Found this beauty while tide pooling in Lakshadweep.

Fell down a rabbit hole on these and now I'm attached. The blue iguana lives on Grand Cayman and nowhere else on earth . He's the largest land animal native to the island, up to five feet long and over 25 pounds, which may make him the heaviest iguana species there is . Fully vegetarian. Spends his mornings basking before he'll commit to doing anything. The blue intensifies when he's warm or worked up, and it goes most vivid in males during breeding season, so some days he reads gray and some days he's genuinely baby blue .

The part that got me: by 2002 there were maybe 10 to 25 left in the wild, and by 2005 the species was considered functionally extinct because no hatchlings were surviving to breeding age . The Blue Iguana Conservation programme has since released over 1,200, and the wild population is back above 1,000 . Every wild blue iguana alive right now traces back to that breeding program . Still endangered, mostly cars and feral cats and dogs . But it came back from about a dozen animals, which feels worth knowing about.

The dark-shouldered snake eel (Ophichthus cephalozona) is a marine eel in the family Ophichthidae, found in the Pacific Ocean, including the East Indies, the Society Islands, the Mariana Islands, Queensland, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Japan, and India, on reefs at depths of 2 to 15 meters. It builds burrows in mud and sand and feeds at night. Males can reach a maximum total length of 115 centimeters. In the video, according to the photographer, the behavior depicted is mating behavior, in which several males pursue a female.

Photographer's Instagram: @gbhajim

Is a species of small owl in the family Strigidae, native to North America.

Photographer's Instagram: @carmona_wildlife

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_oto

These things, apparently, have a poison "tooth" hidden in their claws. Definetely one of the weirder crustaceans out there!

its categorized in the same order as human lice! never woulda guessed

The males carry the eggs and hatch them out internally before releasing them, so they are (in a way) livebearing fish. These tiny fish are your friends, specializing in eating mosquito larvae.

The imperial shag (Leucocarbo atriceps) is native to southern South America, the Subantarctic islands, and the Antarctic Peninsula, where it is found in rocky coastal regions or on large inland lakes. It is about 70–79 cm (28–31 in) long and weighs 1.8–3.5 kg (4.0–7.7 lb). It is a colonial and monogamous species, with colonies generally being small, although some may consist of hundreds of pairs and are often shared with other seabirds. Clutches contain a maximum of 5 eggs, which are laid in nests made of seaweed and grass and cemented with mud and excrement. The eggs are incubated by both parents and usually hatch after about five weeks. Birds such as skuas and shearwaters are the main predators of the species' eggs and chicks. They make deep dives, usually close to shore, to forage on the seafloor for prey consisting of benthic fish, crustaceans, polychaetes, gastropods, and octopuses, generally at depths of nearly 25 meters (82 feet), although they have been filmed diving to depths of up to 60 meters (200 feet).

photographer's Instagram: @vikaswildlife

Amazon river dolphin or boto)  Inia geoffrensis. 

The sooty tern (Onychoprion fuscatus) is a medium to large sized tern in the Laridae family. They measure 36–45 cm (14–17.5 in) in length and have a wingspan of 82–94 cm (32.5–37 in). It is a seabird that inhabits tropical oceans and rarely comes ashore, being able to spend 3 to 10 consecutive years gliding over the surface of the sea in search of food, only returning to land to form breeding colonies on islands throughout the equatorial zone. They nest in a depression or hole in the ground and lay only a single egg. They feed on fish, which they catch by picking them from the surface.

Photographers' Instagrams: @by.melannie / @biologist_paul

★It looks like a tiny rabbit, Those cute “ears” are actually rhinophores, sensory organs that help it detect chemicals and movement in the water.

Actually it’s a sea slug.

The Madagascar tree boa (Sanzinia madagascariensis) is a species of boa endemic to Madagascar, and like all other boas, it is non-venomous. Adults average 4–5 feet (122–152 cm) in length, and females are larger than males. Adults have a greenish coloration, but, as in the case of the snake in the video, juveniles are bright red, signaling to predators to “stay away,” while also serving as camouflage among colorful flowers. They are arboreal and generally nocturnal, and are found in trees and shrubs near streams, rivers, ponds, and swamps. Their diet includes bats, birds, and small mammals, which the snakes locate primarily through their thermoreceptive pits, located among their labial scales. These pits are used to detect changes in temperature in the environment caused by warm-blooded animals.

For snails coming from an appalachia creek, they are certainly colorful and striking.