🦌 Animals 🐇
Animals with a fucked up and evil transformation
Salmonids: During mating season, males undergo a rapid change, developing distinctive coloration, a hooked jaw for intra-specific combat with other males, and in certain species, a humped back. After spawning, they simply disintegrate.
Locusts: In conditions where food becomes suddenly abundant, some grasshopper species go from small, solitary nymphs to larger, swarming locusts. Locust swarms (or "plagues") cover vast tracts of land, ravaging all the vegetation in their path, including human agriculture. When they've stripped their habitat of greenery, they die off. !!!EDIT!!!: The locust picture I included is not accurate. This comment includes an accurate example
tunicates... they are chordates just like us. they start their lives out free swimming, like a fish. then they find a place to lay anchor. they become utterly unrecognizeable and destroy everything about them that was chordate. once thinking, swimming creatures, they become sendentary filter feeders without a brain or eyes. like a plant. they even make cellulose like a plant, something no other animal does. the genes were probably taken from bacteria through horizontal gene transfer. they are the forgotten body horror branch of our evolution.
Honestly there's no use in teaching it to early bio students because the thing is, evolution really reeeaaaaally hates rules and there are exceptions to quite a few. Egg laying mammals, there is a species of warm blooded tegu (lepidosaur i.e reptile.) Most of Biology is just a constant landscape of trying to make sense out of things that have no interest in categories. That's not to say at all that none of the observed rules aren't important, they're just flexible and it's best to learn about them before learning about the holes in them
Have someone regularly bring you food and you’re basically a tunicate that occasionally has opinions on video game graphics and the minimum FPS a game should have.
This is a normal, healthy, average fledgling, they just always look like they’ve been scraped out of the storm drain and installed on the nearest surface.
Probably an odd one but when you think about it a moose could fit this pretty well, pretty peaceful being outside of mating season, males can coexist and mind their business, then comes mating season where they grow literal battering rams on their heads and become super agressive towards whatever that might be in their way of getting laid.
I mean they are peaceful compared to their mating season attitudes. But a moose will absolutely fuck you up for no reason beyond it got bored. It’s just turned up to 11 when mating season hits
Yeah they are still agressive but compared to how they are during mating it's pretty tame, I've had a buck do a warning call last year that rattled my bones, thought it was a bear for a sec.
Dude I'm from Alaska. I have had close encounters with all 3 bear species. Moose scare me more than any bear ever will. They are absolute assholes all year round...rutting season just makes things a little spicier.
I find it fascinating how a horde of grasshoppers will decide all at once to metamorphosize into big chaos swarms and why evolution favored the locust's coloring
I don't really know all too much about insects so this is entirely speculative but I'd guess the change in coloration is basically a consensus signal for the population. It's kind of like quorum sensing with bacteria where a species of bacteria will produce a specific molecule that other members of its species (and itself) have receptors for so that they can get a vague sense of how many of their species are around them. It's a metric for how friendly the environment is in a certain sense. If there enough of the bacteria all producing this molecule then it exceeds a threshold of response where the bacteria will start acting differently. This tends to be really important when it comes to the formation of biofilms and that can sometimes involve multiple species of bacteria that have coevolved to have the ability to crosstalk with their signals,
So with the grasshoppers it is a similar gauge of how the population feels about the environment they are in. If a bunch of members start popping off into locust colors because they are reaching starvation and also sense that there are a bunch of other grasshoppers around then that signal then there is a certain incentive to reinforce the signal through feedback. If the environment is sort of overburdened then you want to move as much as your population to new feeding grounds as possible. So you form the swarm. grasshoppers than see locust colors being displayed are induced towards joining the swarm. If they see enough of their kith and kin with those colors, the decision to commit is made even if they aren't starving themselves.
the moth penis envelopes and traps... jk, see the hairs on the 4 arms (coremata)? they secrete fumes that get the girl moths in a state. the larger the coremata, the more hairs can fit, the larger the surface area to evaporate penis smell, the better the chance of reproducing. same explanation for why theres 4 of them
Once spawning is done their immune system shuts off and they literally just start rotting! You can find images online of salmon just actively dying while alive, ‘tis the horror of immediate termination after reproduction.
Pacific salmon stop feeding when they go upstream to spawn and convert all of their body mass into energy for the journey. After they spawn, they just kind of turn into zombie fish and eventually fall apart.
Salmon spend most of their life at sea. They have to return to freshwater rivers to spawn. That definitely requires a lot of energy to deal with, and like others have said they use up all their energy reserves since they stop eating. Once they have eggs their job is done, time to rot.
Termite queens will go from winged insects searching for a new home to a giant, immobile sac-like creature whose only job is to lay thousands of eggs a day for several decades
The two grasshopper pics you included are completely different species from completely different families, and neither of them are locusts. Top is a Chortophaga viridifasciata in the family Acrididae and bottom is a Zonocerus elegans from the family Pyrgomorphidae. Many Pyrgomorphs are brightly colored because they secrete toxic chemicals and the colors are warning colors, it’s not because they’re locusts.
Here is a pic showing solitarious (non-locust, on the left) and gregarious (locust, on the right) morphs of a single species of grasshopper.
The babirusa is a species of pig where the male's teeth never stop growing. If the teeth don't break (which is common) they will eventually loop back toward its own head and could injure the animal.
Rhizocephalans look like typical free-swimming crustacean larvae during their naupliar and cyprid stages, but when they settle on a host, the female cyprid injects herself into the host’s body and develops into an amorphous, branching, fungus-like organism that grows throughout its host’s body and even castrates the host.
I lived in Alaska for many years, but never went fishing or anything. I honestly didn't realize that the "before" and "after" salmon were the same kind of salmon until nearly a decade in. I always just assumed that King Salmon always looked like fucked up little freaks, since so many of the local artistic depictions or displays have those, specifically.
The antechinus mouse, which is not a mouse but a marsupial. The males enter a kind of heat, dumping corticosteroids into its system. This massively increases aggression and libedo while also suppressing its immune system. It's very rare for males to survive this period, and in some cases they kill the female as well.
Only pink salmon (also called 'Humpy's in Alaska) develop the humpback. The rest of the salmon types develop the hooked jaw when they are spawning though.
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u/nailturtle 28d ago
tunicates... they are chordates just like us. they start their lives out free swimming, like a fish. then they find a place to lay anchor. they become utterly unrecognizeable and destroy everything about them that was chordate. once thinking, swimming creatures, they become sendentary filter feeders without a brain or eyes. like a plant. they even make cellulose like a plant, something no other animal does. the genes were probably taken from bacteria through horizontal gene transfer. they are the forgotten body horror branch of our evolution.