Over the last two years, we've heard a lot of "Nature is healing." Tell that to the baby bird that had its head bitten off by a rampaging tortoise, or the fish that woke up to find its tongue replaced.
Nature is a black hole's empty heart and has always been. Things were the same in 2021. Nature was completely metal this year, so here are 9 of our favorite times.
1. The fish has parasites on its tongue.
The park is called the Galveston Island State Park.
All things die and become bugs. Death is not a requirement sometimes.
The Atlantic croaker was caught off the coast of Texas before Halloween. The tongue-eating louse replaced the croaker's tongue when fishers cracked it open. Females of this species enjoy the job of infiltrating a fish's mouth and sucking the organ dry until it rots away. The louse gets a new home, where she continues to feed on blood and mucus for the duration of the fish's life. Do you love animals getting along?
There are some good videos for you.
This year's scariest Halloween photo shows a fish's mouth.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum has an image of Julius Csotonyi.
T. rex and its cousins were the most brutal animals that have ever existed. When there was no prey to kill, what did these killers do? According to new research in the journal Paleobiology, they fought each other in back-alley tyrannosaur fight clubs.
Researchers analyzed 202 tyrannosaur skulls and jaws and found a total of over 300 scars. The young tyrannosaurs had no bite marks, while the older ones had scars. "These seasoned fighters were likely posturing and sizing each other up, then trying to grab each other's heads between their jaws," the lead study author told Live Science at the time. The tyrannosaur-on-tyrannosaur fights could have been about status or territory.
Dinosaurs bit each other's faces.
3. The great Jersey tornado.
Credit: Contributed
We don't know if "wormnado" is an official sign of the apocalypse, but it's halfway to a biblical plague. The residents of a New Jersey town encountered this scene on the sidewalk after a spring rain. Hundreds of words spread across the sidewalk, with even more contorted into a strange spiral shape where the pavement met the grass. What is the meaning of this horror? The worms likely fled the soil after heavy rains the night before, breathing through their skin, according to experts. One researcher said that the spiral pattern could be a coincidence or a sign of the direction of the water flow.
Scientists in New Jersey are confused by a strangeworm tornado.
4. The'space storm' over the North Pole.
The image is from the Shandong University.
Unphased by the worm tornado? Look north, friends, to the 600-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer) storm that whirled over the North Pole for 8 hours. The towering vortex was invisible to the naked eye, but it was visible on four weather satellites. Unlike hurricanes, the plasma cyclone had a quiet "eye," a funnel and counterclockwise-spinning spiral arms, but instead of raining water, the vortex showered the upper atmosphere with crackling electrons.
Scientists just got around to studying it this year and published their results in the February edition of the journal Nature Communications. The team believed that the storm was caused by a complex interaction between incoming solar wind and the magnetic field over the North Pole. Scientists didn't know space hurricanes existed before this year, and now they suspect they may be a common phenomenon on planets with a magnetic shield. If you're going to travel this holiday, keep in mind something.
The first-ever'space Hurricane' was detected over the North Pole.
5. The assassin tortoise is a bird-hunting reptile.
The Frégate Island Foundation has an image credit.
Tortoises are cute and have no vicious bone in their bodies. It's wrong if you're a baby bird.
In August, a journal shared shocking footage of a killer tortoise on the hunt. In the video, a female Seychelles giant tortoise lumbers across a log in the archipelago, determinedly moving toward a young tern. The bird pecks back as the tortoise barrels down, but the reptile is undeterred, and after a 90-second chase the wrinkly hunter is able to kill the bird.
This is the first video evidence of a tortoise hunting another animal, but it's almost certainly not the tortoise hunter's first kill, the study authors said. This tortoise is a cold-blooded killer because it had experience hunting terns on logs.
Tortoise hunts a baby bird in a slow- motion movie.
6. The animals fought a river.
Buddhilini de Soyza is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
It turns out that the cats are more metal than we thought. These cats are known as the world's fastest sprinters, but they are also powerful swimmers, undeterred by raging rivers. A picture taken near the Talek River in Africa shows four cheetahs paddling against the choppy waves.
The crossing wasn't a picnic. According to Buddhilini de Soyza, the river's current dragged the cheetahs about 330 feet (100 meters) downstream, and pulled one of the cats underwater for nearly 20 seconds. What is the purpose of this journey? Either the cats knew they were having their picture taken and wanted to give us a new reason to fear them, or they were looking for food. The pack successfully hunted a wildebeest on the same side of the river a few days later, according to De Soyza. The photo was highly commended in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
The chesques battle a raging river. Did they survive?
7. The organs kill snakes.
The image was taken by James Holden.
Snakes make these little lists of ours because they have simplified the body plan to a fine art, and they are just killers.
The Most Metal Serpent award is given to the knife-toothed Kukri snake of Thailand. You'll see why if you put one near a bullFrog. According to research in the February issue of the journal Herpetozoa, Kukris are picky eaters who go straight for their prey's internal organs. They do this by biting a hole in the frog's side, shoving their heads into the body cavity, and shaking the still-living frog around in a series of "death rolls," possibly in an attempt to liberate the frog's organs from its abdomen. The snake went on to eat its prey whole after eating its organs. Who doesn't like dessert?
Snakes swallow their organs because nature is horrifying.
8. The mind-control fungus turns flies into necrophiles.
The image is from A. Naundrup et al.
Some killers don't need fangs to empty their victims from the inside out. A study published to the preprint database bioRxiv in October states that the house flies it preys upon are turned into zombies by the fungus. The fly is forced to climb to an elevated place, where the fly clings on, and dies from being eaten by the fungus from within. The fly's wings and body are where the fyllal spores are found.
The horror isn't over for female flies, as researchers found that the fungus emits an attractive scent to attract male visitors to female corpses. If all goes to plan, healthy males will mount the female's corpse and spread the scent to their friends and neighbors. It should be left to a fungus to be scarier than a snake.
The mind-controlling fungus makes male flies mate with dead females.
9. A goat gored a bear.
The image is from Shutterstock.
In the Canadian Rockies, hikers discovered the body of a 154-pound (70- kilograms) female grizzly bear just off a popular trail. The bear's body was found by Parks Canada with stab wounds near its neck and armpit. The holes in the bear's necropsy were similar to those of the mountain goat horns.
According to Parks officials, the bear was attacking a goat when the prey turned the tables and lashed back with its horns. There have been cases of mountain goats killing bears in the past, experts said, but they are rare. If you mess with the goat, you'll get the horns.
Mountain goat kills a bear with its horns.
For more coverage of metal.
Nature was completely metal in 2020.
Nature was completely metal in 2019.
Nature was completely metal in the year.
Live Science published the original article.
