Weekly Readers' Poll 3.0: Videos of the Weirdest Animals Yet!!

bleimanb — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:46:06 +0000

Two weeks ago, we asked you what your favoritest animals in the world were. Then, last week we asked you to up the ante and get weirder. You responded in turn with a veritable cornucopia of odd critters some of which we had never heard of! (Just kidding of course we'd heard of them, we're like freaking bizarre animal encyclopedias.)

Anyway, without further ado, your responses (in video, whenever possible):

Drhoz! wants to cuddle with a tardigrade, aka a 'water bear.' Who doesn't?

Unfortunately, Drhoz! also claims to...

... be open to "shacking up" with a goose barnacle if it buys dinner first

and goes on to say that after a few drinks a box jellyfish's life-threatening poison is a "total turn on"

and once at a "vulnerable moment" got jiggy with a phorid fly

TMI Drhoz! T...M...I.

Ryan woves his wittle polypterus endlicheri

and saved a wittle snuggle-wuggling for Neoceratodus forsteri

milkshake apparently still does not understand the rules and nominated another fictional creature, the yeti

HP: "Blah, blah, blah, Jaguarundis, blah, blah, blah..." (here's a happy one!)

jk, HP, we love your enthusiasm

Jenbug + babirusa = sitting in a tree

G Felis is like a conundrum wrapped in a question wrapped in an illusion. Does G eat turkey, mayonaise, and whitebread sandwiches with the crust cut off while looking at pictures of woodchucks?

Or does he date super models, race Ferraris and speak 14 languages, including vampire squid?

Or is G actually a woman? We may never know...

Greg Morrow likes this video of giant isopods or Bathynomus giganteus. We can't blame him; The footage is amazing.

auswoman's daughter is in first grade and loves okapis. Is her last name "Bleiman" per chance?

Dave Briggs may just be a serial killer. His submission was "kittens."

Meg wanted to reiterate that saiga's have weird "nose tubes." How true, Meg. How true.

And also pointed out, appropriately so, the existence of the elusive yellow-footed rock wallaby.

Bob's favorite animal is President Bush seen here after a press conference in the Rose Garden...

G's least favorite animal is Bob seen here, "at a different period" in his life.

Jenbug thought that Bob thought that she was dissing the U.S. so she brought up American icon, Ranger Rick. Too bad Ranger Rick came to the U.S. on a student visa and never left! Bob doesn't like that one bit!

If Rick hadn't have been Teddy Roosevelt's gardener, he would have never gained citizenship.

Ash represents the mean streets of MD with the freakish coconut crab

Jenbug also wanted us to know that she had an uncle...Bet he looked like this!

Susannah likes long walks on the beach, pina coladas and hooded nudibranches (Melibe leonina)

Oh yeah, hermit crabs also...

Finally, Kristen lives in a dark world filled with betrayal and sadness, a world where the slender-horned gazelle rarely makes the headlines

We want more? What other weird creatures do you love? Bet you can't stump us!

bleimanb Wed, 12/12/2007 - 09:46

Whoa-- TR AND RR? What a serendipitous moment in the history of Earth, and my own existence! Next it'll be Bugs Bunny and Barry Manilow. Or Daffy and Claus Maria Shenk Graf Von Stauffenberg.

And my Uncle looks much more like one of those meatheaded baseball players who got busted for steroids recently. Except he's 5 feet tall.

Great Babyrusa footage; the one I saw was a smaller female and her tusks were much less splintered on the ends.

LOL :D

and the other people have also chosen wisely :D

Wow! Thanks for including my fave, I feel honored. :)
Let's see, what are my other favorites? Well, I like the ampelomeryx, but those are amazingly hard to find. I'll go with Aepycamelus major. Those are awesome!

You know what I find kind of funny, is the difference between the list of favorite animals on a zoology board versus a furry board. Here you get amazing variety, and while you'd think that furries are just as interested in animals, the responses are not unlike "wolf, wolf, wolf, fox, wolf, cat, wolf, dragon, fox, wolf." :)

Team axlotl!

I'd include Sacculina. Coolest parasite ever.

You made my daughter's day. Thanks for the pic of okapi butt!

I must be rather boring. My fav animal is the Red Panda (Poonya) I adored the video you had on the site a while back of two of them living with the young Asian woman.

I'ld beg to differ, Kristin - whilst wolves, foxes, and dragons seem to be disproportionately common, my friends list elect otters, dolphins, utahraptors, geckoes, aye-ayes, beetles, and , just today, a jellyfish-eating pelagic nudibranch.

I recommend for your consideration the ping-pong tree sponge. One of the few animals that might double as a 1960s lighting fixture.

Hmmm... Have "Snot Otters" ever been featured here. I can't remember. Of course they are a fave over at Ugly Overload but somehow they seem to fit in with this crowd. :)

Axolotls are amazing. Paedomorphism at it's finest! Gastric brooding frogs are also way cool. Too bad both of these are super endangered in the wild.

I gotta say, though, my favorite of all non-mammals are sandhill cranes. They make the BEST noise.

I love the tardigrade. But I have to agree with Stevie Foster, sandhill cranes make the best noise.

DrHoz-- These are furries? You must be friends with a group of people who overlap both communities, which of course exist, but are quite rare, because that definitely doesn't represent a good portion of the community that I've met. x)

Last I heard the Gastric-brooding Frog was extinct, Stevie :( chytrid fungus :(

and yes, Kristin, all furries.

Hands-down, the weirdest animal around has GOT to be the Symbion pandora. It lives on the lips of Norwegian lobsters. It has three distinct life stages: asexual, male, and female.
While male, it has two reproductive organs but no mouth or anus. While female, its digestive system collapses and becomes larva. It is the sole member of its own PHYLUM (yes, phylum, not species!), Cycliophora.

Read all about it: http://www.google.co.th/search?q=pandor*+%22lobster+lips

Great Babyrusa footage; the one I saw was a smaller female and her tusks were much less splintered on the ends.