Of course, all my joking yesterday aside, the ocean is a terrifying place. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the lovely little creatures of the sea that kill for their suppers (which is the vast majority of them).
Take the mantis shrimp, which I mentioned some time ago (there's a tag, which I have added to this post, that will let you look if you're curious-though YouTube removed a bunch of the videos I embedded since then). These little creatures are popular in home aquariums for their energy and... well...
...let's be frank-their sheer viciousness and apparent glee at killing other things you put in the tank. Even (especially?) cute things, such as clown fish (the video above to the contrary).
The person who took this video no longer visits the pet shop it occurred at.
Of course, keeping a mantis shrimp as a pet is a tricky proposition. You see...
...they have claws that strike with the force of a small-caliber bullet (fishermen call them by the wonderfully evocative term thumbsplitter), meaning that they can shatter the glass of many aquariums.
Then there's the flamboyant cuttlefish, one of the oddest creatures in the entirety of Earth's oceans, if for no other reason than it likes to walk rather than swim. It's also a poisonous little son of a gun, and can catch the itty-bitty shrimp of its environment faster than the eye can see.
It's merely lucky coincidence I found this video, since I was looking particularly for mantis shrimp.
Then there's this little devil, the pistol shrimp.
(Gotta love all those cinematic gun sound effects they added.)
It's no wonder our little tetrapod ancestors wanted the heck out of a neighborhood like that, huh?
-Signing off.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment