Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish, and Other Weird Animals Read online

  ZOMBIE

  BIRDS,

  ASTRONAUT FISH,

  AND OTHER

  WEIRD ANIMALS

  BECKY CREW

  FOUNDER OF RUNNING PONIES ON THE

  SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN BLOG NETWORK

  To Alex

  For making me tough when I was tired and brave when I was scared. You give me butterflies.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE: HUNTERS

  The Most Powerful Punch on Earth?

  A Mouse in Wolf’s Clothing

  Birds Coming for Your Brains

  The Sock-Loving Vampire Spider

  A Slime-Wielding Predator

  The Spider-Eating Spider

  A Mind-Controlling Parasite

  Isopod Got Your Tongue?

  The Master Deceiver

  Killer Cone Snail

  The Mystery of the Sawfish’s Saw

  PART TWO: LOVERS AND FIGHTERS

  All-Female Lizard Tribe

  The Loudest Penis on Earth

  Battle of the Genitals

  The Impossible Mates

  Don’t Trust Them with Your Offspring

  Your Mother Wants You to Eat Her

  Fruit Bat Fellatio

  It’s Time to Become Gonads

  Sexy Monkeys Bathe in Urine

  Secret Boys’ Club

  A Love Affair with Beer Gone Wrong

  Won’t Rat You Out for Chocolate

  PART THREE: ANCIENT CREATURES

  The Largest Feathered Animal Ever

  A Venomous Dinosaur?

  What’s That on Your Face?

  King of the Rabbits

  Microraptor Shows Its True Colors

  Night Vision for Hunters

  Horses the Size of House Cats

  PART FOUR: PREY

  Cliff-Diving Toad

  Transformer Butterflies

  Don’t Get Angry: Vomit

  Poison-Blood–Spitting Eyes

  Will Rib You to Death

  Playing Dead Pros

  Underwater Mousedeer

  A Poisonous Pelt

  What Big Eyes You Have!

  Wolverine Frog

  Bomb-Dropping Worm

  The Toxic Songbird

  PART FIVE: ODD BODIES

  A (Mostly) Vegetarian Spider

  The Strangest Mammal in the World

  Flying Buttocks

  The Elusive Stick Giant

  At Home in Someone Else’s Anus

  Houdini with an Inflatable Head

  The Toughest Fish in Outer Space

  Sunken Spider’s Bubble Web

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  I was standing in the most exquisite living room I had ever seen, disguised in a bear costume that was chafing the hell out of my left thigh. I had been commissioned by an editor acquaintance of mine to report on a rapidly emerging phenomenon known as Animals Anonymous, which, if the rumors were to be believed, was like the most neurotic menagerie ever assembled.

  I was instructed to head to the public pool for my first meeting if I was of the aquatic persuasion. I said, “Actually, I’m a bear,” so was given directions to the home of a very well-respected Spanish ribbed newt.

  The newt had made himself a tidy fortune as a venture capitalist before retiring to a newly acquired Beaux-Arts mansion in the leafy part of town. I only ever saw his living room, complete with walls inlaid with mother-of-pearl, rich antique walnut furniture, and ceiling-to-floor drapes embroidered with 22-carat gold, but it’s safe to say this newt is very good at buying houses. Which is fortunate, because all bug-eyed and grayish skinned, he wasn’t the most attractive amphibian I’d come across.

  “Take a seat, we’re about to begin,” he told me.

  I sank into the nearest armchair, and if beleaguered thighs could breathe a sigh of relief, my left one poured itself a glass of red.

  The rest of the attendees took their seats, and soon enough, there were all kinds of frogs and lizards and rodents and birds gathered in groups of three or four on each. There were bats hanging from the drapes and a collection of insects and arachnids peering out from over the rim of a silver tureen. A giant panda eyed me from across the room in a way that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Eurasian Roller, why don’t you start things off?” said the Spanish ribbed newt.

  “Okay,” a striking gold and turquoise–colored bird replied gloomily. “Hi, I’m Eurasian Roller, and being an animal is ruining my life.”

  “Hi, Eurasian Roller,” the room droned.

  “My nest is in a pretty dangerous part of town,” she continued, “and I can’t come home from a day of foraging without the chicks having thrown up all over the place. They’re always getting spooked. All I ever do at home is clean up vomit.”

  “Is this something that can be treated with therapy?” offered a minuscule, warty toad perched very deliberately on the sheerest edge of its chair.

  “No, it’s just the curse of our species. I should have sent the damned things to boarding school when I had the chance.”

  As the night progressed, each animal told its story, ranging from, “My mother insists I eat her and I’m just not sure I’m ready for that,” to “There’s a pretty good chance I’m going to fuck an empty beer bottle once this meeting is over.”

  “I’m in heat and I’m the only panda in town,” said the giant panda. “I’m only in heat once a year. It’s unbearable.” She never took her eyes off me.

  “And what’s your story, Mr.…?”

  “Ted. And it’s Ms.,” I said. The giant panda looked away, mortified.

