I wonder if we’ll see a...
to put the willies up When it comes to strange tales nature’s got it all… your walking companions, British FIND/AVOID: Freshwater lakes, gravel pits, reservoirs, rivers and park lakes.
SNOT SNAKE
The hermaphrodite hagfish is a four-hearted, three-foot-long swimming sausage that eats rotting corpses from the inside out. It ties itself in knots to increase the force of its bite and has a survival tactic to delight eight-year-olds: it can turn the water around it to tens of litres of confounding, suffocating slime. So much does it enjoy putrefying flesh, it’s evolved to consume some of its diet straight through its skin. FIND/AVOID: Deep off Britain’s east coast and the west coast of Ireland.
MESSY EATER
As well as their floppy-eared charm, rabbits have a magical-sounding power called coprophagia – the compulsion to eat their own poo. More than a quirky habit, without it rabbits wouldn’t be able to fully digest the nutrients from their food. Dinner’s second course comes in the form of cecotropes or ‘night faeces’ – soft stools consumed straight from the anus. FIND/AVOID: Fields and downs.
VOMIT SPRAYER
An elegant gull-like seabird with a metre-wide wingspan, the Northern Fulmar has a very special welcome for unexpected nest visitors: a jet of foul-smelling oil hot from the stomach. Copping it in the face is unpleasant; getting it matted in your feathers can be fatal. FIND/AVOID: Sea-cliffs all around the country, but particularly northern Scotland.
PARENTAL ABUSER
Neat black water birds with a dab of white on their head that lends them the air of a nun, coots can be quite cruel. If they decide their brood is too big to support, they will peck their own young as they beg for food til they lose the will to live, or drown them.
SIX-LEGGED ZOMBIE
Zombies really are among us – ladybirds infected by the parasitic wasp Dinocampus coccinellae. The wasp deposits an egg, which feeds on the ladybird’s fat and gonads for three weeks before severing the nerves to its host’s legs. Immobilised, but not dead, and acting like an armoured tent (one that convulses reflexively at a predator’s approach) the ladybird can do nothing as the larva emerges and spins a cocoon between its legs, there to pupate for 6-9 days. The wasp leaves. The ladybird can’t. FIND/AVOID: Everywhere.
STOMACH-EJECTOR
Imagine being held down by a predator the size of a fairground ride, who instead of finishing you off with a mercifully swift bite, vomits its whole stomach out and digests you slowly in situ. That’s what retirement looks like for limpets. Starfish expel their stomach and digest their prey like this because their mouths are too small. Blind and slow-moving, they don’t exactly windmill in to fights, but boy do they finish them. FIND/AVOID: Intertidal areas on shingle or mixed beaches.
HOOK-NOSED SEA PIG
Britain’s biggest meat-eater is a 300kg/3m monster called Halichoerus
grypus – the ‘hook-nosed sea pig’ – better known as the grey seal, who keeps in shape by consuming the equivalent of 400 fish fingers a day, brawling to the point of death over mates, and indulging in the odd bout of cannibalism and infanticide. Nearly half the world’s population can be found lolling and sprogging out (and probably considering facial tattoos) in colonies around the UK in autumn.
FIND/AVOID: The Atlantic seal population starts pupping in the West Country during September, and they carry on up the west coast, round Scotland, and finish with the colonies in Norfolk.
SEX CRIME
When mating, snails bite each others’ lips and genitals in foreplay that lasts up to six hours before attempting to penetrate each other with calcified love darts – often so inaccurately-thrust they end up puncturing the other’s head or getting lost among internal organs; and that’s before the actual copulating starts. FIND/AVOID: Damp days.
VAMPIRE OF THE RIVER
Older than dinosaurs, scaleless and jawless, the lamprey is less a fish than a section of intestine that has learned to swim. It can’t find food for itself so instead it suckers onto the side of other fish, using its concentric rings of teeth to scrape away the scales until it reaches body fluids it can ecstatically suck. But it’s alright, say experts, because they won’t do it to humans unless starving. FIND/AVOID: The upper reaches of many English rivers.
FISH-EATING SPIDER
Britain’s biggest spider is the size of your palm, eats fish and runs across the surface of water to catch its prey – but it’s harmless to humans. Reintroduced in East Anglia, the Fen raft spider also builds a 25cm nursery web above the water to protect its spiderlings.
FIND/AVOID: Norfolk & Suffolk fens, East Sussex and Pant-y-Sais Fen & Crymlyn Bog near Swansea.