in a snail? I have seen a few articles on fluke infestations of ornamental fish and the intermediate host for this specific one is a snail as well. (Also transmited by birds eating the snails and poopsing in the ponds).

[MortenS]

There are some variations, but snails are definetly a very, very common intermediate host of flukes.

 

For those that have only one intermediate host the pattern are usually like this:

 

Primary host: vertebrate

Intermediate host: snails (or clams in some instances) or crustaecean

 

For those with several intermediate hosts:

 

Primary host: Vertebrate (fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, mammals)

First intermediate host: Snail

Secondary intermediate host: arthropods (e.g. insects, crustaceans), fish

[Fishteacher73]

My mind seems to have blanked on me, there is a term for this type of life cycle, (Various life stages only occuring in specific hosts), do you happen to recall what it is?

[alxian]

now admit it i'm sure some of you have hot sisters and you must of at some point wished you were a male Acarophenax.... (joking)

[alxian]

how about most australian animals?

 

i wonder what fossils lay under antartic ice.. dinosaur and mammalian alike. bound to be some odd critters. as odd as australian and south american creatures or even more odd..

 

does anyone know of any mainland expeditions scheduled?? i know that they are doing coastal research but thats not going to turn up much..

 

also what if AVP was more on the mark than the layman will give hollywood credit for and there are pyramids on the continent? what humans and lost civilizations could be found... i always liked the idea of russians using their huge orit mirror technology to melt sections of the ice (will include this in my novel :) ).

[MortenS]

Opps, wrong forum...I was posting in norwegian something that was going to a biology board I am on... :)

 

I'll save this space until I have something to write..I writing was about Monotremata btw..quite a coincident?

[Fishteacher73]

Possibly the oddest is the platypus. Not only is just plain wierd by just about any yard stick, it is also venomous (Males have spurs on thier thighs that inject the venom). Not only that moden science really does not know what this venom is. (It is neither a neurotoxin, myctixin, nor a necrotoxin). Envenomation is extemely painful (Morphine will not dull the pain. Usually epidural-like blockers are used to numb the envenomated limb).

[alxian]

the platypus is fine.

 

the oddest could be the (check google for SP.) coelacanth

 

thought to have died out with the dinos was caught by fisher men who've been netting them for generations..

 

but i still say the oddest creatures are deep see creatures and missing animals from the antartic jungles.

 

the best way to tell if they will be 'weird' or not will be how long ago did it separate from pangea. australia did so and was separate for much longer than a few other continents maybe the longest.

 

but i'd bet a few pesos the antartica jungle has been estranged from the mainland as long or longer meaning life there would have evolved differently for much longer than any life forms on earth.. wouldn't it be fun though to see animals that were supposed to have evolved after the continents separated.

[ton-loc]

ok ok guys this is what actually happened... so there was this guy named god and he was all like i am going to make an earth so he was all like hmm i am going to make people and animals and plants and earth and water and trees and bugsa and mushrooms and badgers and fish and whales and monkey and beavers and mooses and women with mustaches and black people... so he made them and thts how ti all happened so get it straight guys. :) :D :D

[Tormod]

ok ok guys this is what actually happened...

 

Hey there ton-loc

 

Welcome to Hypography! We do enjoy jokes but please try to stay on topic in our discussions. Use the Watercooler for nonsensical stuff. :)

[Fishteacher73]

the best way to tell if they will be 'weird' or not will be how long ago did it separate from pangea. australia did so and was separate for much longer than a few other continents maybe the longest.

 

 

If I recall both Austrailia and Antarctica split off of Lauraisa about 135 million years ago. at this point, Austrailia kinda hung out near where iit is now and Antarctica made a b-line for the pole. The only fossil evidence that I am aware of being found in Antarctica are aquatic fossils from before the seas recessed.

[alxian]

ton... thank you.. debates are always best with a modicum of comic relief. welcome to the forum.

 

as for this guy named god, i'm more likely to believe he sneezed on his way through sols domain and life was begat that way, but he kept right on trucking and never looked back.

 

equally i like the summerian story of creation that tells of a planet called tiamat that was cleaved by another called nibiru, this interloper then continued on on a new path outside of our solar system. whether our not nibiru was in fact populated at the time of the cleaving is not certain but the summers would have us believe it was that the collision shared matter with the new planet (earth, the contiguous remains of the traumatized tiamat). one of the reasons i like the story is that it allows for dinosaurs to have in fact existed on earth, because by all accounts the larger flighted terrestrial dinos namely pterodactyls could not have actually flown in earth current gravity. also the moon would have been closer to a more massive planet (if in fact that cleaving wasn't the origin of the moon in the first place)(where science says earth was impacted at some point by a mars sized planet which could have shorn off enough matter to have formed the moon). but besides all of those reasons which still don't account for all the oddness of the current configurations of things (namely the moons orientation (unless the fact the moon is heavy on one side meaning it was formed after/during the destruction of tiamat, the satelite (the moon) would have been subject to earths pull, meaning its oddness is in fact accounted for by the summers tale), but what i mean is why the remains of tiamat just happen to make a twin of venus of the earth.. that just very odd. getting back to the moon.. if in fact it was formed under the pull of earth, wouldn't it have a spin of some kind? with the axis pointing at earth? still, but i guess the fact the moon is dead and has no rotation kind of points to an abnormal formation.. because had it formed as most bodies do by concretion it should have some amount of rotation and internal heat.. so it looks like it was put there, and formed in earths gravity and the oddness is just that non-coincidental oddness.. i'm still left with the question why is it moving away slowly (science says the moon was closer to the earth in prehistoric times, if this is so and the summers were wrong, what accounts for the outward drift, has it stabilized? or will the moon escape from earth some time in the future?)

[alxian]

so yeah the antarticans should be equally as far removed from normal evolution as astralians (animals not people). heck if they found human bones on antarctica i'd be very very happy. it would beg very huge questions as to how peeps got there.. as in did they get there by ship, or is evolution going to have to bite another bullet.

 

furthermore, what if the skeletons found on antartica are more modern than is possible but dated to be extremely ancient... i mean a boat isn't hard to build any fool can build a raft, but to have gotten there and settled (easy enough given the place was lush jungle at one point) who would they be most closely related to? perhaps they could be the snake people the egyptians ran from, perhaps the peeps responsible for the missing north american copper.. who knows. so many questions to be answered.

 

not that i'd want to be on the expidition to the pole, i'd sure like to know how much science to date has gotten right about human origins and subsequent evolution.

 

lol.. what if they found a mayan spaceport? (by mayan i mean any pacific rim culture, that would have tried to escape the ice age)