  “Terribly sorry, Ms. Ted,” said the newt.

  “Easy mistake. My fur’s always given off an ambiguous vibe, genderwise. I guess that’s why my parents left me when I was seventeen months old. I’ve never really gotten over it.”

  No one seemed particularly moved by my fabricated confession, particularly the spider who said, “Did you not just hear my story about my mother? The eating … ?”

  I changed the subject. “Spanish Ribbed Newt, can I ask what your story is?”

  His puffy eyes looked suddenly very sad. “I have everything in the world that a male could want, except a mate for life.”

  All the females in the room sighed wistfully. (At least I think they were females; it was very hard to tell in several species I’d never seen before in my life.)

  “Why is that?” I ventured.

  The newt removed his spectacles and placed them gently on the arm of his chair. Then, without warning, he violently contorted his torso in such a way that his ribs ripped right through his clammy flesh like a set of gnarly spears. Then he straightened himself out again, which pulled his ribs back inside his tiny frame. “Females can’t stand it for more than a couple of months. It’s too vile, even for the gold diggers. The situation is so hopeless that I’ve resorted to online dating. It’s not going very well.”

  A heavily armored lizard was looking very intently at him.

  “Well, would you look at the time,” said the newt, replacing his spectacles as he attempted to do the same with his dignity. “I’ll see you lot at the bar.”

  “Look, if it’s all the same to you I’d rather leave the sunglasses on.”

  “You didn’t have to go drinking with them, you know,” my editor told me as I heaved myself into his office the morning after. “Now, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  “Seriously, I could have just e-mailed the article to you. That way I wouldn’t have had to throw up in your—”

  “They’re just like us! Their body image issues, their family
squabbles—even their sex lives!”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Until a monkey urinated on himself and scored all the dates.”

  PART ONE

  HUNTERS

  The Most Powerful Punch on Earth?

  PEACOCK MANTIS SHRIMP

  (Odontodactylus scyllarus)

  AT NO MORE THAN 7 inches long, the peacock mantis shrimp is small, but it packs a punch with the acceleration of a .22 caliber bullet.

  There are 400 known species in the stomatopod, or “mantis shrimp,” group, which contains solitary-living, predatory crustaceans that are technically neither mantis nor shrimp. They are found in tropical and sub-tropical waters, with more than half of all species occurring in the Indo-West Pacific region. They spend their days holed up in burrows or crevices in shallow coral reefs and on the sandy seabed as far as 4920 feet below the surface. The peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) is arguably the most beautiful of all the stomatopods, with velvety olive, red, and brilliant turquoise varieties, each with a dual chain of deep red legs and the strangest barely pink eyes. They are distinguished by the spattering of orange leopard spots across the white of their anterior, or frontal, carapace, which, when the peacock mantis shrimp is face on, give it the appearance of an exotic lily.

  Mantis shrimp species are grouped according to their hunting techniques. There are the “spearers,” with front legs that end in a barbed spike perfect for impaling fish, and the larger “smashers,” who thrust their club-shaped claws at speeds of up to 75 feet per second to shatter the protective shells of crabs, clams, and snails. Even larger prey such as octopuses and clown fish are not safe from the peacock mantis shrimp, and you wouldn’t handle one if you were fond of having a complete set of digits. One of the world’s top mantis shrimp experts, Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the tale of a South African surgeon who once tried to remove a peacock mantis shrimp from its tank, only to have his finger mangled so badly it required amputation. And several aquariums have had their tanks destroyed by peacock mantis shrimp, a particular individual named Tyson famously smashing through his tank’s 0.2-inch-thick glass in 1998. Little Tyson was only 4 inches long.

  In 2004, Caldwell and his colleagues got hold of a $60,000 high-speed camera, capable of shooting 100,000 frames per second, to investigate the peacock mantis shrimp’s lightning-fast punch. By slowing the action down by a factor of 883, the team discovered that the creature had an odd, saddle-shaped spring within the hinge of the club. Known as a hyperbolic paraboloid, this type of spring arrangement is often used by engineers and architects to reinforce buildings, but is rarely seen in nature. Like a crossbow, it stays locked and compressed while the mantis shrimp’s front leg is cocked, which stores elastic energy until the latch is suddenly released as the arm is extended. The spring gives the claw a peak acceleration of 10,000 times the force of gravity, and strike forces that are thousands of times the peacock mantis shrimp’s body weight. According to Sheila Patek from Harvard University, a biologist who coauthored the paper with Caldwell in Nature that year, the speed of this strike far exceeds most measured animal movements, except that of the trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus bauri) of Central and South America.

  Patek went on to lead a research team that measured the speed at which this ant snaps shut its mandibles, which are the pair of appendages near its mouth. Using high-speed videography, the researchers clocked the speed at 115–210 feet per second—2300 times faster than the blink of an eye—which they claimed in a 2006 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the fastest self-powered predatory strike in the animal kingdom.

