Badass Animals

For example, at a zoo I once saw a one-eyed Golden Eagle named Apollo. Even if that bird did nothing but sit around, it would be amazing.

The Honey Badger. 'Nuff said.

Thing even was Badass of the Week once.

Pangolins.

edited 12th Aug '11 9:20:00 PM by MetaFour

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/voytek.html

A bear who fought Nazis. Nuff said.

edited 13th Aug '11 9:51:23 AM by Kerrah

Cockroaches. Can you live without your head for ten days? Didn't think so.

Spitting cobras. When they spit, they don't aim for where your eyes are now, but where they will be.

And then there's mongooses. They eat cobras for breakfast - literally.

See my icon.

No fucking way I can match Voytek, but Japanese hornets are scary as shit.

edited 20th Aug '11 2:54:22 PM by Pykrete

Any and all predators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy96muNxuro

HOLY F***

Orcas, they show up on the awesome tab for real life frequently and for good reason when it isn't inching toward Nightmare Fuel.

Edited by sifsand on Jun 17th 2019 at 7:48:57 AM

Cassowaries. 97 lbs of feathers and death that bear an uncanny resemblance to Velociraptors. What else would you expect from Australia?

Cassowaries are a perfect reminder of the link between birds and dinosaurs.

Cassowaries forget they technically aren't dinosaurs.

Tardigrades can survive anything.

Nova has a documentary show called "Bird Brain". I saw an episode with two different scenes where crows were tested for their ability to solve puzzles, and the crows were awesome.

The first test was a competition between a crow and a dog to see which one could get food out of a puzzle faster. The crow instantly left his handler's shoulder and flew over to the puzzle before the handler had time to look around and see where the puzzle was, let alone point the crow at the puzzle. The crow solved the puzzle in five seconds flat. Meanwhile, the dog's trainer was trying and failing to get the dog to notice the other copy of the puzzle. "Doggy, look! What's this? Doggy! Pay attention! Do you smell the food? Doggy! Get back here! No, this isn't a fetch toy, it's a puzzle!"

The second test was composed of two parts. The first part was setting up a number of different puzzles that could be solved with specific lengths of sticks and letting the crow play with them until the crow figured out which stick went with which puzzle and how to get food out of each puzzle. The second part was resetting the puzzles so that the food was in the puzzle that required the longest stick, the longest stick was inside the puzzle that required the next-longest stick, which was inside the puzzle that required the third-longest stick, and so on and so forth with the shortest stick available instead of locked away. The crow eventually worked his way through the sequence, and that was awesome in and of itself, but I noticed an even more awesome detail that the dubbed-in commentary missed. The commenters would groan in disappointment whenever the crow tried a recently freed stick on the "wrong" puzzle, but I noticed a pattern to the crow's alleged mistakes. The crow wasn't just making wild guesses as to which puzzle to try next. If he tried the longest stick he had on a puzzle and the stick he had was too short, his next guess was to fly over to a puzzle that contained a stick shorter than the stick locked up in his previous try. The crow already had a rough idea of the sequence from the beginning, he was looking to see if he could skip steps.

One day while I was walking home through my neighborhood, I spotted a large snail that was paler than all the other large snails I'd seen in my backyard. Intrigued by its yellowish color, I picked up the snail and carried it home in hopes of seeing it more often around my backyard. On the way, the snail started methodically doing something to my finger that felt like a cat's tongue. I figured out (and later confirmed) that it was using its many-toothed radula to rasp off and eat the top layer of my skin! I don't know how aware the snail was of how easily I could have killed it if I had taken offense (I didn't), but if the snail somehow was aware of the potential danger of eating a piece of a living animal who's much larger and faster, that's one brave snail!

So apparently I taste delicious, or at least edible, to at least one wild snail. I wonder if other snails would find the dead layer of my skin to be worth eating? Now I want to find out... For Science!!!

That reminds me of cone snails. They have a full fledged venomous harpoon and have actually killed people. Snails are hardcore.

Cone snails are terrifying.

Remember that curiosity I stated? Well, I got a chance to test it For Science! But before I tell you the results of my experiment, first the story.

