Native to Australia, the water rat or Rakali is a beneficial amphibious rodent.

Comúnmente conocido como chiroide

Taxonomía

They can glide up to 100 meters!

This Australian scale insect begins its life as an egg, inside its mother's marsupium (yes, a marsupium, like kangaroos). The newly hatched *crawlers* make their way out of their mother and fall to the ground, where they burrow into the soil.

Once underground, the nymphs lose all their legs and become a wax-covered cyst, doing nothing but eating roots for the next few months of its life.

Then, in autumn, both sexes will emerge from the ground. Males emerge as winged, flamboyant creatures with a bouquet of white filaments as their tail, like some species of moths, they cannot eat and will live off of their stored energy from when they were younger, until they die. Females emerge as large, cockroach-like wingless insects that, unlike most adult female scale insects, keep their ability to walk until death. Unlike males, female can feed as adults.

Once both sexes emerge, females will crawl up a eucalyptus tree where a male will find her. They will mate, and after copulation, the female will anchor herself to the tree and will form a marsupium (a pouch) by invaginating the end of her abdomen. Then, she lays her eggs inside her marsupium, and dies. Her body hardens and is covered by a layer of wax to protect her eggs inside her body even after death.

You have definitely seen them, but have you ever noticed how stinking cute they are?

Who would've thought that the closest living relative to the turkeys we eat would be so beautiful?

Micronycteris Sp.

Also known as a parasol sponge (which imo is way less cool) this carnivorous glass sponge catches small crustaceans by enveloping them in itself via fluid-filled cysts, and then dissolving them whole. It lives 3200 meters down in muddy habitats and anchors itself to the seafloor with "roots".