  Patek is now investigating the movements of other mantis shrimp species, and thinks the peacock mantis shrimp could have a rival in its own family. “Each species has different strike features—some are faster and some are much slower,” she says. “And, although we haven’t published it yet, we have found another mantis shrimp species that may be even more impressive than the peacock mantis shrimp.”

  Patek and Caldwell’s team also found that the peacock mantis shrimp’s punch was particularly destructive due to a process known as cavitation. Its superfast strike lowers the pressure in the water surrounding the point of impact, causing it to boil and produce exploding bubbles. While emitting a loud clicking noise, and sometimes even flashes of bright light, these bubbles will soften the hard shells of sea snails and clams when they explode, making it easier for the peacock mantis shrimp to break through its prey’s armored exterior.

  Poor Peacock Mantis Shrimp. With a punch like that, he’s going to have a hard time convincing the entire ocean that he’s not a total psychopath. One night he’ll be at home, quietly ironing and watching something with Gordon Ramsay in it, when a pair of unexpected visitors will turn up on his doorstep.

  “Yes?”

  Two starfish in police uniforms will invite themselves inside, drink a cup of his very expensive tea and tell him they’ve both seen this episode already and how great is Gordon Ramsay?

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m watching it.”

  “Anyway,” they’ll say, “you’re the main suspect in the murder of a crab whose mashed-up remains were found in a garbage bin behind the gym tonight.”

  “What? I don’t murder crabs, I buy my crab meat from the supermarket, like everyone else,” Peacock Mantis Shrimp will tell them, but he’ll end up in court the next day anyway.

  The two starfish in police uniforms will have to cross-examine him, because there’s no such thing as lawyers under the ocean. (There’s no such thing as a justice system under the ocean either, so the fact that they managed to cobble together some semblance of a courtroom in the space of twenty-four hours will be something of a minor miracle. And I do mean minor, because it might look like a proper courtroom, but that doesn’t mean that anyone inside it will know what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.)

  “So, Mr. Peacock Mantis Shrimp, can you please tell the court exactly what you did on the night of August 5?”

  “I told you! I ironed, watched some TV, made a sandwich … then the two of you barged in and drank all my tea.”

  A very uncomfortable-looking blue cod in a wig will be sitting on the bench, furiously scribbling something in his notepad before crossing it out again with long, hopeless strokes.

  “Tell us about this sandwich you made, Mr. Peacock Mantis Shrimp.”

  “It was just lettuce and crab meat—”

  “Crab meat … ?” the two starfish in police uniforms will repeat suggestively, swiveling around to give the jury the starfish equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

  “Yes, I got it from the supermarket—”

  “Do you have an alibi, Mr. Peacock Mantis Shrimp?”

  “No, I’m a stomatopod. I live alone.”

  “Indeed.”

  The courtroom will erupt into a chorus of anxious murmurs and the blue cod judge will mutter to no one in particular that he has no idea what he’s doing.

  The head jury member, an eel, will stand up.

  “Down in front!” One of the other jury members will instruct.

  “No, idiot, he’s supposed to do that!” the two exasperated starfish in police uniforms will respond, doing whatever the starfish equivalent of burying their heads in their hands is. “Mr. Eel, have you reached a decision?”

  “Yes. We think you should reimburse Mr. Peacock Mantis Shrimp for his tea.”

  “What? We’re not on trial here! He is!”

  But Peacock Mantis Shrimp will have punched a hole through the courthouse wall and he’ll be halfway to the train station before the two starfish in police uniforms even figure out what just happened. So we can all stop feeling sorry for him now, he’s got this well under control.

  Not only can the peacock mantis shrimp throw one hell of a punch, it also has the most sophisticated eyes of any animal in the world. Like flies, honeybees, and praying mantises, the mantis shrimp has a pair of compound eyes made
up of many different facets. The surface consists of two hemispheres separated by a midband, and all three sections are capable of viewing an object independently of each other. This is known as trinocular vision, and it is far superior to the binocular vision humans have, because we need to use both of our eyes simultaneously to achieve the best result.

  The mantis shrimp’s midband is separated into six rows of ommatidia, which are structures that carry a cluster of light-sensitive cells called photoreceptors. The first four rows of ommatidia contain specific types of photoreceptors that respond to different wavelengths of light, allowing the mantis shrimp to see in both the infrared and ultraviolet range. Special filters allow each photoreceptor to respond to changing light conditions in the area. The fifth and sixth rows contain photoreceptors that can detect different planes of polarized light, according to a 2008 Current Biology study led by biologist Tsyr-Huei Chiou from the University of Maryland. Nonpolarized light is the kind that comes from the sun and is visible to humans, and it is made up of electromagnetic waves that oscillate in a direction perpendicular to the way the light is traveling. If this direction is restricted, for example, if nonpolarized light is made to pass through a particular type of crystal or reflected off the surface of water, the oscillations will be forced to point in the same direction that the light is traveling. This produces a particular form called linear polarized light, which appears as nothing more than a bright glare to the human eye.