These Images Are Floating Around And It’s Said That These Are “skeleton Panda Sea Squirts.” Elsewhere

Plop

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A WALK ON THE WIDER SIDE

hello and welcome to another episode of Weird Biology with me, your host Bunjy! this week’s creature is hard to see and kind of dangerous, so we’re just going to watch our step as we-

OOP WATCH OUT!

you almost stepped on him!

you should be more careful, you could have really hurt his feelings.

it’s time to meet-

*muffled hysterical laughter*

the Gaboon Viper is found in the forests and savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. its boldly patterned scales are perfectly camouflaged against the forest floor, making it all but invisible. 

its incredible striking speed and strength are renowned throughout the reptile world, and its venomous bite is powerful enough to kill even a grown man! clearly, this is not a creature to be trifled with.

and it is, as they say in herpetologist circles, a Swarthy Lad.

*continued hysterical laughter*

as you may have noticed from the pictures, the Gaboon Viper is very, uh, wide. and flat. like a pancake. a pan-snake, if you will. in fact, they’re so wide that their wikipedia page has an entire measurement category called “girth” just for them. (no, I’m not joking) and it’s over 14 inches, if you were curious. that’s usually a measurement reserved for pizzas.

there’s good reason for this, because the Gaboon Viper is the heftiest viper in the world! they generally reach only 4-5 feet long, but may weigh nearly twenty pounds. that’s completely fucking ridiculous.

that’s like a normal snake, if that normal snake had just eaten a couple of 7-pound free weights.

Gaboon Vipers are at the top of the snake list for a lot of different qualities, as it turns out. it’s not just that manhole cover physique, this snake has the WHOLE package. they are known for being incredibly fast despite their size, and for wrestling prey to the ground with their sheer strength like it’s the last five seconds of a ladder match. but now get ready for a real double whammy-

they have the longest fangs of any snake! OF ANY SNAKE. they also produce the most venom per bite of any snake! OF ANY SNAKE. wow! fuck!

aaaa! I still think you’re adorable!

those fangs are two fucking inches long, for reference. two inches. let’s think about that for a minute. 

oookay we’re done thinking about that. so now let’s consider the fact that a Gaboon Viper can deliver up to 7 ml of venom per bite! alright, so that doesn’t sound like a lot. but please remember that the lethal dose for a human is 0.06 ml. jesus. imagine carrying enough poison in your face to kill like a thousand people.

and for a species that mostly eats small animals like rabbits, this is absolutely stupid amounts of overkill. like, hunting-pigeons-with-a-rocket-launcher levels of overkill.

people probably would be into that if it was allowed, actually.

alright, so we’ve definitely laid out the facts that make Gaboon Vipers so terrifying. but now I’ll hit you with the good news! 

human deaths from Gaboon Viper bites are very, very, very rare. and it’s because Gaboon Vipers are very good flat boys.

no seriously, some of that is because Gaboon Vipers live way the fuck out in the woods but it’s mostly because these snakes are some of the most laid-back reptiles in existence.

yes, really.

don’t have a cow, man.

Gaboon Vipers are tolerant, docile animals that are extremely unlikely to bite you. in fact, they’re so chillax that scientists have been able to pick them up barehanded and stick them in collection boxes.  (WE DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS. SCIENTISTS ARE OFTEN A LITTLE NUTS.) apparently the snakes just kind of went along with it. maybe they were bored? 

usually when people ARE bitten, it’s because they didn’t see the snake and fucking stepped on it. and even then, stomping on a Gaboon Viper doesn’t always earn a bite. (BUT DON’T DO THAT. IT’S MEAN.)

they’re good sweet boys, is what I’m getting at here.

the GOODEST good boy. look at his widdle face.

thankfully, the Gaboon Viper is doing pretty okay! the species is still widely distributed, and has a conservation status of Least Concern. (it probably helps that they have so little conflict with humanity! chillness is its own virtue.)

it’s not often that I close a Weird Biology article with that kind of good news, so this deserves to be celebrated! clap your hands and jump around a bit! Yaaay, Gaboon Viper! we love your chubby little face and your ridiculously chill lifestyle!

maybe we could all take a lesson from the Gaboon Viper, and relax a little more.

–

thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee or check out my Patreon to see extra content and support Weird Biology.

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Wikipedia.zh img2- The National Zoo img3- Julie Larsen Maher @WCS img4- reptiletalk.net img5- Reptiles Magazine img6- AnimalSpot.net img7- Carnivora img8- AboutAnimals.com

Had enough of bath time thanks

VIDEO SOURCE

(Turn on the sound!!)

Baby armadillo plays with his toy

free lil cuh

Parasitic crustaceans are wild.

[cw: photos of parasites inside host bodies]

Here is Linguatula serrata, which lives inside the nose of dogs and other Carnivorans. It belongs to group Pentastomida, which has so shed its arthropod appendages that it was long classified as its own independent phylum (attested in fossils all the way from the Cambrian Explosion!), until molecular analyses showed they were in fact strange crustaceans – closest relatives of the relatively normal-looking fish lice (Branchiura).

And then there’s Pennellidae…

Do those horn-things look like crustaceans to you? And yet the family Pennellidae is fully part of Copepoda, the chief component of crustacean plankton. Its body is simply one elongated trunk and a tiny head biting onto the fish, with two long egg cords trailing behind.

Look at the cod worm (Lernaeocera branchialis), another Pennellidae, hanging from the gills of a fish:

It’s those two red things that look like slugs wearing a wig made of soy noodles. Here’s what it looks like on its own, extracted and preserved:

(source) The coiled strings are egg masses. The slug-like part is the copepod’s trunk. The thin branching thing at the bottom is its head, converted into a sort of root system that no longer does head-like things, but rather burrows into the fish host’s blood vessels to feed its eggs. Incidentally, this is just the female; the male still looks like a regular planktonic crustacean.

Now, regular barnacles (Cirripedia) are strange enough…

(source; picture them as shrimps lying on their back, with a digestive system that fell out of the body wall but is still contained by the outer shell, and feathery legs poking out to filter water)

… but parasitic barnacles of clade Rhizocephala go much further:

Here, on the left, is Sacculina carcini. No, not the crab; the yellow sac poking out of the crab’s belly. On the right, its relative Clistosaccus paguri shows what it might look like once extracted.

Sacculina carcini is fun. A larva looks much like any other crustacean planktonic larva, until it finds a suitable host. It stings the unfortunate crab in a vulnerable spot between armor plates, and effectively injects itself into the host, leaving its own shell outside, and transferring only soft tissues.

Once inside, it grows more like a fungus than an animal, turning into a root-like web that infests the crab’s entire body, down to its leg tips. Then it takes over not only the crab’s digestive system, leeching nutrients for its own eggs, but also its nervous system, effectively controlling it like a puppet.

When the parasite is mature, its egg sac starts bulging out of the crab’s body: that’s the yellow part you see in the photo. Male Sacculina stay larvae their whole life: they just mate with the female’s egg sac and then die. The parasite makes the crab take care of itself as if it was the crab’s own eggs. There’s no competition, since the host is sterilized; to leave more food for the parasite, it also stops molting and regenerating lost limbs. If the host is male, and therefore poorly suited to carrying egg sacs under its tail, Sacculina messes with its hormones and effectively turns it female.

Finally the eggs are released and the whole cycle starts again, with the only purpose of making more eggs whose purpose is making more eggs.

(all pictures from Wikipedia unless specified otherwise)

“Meet the Shame-faced Crab”

Thank you, I will!

What in the world are you? 

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