26Crab Hacker Barnacle
Crab hacker barnacle is a species of barnacle that is a parasite found in crabs. The female will attack a crab, movie inside it, push out a sac that contains its eggs. It then controls the mind of the crab into caring for its egg sack as its own, and when the time comes the crab shoots them out through pulses creating a large cloud of parasites.
27. Deathwatch beetles start their life as a pupa emerging from an egg and eat wood for 10 to 15 years, at the end of which they emerge as an adult beetle. At this point, they are blind and have less than a week to find a mate and have sex. So the male starts banging his head against the wood and hopes for a female to answer his calls. If he is lucky and finds a female, there are chances that she may reject him.
28. Australian jewel beetles are threatened because they try to have sex with beer bottles that look/feel like the female Australian jewel beetle and they subsequently die of sun exposure.
29. Stephens Island Wren had no natural predators, so evolution rendered it flightless as it didn’t need to escape. Humans arrived on the island and one year after discovery and soon after its declaration as a new species, it went extinct. The lighthouse keeper's cat killed every single one of them. It is the only species to be eradicated by a single, lone entity.
30. Sea cucumbers spit out their guts via their anus as a defense mechanism. Also since pearlfish has no defense mechanism of their own, they hide from predators by burrowing into a sea cucumber's anus. While inside, it may eat the cucumber's gonads. Although the cucumber normally defends itself by squirting out its guts, the pearlfish does not trigger this response, possibly because it isn't worth the trouble.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Peppered Moths
Peppered moths evolved to blend in with tree bark. Then the industrial revolution covered all the trees with soot, so they stood out like a sore thumb and got eaten by birds. This created a selection pressure towards black pigment making them darker. They are now lighter again after pollution regulations cut down sooty coal emissions.
32. Greenland sharks have the longest known lifespan of all vertebrate. They have an average lifespan of 400 years. Unfortunately for them, they spend most of this long lifespan swimming blind despite being born with fully functioning eyes. Majority of these sharks are blind due to the fact that they have parasites hanging from their eyes. These pinkish-white parasites are called copepods, and they attach themselves to the Greenland sharks’ cornea, rendering them blind.
33. A small mouse-like Australian creature called antechinus literally f*ck themselves to death. The male stops eating and sleeping when mating season starts and he can mate with females for up to 14 hours at a time. He exhausts himself so thoroughly that his body starts to fall apart. His fur falls off. He bleeds internally. His immune system fails to fight off incoming infections, and he becomes riddled with gangrene. By the end of the mating season, physically disintegrating males may run around frantically searching for last mating opportunities.
34. Mayflies have a lifespan of only a few minutes and rarely live past a day. A male mayfly has two penis-like organs and the female has two sexual openings.
35. Female spotted hyenas have the largest clitoris of all mammals. It is shaped like and larger than the male hyena’s penis. This is referred to as “pseudo-penis”. This means that it is really hard for the males to have sex with a female hyena who isn't receptive to it. It does have drawbacks though, in that they give birth to live young who have to come through that long and not too stretchy pseudo-penis. It is not uncommon for the pseudo-penis to split during childbirth and for the mother to bleed out. A lot of hyena cubs die before they're actually birthed because they suffocate on their way out.
