awesome creatures

Where they come from?

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Electric eel

The Electric Eel Is Not an Eel, they are are a genus , Electrophorus, of neotropical freshwater fish from South America in the family Gymnotidae.

Electric eels come by their name for good reason — depending on the species, they can release an electric shock of up to 860 volts. This defense mechanism is created by three organs found in all three electric eel species: the main organ, the Hunter’s organ, and the Sach’s organ. The strongest electrical discharges are caused by the main and Hunter’s organs working in unison, while the Sach’s organ produces lower voltage electrical charges.

Not only are electric eels capable of delivering a high voltage shock, but they are also known to leap out of the water to attack predators.

During the dry season, female electric eels lay their eggs in a foam nest made of saliva. Males are responsible for building the nest of spit and guarding the eggs until they hatch during the rainy season. An average of 1,200 baby eels will hatch from the well-guarded nest. Electric eels are believed to be fractional spawners that lay three batches of eggs during each spawning cycle.

While they have small gills on the sides of their head, electric eels get most of their oxygen at the water’s surface. Electric eels obtain around 80% of their oxygen by gulping air with their mouths — an adaptation for the muddy, poorly oxygenated waters in which they live.

Because they have poor eyesight and live in a muddy environment, electric eels have been adapted to use their electric power for another purpose — locating fast-moving prey. A study of the electrical pulses discharged by electric eels revealed that there are three distinctive types. The eels utilize a low voltage pulse for electrolocation; short, high-voltage pulses for hunting; and the highest frequency and intensity pulses when they are in attack mode.

Electric eels use a clever strategy to handle large or challenging prey. They curl around it, holding the prey near their tails — which are essentially two electric poles. At a minimum, this strategy doubles the electricity and thus the amount of shock the prey receives. This behavior is particularly effective because it allows the eels the chance to immobilize and reposition prey so that it can be easily consumed.

While electric eels can reach a body length of up to 8 feet, only 20% of that length contains their vital organs. The eel’s entire posterior, 80% of its body, is electric organs. Even their skin is covered by tuberous and ampullary electroreceptor cells. All of their internal organs are squeezed into the small space near their head.

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Opisthoteuthis californiana

Flapjack octopus vs. dumbo octopus: The Opisthoteuthis californiana octopuses are known for flattening out their body, while the dumbo octopuses are known for their ear-like fins that are flappy.

Flapjack octopus adaptations: The eyes of the flapjack octopus is round, outstanding, and bovine-like, while their fins are ear-like. This offers the whole creature the form of a staring face, sufficient to startle its enemies, specifically the dangerous predators. The very length of these Opisthoteuthis califeorniana octopuses allows them quick cover inside crevices or beneath rocks if attacked.

They had been located across California at depths of 1148 ft (350 m). They've also been sighted in parts of Japan, including 1738-1837 ft (530–560 m) off Kashima Nada, the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, central Honshū within the northwestern areas of the Pacific Ocean, to southern parts of California within the northeastern parts of the Pacific Ocean

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Pistol Shrimp

Pistol shrimp is capable of producing a sound reaching 218 decibels, which is louder than a gunshot and capable of breaking glass jars, hence making it difficult to keep it in aquariums.

Snapping shrimp have the ability to reverse claws. If they lose the snapping claw, the missing limb regenerates into a smaller claw and the original smaller appendage grows into a new snapping claw.

The snapping action of the claw creates a cavitation bubble that reaches speeds up to 62 miles an hour (100 km/hr.) and collapses with a loud snap.

The snap of the bubble also produces something called sonoluminescence, i.e., emission of short bursts of light. When the cavitation bubble collapses it reaches temperatures of over 5000 Kelvin and produces a flash of light which lasts for no longer than 10 nanoseconds and is not visible to the naked eye.

Pistol shrimps have the ability to form a symbiotic relationship with some species of goby fish. Pistol shrimp shares its burrow with the goby and provides it with food. In exchange goby, which has much better eyesight, warns the shrimp when danger approaches. The shrimp keeps in contact with goby through its antennae and the goby alerts the shrimp by its characteristic tail movements and then both retreat into the safety of the shared burrow.

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Sea cucumber

Sea cucumbers are animals. They are related to starfish, sand dollar and urchins.

Sea cucumbers breathe as water is pumped through two respiratory trees located on each side of their digestive tract. Some sea cucumbers can eject their digestive system and associated organs when disturbed or threatened (or purge its inner organs of excess wastes or chemicals). This process called evisceration, once the organs are discharged, they regenerate within days or weeks.

Pearlfish often live inside various invertebrates including sea cucumbers. Because a sea cucumber breathes by taking in water through its anus, a pearlfish can wait for the cucumber to open for a breath and swim in.

Some species ingest sediment, remove the food particles and then excrete the sediment in long strands. One sea cucumber can filter up to 99 pounds of sediment in a year. The excretions of sea cucumbers help keep nutrients cycling throughout the ocean ecosystem. 

Many species reproduce by spawning — broadcasting their sperm and eggs into the water column. There, the eggs are fertilized and become swimming larvae that later settle to the ocean bottom.

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Jellyfish

Lacking brains, blood, or even hearts, jellyfish are pretty simple critters. They are composed of three layers: an outer layer, called the epidermis; a middle layer made of a thick, elastic, jelly-like substance called mesoglea; and an inner layer, called the gastrodermis.

The typical jellyfish lifecycle has two alternating generations. The free-swimming medusa (a jellyfish) is either female or male and produces eggs or sperm which combine to produce a larva (planula). The planula swims through the water to find a suitable place to settle, attach itself to a surface and metamorphoses into a sessile (polyp). When conditions are right, these bud off to form ephyrae (baby jellyfish).

