Geographic Cone Snail the Cannoli Eating Don Gastropod Mollusk

Set scene: Imagine you're a stereotypical Italian mobster cone snail sitting at a stereotypical Italian market eating some cannolis with some other stereotypical mobster cone snails.  Don Gastropod Mollusk tells you to whack a baby grouper fish that's been trimming off the top.  One of the other cone snails at the table, Fat Conoidea, says he'll do it the old fashioned way.  Then you, a geographic cone snail say, "Fo-get-about-it.  I'm going to make that fish sleep with the fishes.  

There are more than 100 species of venomous cone snails that are highly effective predators of fish. Most of them kill via a neurotoxin venom injection that targets the nervous system of prey, predators, or competitors. Two of those species, the Geographic Cone Snail and the Conus Tulipa are WAY neater than the others. In contrast to their brethren, these snail cobras target their prey's energy metabolism, which is radical and super neat. 

They've evolved specialized insulins that are more similar to fish insulin than mollusk insulin which they either release as a toxic gas cloud in the vicinity of a school of fish or as a direct injection. The insulin venom causes the fish to go into hypoglycemic shock, wherein the fish's low blood glucose causes it into a "sugar coma" where the cone snail can attack and eat the fish whole while the fish is in an almost drunken stupor.  Whoa!  That's insanely neat! 

Here's a video of the conus tulipa getting its prey:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHiGuquJmpE

Here's a video of a cone snail baiting, stunning and eating it's prey: https://youtu.be/JjHMGSI_h0Q

They're the most poisonous cone snail of all cone snails and have even killed a few Curious George human scuba divers that have tried to pick up the shell.  Not so neat! 

Chameleon

Get ready to learn about a super neat animal mostly found in Madagascar and the rest of Africa. Many people think the chameleon takes on the color of the surface it touches which is mostly true. But most of their skin's hue changes are a result of physiological reaction that is for communication. The chameleon express itself via it's skin tone reflecting courtship, stress, and competition among others. Holy Spicoli neatness galore! 

Chameleons tongues are also super neat!  "Stored in the lizard’s throat pouch is a tongue bone surrounded by sheaths of elastic, collagenous tissue inside a tubular accelerator muscle. When the chameleon spies an insect, it protrudes its tongue from its mouth, and the muscle contracts, squeezing the sheaths, which shoot out as if spring-loaded." Here it is in slow-mo  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3oh73amxQo

And finally recent neat research has discovered clues to how chameleons actually change color.  Underneath a layer of pigmentary skin cells, the researchers found another layer of skin cells with nanoscale crystals arranged in a triangular lattice. They found that the chameleons can adjust the space between the crystals which affects the color of light that the lattice of crystals reflects. As the distance between the crystals increases, the reflected colors shift from blue to green to yellow to orange to red. How neat is that!