• Question: What is the weirdest animal you have seen?

    Asked by to Thon, Catherine, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , , , .
    • Photo: Catherine Offord

      Catherine Offord answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Well, I haven’t seen this one, but I would say again that the goblin shark is probably the weirdest looking creature I could possibly imagine. I think I’d be pretty terrified if I met one.

      As far as what I have seen, I’ve met a bush baby in the rainforest, which looked like a startled gremlin…

    • Photo: Shaylon Stolk

      Shaylon Stolk answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Probably a sea cucumber. They look like a squishy sausage, and crawl around on the sea floor, eating bits of food scraps. But what makes it really weird is how it defends itself– by squirting out its guts all over the predator! Then it regrows them all 😮

    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I love how Catherine and Shaylon have gone with the deep sea examples here!!

      Catherine: Here’s a video of a goblin shark catching a fish (that I just happened to know about off the top of my head)

      I think the deep sea is probably one of the best places to find weird looking animals. This is because their environment is really very different to our own, so they have a lot of different things to adapt to. One really big difference is that an animal like a deep-sea jellyfish might NEVER come into contact with a hard surface in its ENTIRE life because it’s always really far from the seabed and the coast. This allows animals to have evolved to be really fragile (it’s not worth investing all that energy in a skeleton and big muscles if you don’t need it for hunting or protecting).

      Not all deep-sea animals are gooey and jellyfish (like Shaylon’s sea cucumber) and some are aggressive hunters. My favourite group are the angler fishes

      http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/weirdest-angler-fish

      These fish are called angler fish because they use a special ‘lure’ to attract fish to eat. The lure contains special bacteria that can make light (this is called bioluminescence) and I think that’s one of the most amazing things about deep sea creatures

      Here’s another deep-sea hunter with teeth so big that he actually can’t close his mouth properly (without biting into his brain 😛 )

    • Photo: Anthony Caravaggi

      Anthony Caravaggi answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I’m going to go away from the deep sea and head to Madagascar. Well, I should be more accurate, I’m going to head to Bristol Zoo, where I saw an animal from Madagascar. I’m going to go for the aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur (a type of primate).

      There’s no doubt that the aye-aye is a weird-looking animal, but that’s not why I picked it. I picked it because of its fingers. The aye-aye eats grubs and insects which live inside trees. To find its food, the aye-aye taps trees with a long, thin, third finger, to find hollows burrowed-out by its prey. It then uses its bottom teeth to gnaw a hole in the tree and sticks its extremely long fourth finger, which is longer than the third and has a hooked nail, into the hole and drags the grub out.

      Here’s a video of the aye-aye in action:
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Aye-aye#p00bf1hs

    • Photo: Natalie Pilakouta

      Natalie Pilakouta answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      I would say that the weirdest animal I’ve seen is a flying fish… Which is kind of weird but amazing more than anything else! I saw flying fish when I was in Egypt (in the Red Sea).

      Here is an awesome video of them “flying”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uFjmeWnFZ4

      Also, here are some amazing facts for you: apparently, their maximum speed can be more than 70 km/hour, they can stay in the air for up to 45 seconds (covering distances of more than 400 m outside the water), and they can fly up to 6 meters above the surface of the sea (which is almost as high as a two-story building!)

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