The immortal jellyfish is a species of jellyfish that is biologically immortal, that does not remain in the Medusa stage, until death. Instead of dying it shrinks in on itself, reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim. It then settles on the seafloor as a blob and develops into a new polyp. This regeneration process is called “transdifferentiation”.

A sting from a box jellyfish, the most venomous animal on Earth, can kill a human in two minutes.

Comb jellies' ability to generate light comes from genes that produce photoproteins. Two types of chemicals involved in light production, called luciferin and luciferase, are bound together in a photoprotein. This molecule can be triggered to produce light when calcium is added to the system. Photoproteins emit flashes of very bright light for a fraction of a second.

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Starfish

All starfish resemble stars, and though the most common have only five arms, some of these animals can grow up to 40 arms. They’re also strong enough to rip apart mollusca and crustacean shells.

While they have highly adapted stomachs and exceptionally well-developed “skin,” sea stars lack brains and have absolutely no blood. Lacking a bloodstream and gills, starfish live by pumping seawater through their bodies to deliver nutrients, oxygen, and other essential fluids.

On each arm, there may be up to 15,000 tiny tube feet that move in caterpillar-like synchronization, propelling the starfish forward at an efficient pace.

Their feet can form a powerful glue that will bond indefinitely with a rock or prey item, with an adjacent tube releasing a solvent to undo the bond once the star is ready to move on.

Sea stars are cannibals when provoked by reductions in normal food supplies.

One of their bizarre traits is their ability to eject their stomachs. After a sea star opens its prey’s shell by gluing its feet to the outside and forcibly ripping the shell apart, it’ll shoot its own stomach into the shell. The inverted stomach actually digests the animal inside its shell and turns it into a liquefied soup.

They have no teeth and are not dangerous to humans. But crown-of-thorns starfish are different, their upper surface covered with venomous spikes.

While sea stars are typically very accomplished as predators, cushion stars are much gentler animals with less dramatic lifestyles. They mostly feed on detritus, plant material, and sometimes coral. The cushion star also serves as a sort of home for other species of marine animal in a strange symbiotic relationship system. Small fish may live inside the main body cavity of this sea star, which is filled with water, while invertebrates on the outside clean the prickly spines.

Sea stars do have eyes that give them the ability to navigate, and they’re located in a pretty weird place: the tips of their arms.

Sea stars can switch gender at will. Some species have both male and female sex organs and can take on either role while mating.

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Wood Frog

They are one of the only amphibians that live near the Arctic Circle.

They deter predators with their poison glands and shrill noises they can make.

Wood frogs shut down during freezing winter temperatures. They can survive in this state off and on for 7 months in temperatures as low as 3°F.

They may appear frozen solid when you pick them up, but their body is only about 65% frozen. Their heart stops beating, blood stops flowing, and they go into suspended animation. Their individual cells are still functioning but they have no way of communicating with each other.

Female wood frogs lay up to 3000 eggs in temporary water pools, that later hatch into tadpoles, then morph into adults; and they generally only reproduce once in their life, which is 3 to 5 years.

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Costasiella kuroshimae (Leaf sheep, leaf slug)

Discovered in 1993 off the coast of the Japanese island Kuroshima. Leaf sheep are only about a fourth of an inch, or a little over 5 mm long.

Leaf sheep have rhinophores on their heads that look like the ears of a sheep in perspective to their faces. The leaf sheep’s rhinophores have fine hairs that sense chemicals in the water, enabling them to find food sources.

Leaf sheep’s primary diet is sea algae. When they consume it, they suck the chloroplasts out of the algae in a process called kleptoplasty. This process then enables them to photosynthesize. This is why leaf sheep glow. In other words, they are bioluminescent.

While some scientists believe that kleptoplasty can add to longevity in sacoglossans, the truth is – we don’t know how long leaf sheep live.

Because they are so beautiful and adorable, many people wonder if they can have a leaf sheep as a pet. But leaf sheep are still wild animals who have the right to live in their natural habitats.

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Axolotl

The axolotl genome is the second longest in the animal kingdom, with 32 billion base pairs. That’s 10 times as long as the human genome.

The impossibly silly branches that grow from the axolotl’s head might not seem practical, but they’re actually the salamander’s gills. The filaments attached to the long gills increase surface area for gas exchange.

It’s not unusual for amphibians to be able to regenerate, but axolotls take it to the next level. On top of being able to regenerate limbs, the animal can also rebuild their jaws, spines, and even brains without any scarring.

The rarest axolotl color that is practically obtainable in real life is the firefly color. It is dark, like the wild type axolotl, but with a fluorescent green tail that glows in the dark. Other very rare but almost impossible to obtain axolotl colors include enigma, chimera and mosaic.

They’re critically endangered.  A 2019 assessment by the International Union for the Conservation of Species found only between 50 and a thousand axolotls are left in the wild - and their populations are dropping.

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Pangolin

Pangolins are the only mammals with scales.

A pangolin’s tongue can be up to 16 inches in length. They use these extraordinarily long tongues to reach insects burrowed underground.

The pangolin’s scales make up 20 percent of its total body weight and are composed of keratin, the same material that makes up human fingernails. Pangolins use their scales as tools for self-defense. If threatened, the pangolin will perform a cutting motion with its scales if anything is inserted between them. 

Pangolins are entirely insectivorous as they only feed on ants and termites. The proportion of ants and termites consumed varies seasonally and geographically, but typically 90 – 95% of their diet consists of ants, while the remaining 5 – 10% are termites. A single pangolin can eat up to 70 million insects in a year.

Less than one year ago, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recognized the threat to Africa’s pangolins by scaling their status up to ‘Vulnerable’ due to the effects of illicit hunting and poaching.