Category: Invertebrates
Crinoids, aptly nicknamed “feather stars”, can inhabit a wide range of marine environments and, judging by the fossil record, were very abundant organisms in the past, especially in the mid- to late-Paleozoic. They usually have a stem to attach themselves to a substrate but many only live attached as juveniles and spend most of their lives as free-swimming entities. They obtain nutrition by filtering small particles of food from the water using the mucous covered tube feet covering their feathery arms. Though they display the five-fold symmetry typical of echinoderms, some crinoids can have as many as two hundred arms!
Body horror in the insect kingdom
Learning about animals, you can discover many fascinating, even beautiful facts, but there are also things that can give you nightmares! Enter the strepsiptera (“twisted-wing parasite”). The adult female has no limbs, wings, or mouth - she simply lives in and feeds off her host (typically a wasp). When it becomes time to mate, she protrudes part of her abdomen from between the plates of her host and uses mind control to get the wasp to fly off to nearby males. Sexually mature males have wings, and fly around for about five hours before dying - spending their entire short existence seeking out females to mate with. After the female is impregnated, her own young grow and consume her. And once there is nothing left to eat, they leave their host wasp, infiltrate the nursery, and latch on to a larvae to create their own “zombie wasp” host and continue the grisly cycle!
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