Leggiest Creature!

- – When something has more than four legs, it generally tends to inspire a cringe factor.  Something with 750 legs would definitely then register high on the creepy and gross-out scale, and this little beauty is so compact as well; a white millipede named Illacme plenipes, which is Latin for “the pinnacle plentiful feet,” and measures a mere 1 – 3 centimeters long.

Found only in a small area of Northern California and looking like a thread, the millipede also boasts a rudimentary fused mouth with no known function, and hairs on its back that produce a silk-like product.

A useless mouth, and 750 legs (at least in the females)!  A related species in Puerto Rico only has 742.  I thought you’d get a kick out of that…

Along Came A Spider…

- – If you are an arachnophobe, this tale is not for you!  It seems that a woman went to China’s Changsa Central Hospital complaining of itching in the left side of her face.–Well, it turned out that the source of her irritation was a spider which had been residing inside the woman’s ear canal for five days!  It had probably set up housekeeping.   The picture shows the actual spider before its removal…

Doctors used a saline solution to flush the spider out in order to avoid having it bite the woman, or burrow deeper into her ear!  Fortunately, the flushing technique was successful.  Speculation was that the spider crept into the woman’s ear as she slept,  brought in while her house was undergoing renovations.  Spiders can be quite the opportunists…

Spiders and insects are appearing in greater numbers this summer due to the warm weather and drought conditions across much of the United States.  As cold-blooded creatures, insects develop faster in heat conditions, producing more generations in a shorter time.   The Orkin folks and other exterminators ought to be able to get some memorable commercials out of this one!  And you thought the giant talking ants were creepy…

Artificial Jellyfish!

- – I’m sure that you’ll all be pleased as punch to learn that scientists in the U.S. have created a free-swimming artificial jellyfish!  I, for one, know that when at the ocean, I can never have enough of them bumping against me in the tide or lying on the beach.

It gets stranger, too; the team members built the replica using silicone as a base on which to grow heart muscle cells that were harvested from rats.  They then used an electric current to shock the created Medusoid into swimming with synchronised contractions that mimic those of a real jellyfish!  I swear that I am not making this up…

The finding serves as proof of concept for reverse engineering a variety of muscular organs and simple life forms.  As jellyfish use a muscle to pump their way through the water, the way that they function is similar on a basic level to that of a human heart.  Such similarities reveal what you need to do to design a bio-inspired heart pump.

Synthetic life is an emerging field of science that until now focused on replicating life’s building blocks.  Now instead of just building a cell, researchers at Caltech and Harvard University have built a beast!  

Old Spice “Swagger” Sea Captain and Squid…

 - – He’s self-described as not being a “well decorated sea captain who battles monsters on a large nautical vessel,”  but thanks to Old Spice’s Swagger, he smells like one!  The character we see depicted kind of plays out like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo as seen on a bad acid trip…he walks into a room with a patently fake killer squid attached to his left shoulder at which the captain throws half-hearted punches throughout the commercial while endless gold treasure pours from his pants, quickly filling the room!

Apparently, Old Spice is trying a variety of spokesman, and this bizarre sea captain is part of a new ad campaign to “smell better than yourself.“  Smelling better than yourself may be fairly easy if you routinely smell like squid, and the squid in this one is wonderful, looking like a low budget creature feature creation from 1950′s or 60′s Chiller Theater type offerings.  I like the little guy, who features moving eyes, teeth, and flailing tentacles…the punches thrown at him don’t seem to faze the persistent squid much, and I keep waiting and hoping for him to remove a chunk from the captain.  Failing in this, perhaps we could arrange a steel cage death match for him with SpongeBob…

Amazing Sea Monkeys!

– -If you grew up on comic books as I did, you may remember reading cheesy ads on the back pages and cover for things like, well, X-ray eyeglasses and Sea Monkeys!  The ad presented the sea monkeys as being intelligent mer-people who would serve you as their king, “clown around,” and even “learn tricks for your amusement!”- – What child doesn’t nurture a God-fantasy where a kingdom of adoring and obedient subjects would shout “Hail!,” and appeal for attention and approval whenever they enter their bedroom?  Twilight Zone episodes have been built around this kind of thing, and a locker full of a tiny kingdom was also glimpsed in one of the Men In Black movies.- -Works for me!

This would have been a neat trick indeed, because the “sea monkeys” were in reality not primates but… brine shrimp!  Gullible and naive fool that I was, I actually ordered sea monkeys…twice!  The first time, the tiny crustaceans failed to even hatch.  The second time they did hatch, but had an extremely short life span, never living up to my expectations, showing personalities, or considering me royalty…caveat emptor!

Scorpion on a Plane!