Two days ago, while I was weeding, I pulled on a blackberry vine and dislodged a snail, accidentally cracking its shell. The shell was mostly intact, but it could have been a lot worse. Poor little critter was right at the top of concrete stairs and I shudder to imagine the potential damage of a Staircase Tumble. Out of guilt, I moved the snail to where it could stay put and hide from predators until I could come back to it. It did indeed stay put and hide.

Some hasty research later, I put together a snail terrarium. The walls and floor are solid transparent plastic, so I lined the floor with soil and patches of moss for cushioning and air. Between the moss and the lid's non-airtight design, there's enough air. To keep the habitat outdoorsy without trapping the snail in hostile weather, I put the terrarium in a sheltered window well directly under a roof, so that there's neither direct sunlight nor flooding rain. The indirect sunlight is enough for the circadian rhythm and I frequently go out with water to check the moisture levels. I added a baby carrot, some peas, and a deceased snail's shell for food and calcium, then I went and did more research. Apparently snails are social, so I went and found some snail buddies and added a shredded-up blackberry leaf for more food so that they all had a choice of what to eat out of the variety of food I left.

During my observations that day, I noticed the snails clustered together in small groups, supporting evidence to the "snails are social" thing. Furthermore, I saw smaller snails slithering on the shells of larger snails mostly willy-nilly, except for the one with the cracked shell — even though there were at least three snails smaller than that snail, only the tiniest snail slithered on top of the injured snail. I don't know how they knew, but they knew. The snails didn't eat much during the daytime.

Overnight the snails ate all the peas left for them. The baby carrot had obvious chunks missing and the shredded blackberry leaf was rather untouched. Figuring the peas were popular, I brought some more. Using the water I brought, I carefully moistened and re-positioned the snails and removed most of the poop. Later that day, I was checking my supply of mini bell peppers for any with rotten spots that needed to be removed before they spoiled the rest. I took a non-rotten chunk off of one of the ones I composted, and added the decent chunk of pepper to the terrarium, along with a shredded blackberry leaf younger and more tender than the previous one. The lid was open long enough to where I had to moisten and reposition all the snails that were getting in the way of the lid closing. Most of the snails weren't interested in the red bell pepper chunk at the time, except for one that immediately began eating with gusto. The few snails that did come down to snack slithered right over the previous blackberry leaf bits to get at the tenderer blackberry leaf bits. Later that day I hard-boiled an egg for my own lunch and added eggshell to the calcium supply. Over the course of the day, the snails ate much less than what they ate overnight.

Now for the experiment part. Now that I have a good idea on what time of day (or more accurately night) they prefer to eat, yesterday evening I clipped off some excess dead skin from some of my calluses and put them in the snail terrarium. With carrot, peas, bell pepper, and blackberry leaves to eat, if any snail nibbles on dead skin, it won't be from lack of options.

Today I cleaned the terrarium, took roll call, and examined the leftover food. A little bit of everything was gone, including some of the skin pieces I'd left behind. So it's not just that one snail who thought I was tasty. Holy cow, garden snails can and will eat human skin! Should I be worried? This sounds like the start of a cheesy horror movie, .

The snail with the cracked shell is stabilizing the crack, but now the biggest snail now has a booboo. I'm not sure exactly what happened. Now that I've done my experiment, I think I'm going to release some of the more active and persistent snails before their buddies — there was a lot of slime to dissolve and in hindsight, the terrarium might be a little crowded. If the snails had an orgy and laid eggs in the soil (my research warned me of that possibility), it's going to get even more crowded in there without my intervention. I'm not planning on keeping any of the snails long-term, they will be released back into the wild sooner or later.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Sep 26th 2019 at 2:59:09 AM

Mantis Shrimps. They are a cool mix of mysterious and Rated M for Manly.

YES. That was the first animal I thought of when I saw this thread, and I was about to write about just that.

Speaking of shrimps, what about pistol shrimps?

Leopard Seals◊. Most seals are cutesy, chubby puppies. These guys are dinosaur-headed monster mammals who can and will fuck your shit up... Assuming they don't mistake you for a young pup, which they often do.

Hippopotamuses. They look slow and chubby, but they can run as fast as a steam locomotive, and when they attack something in the water, they move with massive bounds, taking advantage of the water holding up their weight. Plus, they have enormous mouths full of massive tusks.

The Ayam Cemani, a unique breed of chicken. They're all black inside and outside. Read this to learn more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chicken-breed-boasts-black-bones-muscles-and-organs-180973179/