Today’s creepy pic: the scariest effing squirrel you’ll see all week

Yea, I know it’s a shopjob. Doesn’t make it any less creepy, tho.

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That’s the ugliest bitch I’ve ever seen!

I was looking through an earlier blog entry and discovered *dramatic music*, the ugliest dog competition. Now even if you have heard of it before, it oddly draws your eyes!! Nooo, I can feel them being sucked innnnnnnn. So check out below and you can even download one of those beauties onto your desktop – go on, you know you want to. But I think they should call it, “Who looks the most like a Gremlin?” – I mean, come on, wasn’t that what you thought when you saw this picture?

Ugly Dogs

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More strange and weird animals

Seeing as how the previous weird animal post was so popular, I’ve found a list of more strange and unusual animals, such as the very cute long-eared jerboa (wiki) shown above, or the star-nosed mole that was featured before. Some of these animals are quite bizarre, and it’s a testament to the sheer variety of life that exists on one single planet. How can there not be a similar variety of animals out in the stars?

[Link: World's strangest looking animals]

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Scuse me, I can’t hear my mate chirping!

Ok, the pic is a Final Fantasy joke, but Bernie Krause, a field recording scientist, reckons that the sounds made by human machinery are buggering around with animal communication.

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

The reason for this, says Krause, is that in the animal world, each animal species uses a separate accoustic spectrum. This way, other species don’t use a given accoustic spectrum and muck up whatever communication is happening in that spectrum. However, when you introduce man-made noises into the mix, animals get confused, and can’t make themselves heard. This, he says, is part of the cause of dropping numbers of biodiversity in the world.

So how can it be fixed?

Perhaps we should be developing not just clean tech but “quiet” tech, industrial machinery designed to run as silently as possible. More regulations could help, too. Cities have long had noise ordinances; wilderness areas could benefit from tighter protections as well.

And interestingly enough:

Last year, Krause brought biophony to the masses by creating an extraordinarily cool add-on for Google Earth. Download it from his WildSanctuary.com site and you can click on dozens of locations worldwide to hear snippets of their soundscape.

Excuse me while I go download the add-on!

[Link: Wired.com]

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One double-pepperoni aphid to go? Thanks!

According to this Live Science article, scientists have discovered that insects use plants in much the same way that we telephones (What, you mean that they send incriminating text messages to each other?)

When a subterranean insect takes up residence below a plant, it settles in to feast on the plant’s roots. In order to alert leaf-eating insects of the “no vacancy,” the underground insect sends a chemical warning signal through the plant leaves, so the leafeaters are alerted that the plant is occupied.

Evidently, they don’t like other insects to tie up the line!

[Link: Live Science]

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Fowl-mouth bird teaches other birds to swear

A foul-mouthed macaw in London has been teaching other birds to swear. Says the owner, Geoff Grewcock (that’s seriously his name?):

“They just sit there swearing at each other now, all kinds of foul language – it’s unbelievable.”

It’s similar to having very young, impressionable children around the house, don’t you think? And like little children:

Mr Grewcock added: “These birds can live until they are 70 so there are potentially another 60 years of this to contend with.”

Parrot stew, anyone?

[Link: IOL.co.za]

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25 weird animals

I seem to be going through a list phase at the moment. I really should find something that doesn’t include a list! Anyhow, DIVaBoo have a list of 25 of what they term the world’s weirdest animals, but I think I might argue with some of the animals, and the idea of weirder animals out there that should really belong on this list. Can you think of anything weirder animalwise that you think should be on this list instead?

[Link: 25 World's Weirdest Animals]

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