 - – It sounds like a sequel to the forgettable action flick Snakes on a Plane, but the scorpion on a plane was all too real, and it stung a Portland-area man flying from Seattle to Anchorage during a June 17th Alaska Airlines flight.

The male victim felt something crawling inside one of his sleeves while trying to sleep on the flight, and thought it was a small bug.  When it turned out to be a scorpion, the man at least had some fun out of the experience by gathering the arachnid up in a napkin, and showing it to his girlfriend!  Predictably, she freaked.   By this time, the man’s elbow was burning from the sting, and two doctors on board checked the guy out while the flight crew called for medics to meet the plane at the airport in Anchorage.  The girlfriend kept her feet on the seat for the rest of the flight, refusing to put them on the floor.

The arachnid is felt to have been a striped bark scorpion common to Texas where the flight originated.  An Alaska Airlines spokesperson said the airline has never had a poisonous creature like the scorpion on one of their flights before.

Politicians, lawyers, and my ex-supervisors apparently have never flown Alaska Airlines…

Magnificent Mentos Spider!

– - Short of Peter Parker, you aren’t going to find an arachnid as breathtaking as the Mentos Rainbow pack spider! The commercial introduces us to a young couple sitting in their living room when suddenly the female goes ballistic, shrieking and recoiling on their couch.  The view shifts to the carpet, where we are shown…a spider!- -What is it with chicks and spiders, anyhow?!

Anyways, the guy responds by dutifully going to deal with the spider, extending a finger, possibly to crush the inoffensive creature.  The extended digit is all our eight-legged hero needs, however, to demonstrate his profound mastery of Jujutsu or perhaps Aikido, grasping the human’s finger and throwing him like a rag doll across the room no less than three times! A shelving unit and coffee table are splintered in the fracas!  The wrath of the spider is awesome, and the human is hopelessly outclassed!

In the closing images, we see the grounded human’s body dragged forcefully across the floor presumably by the amazing arachnid as the announcer intones, “It’s better to know what’s coming next!” It’s not revealed what fate awaits the human female, but I doubt things will go well for her, either…

…Bravo, I say!  Long may this arachnid martial arts master live and prosper!

Psychic Octopus Dies!

– - I have terrible news…Paul, the Psychic Octopus, is no more!  The tentacled tipster, who on eight separate occasions correctly predicted the winner of FIFA World Cup soccer matches, passed away in his tank in the Oberhausen Sea Life Centre in Germany early Tuesday morning.

Paul’s predictions were rendered by which of two mussel-containing boxes representing competing teams he picked.   The odds of picking eight straight winners are estimated as being more than 300 to 1.  Someone who had bet $20 on Paul’s picks from the start of the World Cup and then let the bet ride throughout the tournament would have walked away with about $4,500!

Sadly, the octopus is not a long-lived creature, and Paul expired at the age of two and a half.  An octopus, it is said, generally grows to maturity, breeds, and dies…just the basics.   It is rumored that the psychic cephalopod may have known of his own impending death, but if so he kept it to himself.  The candles which burn the brightest burn the briefest, after all…

Biggest Moth!

- – It’s not Mothra, but the world’s largest real specimen is the Atlas moth, named after their map-like wing patterns.  Boasting 12-inch wings and breathtaking colors, the Atlas moth lives a mere two-week life span owing to the fact that they have no stomachs and their mouths don’t form properly, preventing them from eating anything!

Native to the rain forests of Southeast Asia, the Atlas moth lives its brief life off the fat it accumulated as a caterpillar, and spends its adult life breeding other moths…a short life but a merry one, eh?

Sufferin’ Shellfish!

- – I realize that it’s hard to form an emotional attachment with a crustacean.   I also know that Klingons eat some of their food raw and wiggling.  I am glad, however, that a restaurant in Sacramento, California will no longer serve a cruel dish that’s often called “dancing shrimp” or “dancing prawns.”  The dish’s name is a reference, you see, to the writhing that the animals engage in when their protective shells are ripped off and acidic lemon juice is squeezed onto their raw flesh before they are eaten alive...

Scientific research has demonstrated that prawns feel pain, just as other animals do.  A 2007 Queen’s University Belfast study found that when prawns have acid dabbed onto one of their antennae, they respond by grooming the affected area and rubbing it against the side of the tank, just as a dog might lick an injured paw.  When given painkillers, the prawns felt no need to groom or rub their acid-dabbed antennae.  The researchers concluded that these results are consistent with the idea that these crustaceans can experience pain.

When PETA presented their findings and numerous complaints about the practice of serving “dancing shrimp” as cruel, the restaurant agreed to stop serving live shrimp…