Western Morning News (Saturday)
Weird and wonderful wildlife
There are some curious creatures that keep us guessing, as Charlie Elder reports in the first of two features looking at a mixed bunch of species that are anything but ordinary
Nature does throw up some weird and wonderful surprises – eccentric oddities that stand out in appearance as anything but the norm and leave us scratching our heads with the question: what on earth is that?
For some species the over-the-top physical adaptations help ensure survival, either as camouflage or to ward off predators. For others their fantastical and outlandish looks have evolved to aid feeding, breeding or to impress potential mates and repel rivals.
This week and next I’ll share a few of the more bizarre species one might come across in the South West and beyond – a veritable cabinet of curiosities...
MOTHS are typically active at night and relatively safe under the cloak of darkness. But by day, when they are resting, they have to ensure they do not draw the attention of birds and other predators.
Many are brown, grey or greencoloured to blend in with their surroundings, such as foliage and the bark of branches, and a number go a step further and have evolved remarkable shapes and patterns to help avoid detection.
One way of deterring potential predators is to send out a clear message that you are not good to eat. Some moths deploy bright colours to advertise the fact that they are unsavoury or toxic. However, this small species takes a different and unique approach, using visual mimicry to let it be known it is best avoided: it resembles a bird dropping! To tell this moth that it looks crap, if you’ll pardon the language, is actually a compliment.
With rounded white and grey wings held at rest in quite a steep position, it looks remarkably like a recently deposited bird splat (in the picture above it is on the right). Certainly no tempting morsel.
The Chinese character moth – named after the silvery patterning in the centre of the wings that looks a little like written shapes – is fairly widespread in a variety of habitats, such as open woodland, scrub,
hedgerows and gardens.
WITH their surreal, translucent forms and trailing tentacles, jellyfish and other creatures that resemble them certainly look like they have arrived from another planet.
When they wash up along the shoreline they are a source of fascination – especially if they look anything like the Velella, also known as the By-the-wind-sailor.
This bizarre bluish creature consists of an oval float several centimetres long, beneath which stinging tentacles hang to ensnare prey. On top a thin upright ‘sail’ helps catch the breeze and keep them on the move as they drift around warm waters at the mercy of currents and the wind. The alignment of this rigid sail along the dorsal surface can differ in individuals, which means they may be blown in varying directions.
When the conditions are right, particularly in the autumn and winter, storms can wash these open ocean creatures downwind onto our shores.
Like the Portuguese man o war, By-the-wind-sailors are not true jellyfish but in fact made up of colonies of tiny animals and known as a colonial hydroid.
LAMPREY
LAMPREYS have a smile only their mother could love, with a head full of teeth that they use to grip onto the victims they parasitize. Combined with an eel-like body, these creepy fish have an appearance that looks as if they were conjured up by the creator of horror sci-fi films.
But these secretive and remarkable-looking animals are highly successful at what they do, and fossils resembling lampreys date back well before dinosaurs.
We have three types in the UK: the brook lamprey, which is a harmless thin little jawless fish that lives in freshwater its entire life, and the river and sea lampreys, both of which breed in freshwater but spend some of their lives in estuaries or at sea.
The sea lamprey is the biggest of the bunch and, much like salmon, it travels up our rivers to spawn, before dying. The young live in the mud for several years and then develop into adults and head to sea, latching themselves onto the side of fish with their sucker mouth to feed on their blood.
Once a great delicacy at royal feasts, numbers of these primitive vertebrates have suffered from pollution and barriers to migration and they are now protected.