Jewel Wasp

Hide your kids, hide your wife!  Zombies are real and this mommy is a cold blooded zombifier!  Neatness is spooky this week with the parasitic emerald cockroach wasp (jewel wasp). The preggers she-wasp first injects venom between the front 2 legs of a regular non-zombie cockroach and paralyzes it. Then it switches positions and stings in the back of its neck. Basically this is zombification wasp foreplay and things are just getting caliente. Then the wasp employs the 3-strikes your out policy and uses specialized sensory organs on the tip of its stinger and injects a big load of venom into 2 precise locations in the roach's brain (the supra and sub-esophageal ganglion). The venom blocks a chemical substance called octopamine in the cock-a-roach's brain that controls its ability to walk, fight and talk (assuming cockroaches can talk). 

The primagravida wasp amputates the cockroach's antennae and drinks the roach's blood rich in sugar and protein.  She then bites down on the remaining stub of the antennae and leads the now zombie cockroach into a super secret death chamber where the wasp lays an egg on the zombie's abdomen and then covers the chamber and all the evidence with dirt.  Finally, the wasp larva hatches and eats the still alive zombie roach from the inside out.  The process takes around 7-8 days and it's important that the roach stays alive or else it would rot.  Best sexcapade ever! 

And to top it all off, there's a super neat video narrated by the sultan of neat, David Attenborough:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl_9kghmChw 

Cymothoa Exigua - the sex-changing parasitic tongue-eating louse

The neatness of this creature is kaleidoscopic: It seemingly goes on forever and if you look and think about it too much you'll get sick and confused. This neat creature is a sex-changing parasitic tongue-eating louse of the crustacean phylum (shrimp, lobster, crab).  An infant C. exigua lands in a fish's gills, infiltrates it and begins to develop into a male. Then when a second one appears in the gills it stimulates the first one to go all "lady boy" and turn from male into female (scientific term for Protandrous hermaphrodites I am pretty sure) and crawl up from the gills, through the throat and anchors herself to the tongue with her 7 pairs of legs. 

Then the 2nd creature is the male that impregnates the newly turned Betty. The neatness continues and the C. exigua that attached onto the tongue will not only suck blood and devour the tongue until it's a muscular stub, atrophies and falls off AND with the rose snapper fish it will replace the tongue with its body and provide the fish with a newly functional tongue. This is the only known instance in the animal kingdom of a parasite functionally replacing an organ of its host. How neat is that! 

Then after procreation is complete and it has released its freaky offspring and drained all the blood supply from the tongue, it is believed that the C. exigua does like Elsa and "let it go" from the stub that was once a tongue and gets swallowed by the fish.  Then the fish, with no tongue, eventually dies too.  

So let's sum up: a 14-legged hermaphroditic parasite get's all vampire-like and sucks the blood out the tongue of a fish, uses it for a bang pad, get's knocked up, kicks the kids out of the basement and forces them to find their own bang pad, then this things goes all Moby Dick gets swallowed when the well dries up.  NEAT!  

The Torquigener albomaculosus pufferfish - The Psychedelic Mushroom Taking Euclidian Scholar Pufferfish

Scientists were dumbfounded by intricate circles with geometric designs about six feet in diameter found on the seafloor off the coast of Amami-Ōshima Island in Japan. This is in itself super neat because that meant people would have to go on neat adventures to discover the culprits.  

In the last few years scientists discovered a new species of pufferfish, Torquigener albomaculosus, was responsible for these mystical underwater hippy designs.  It turns out males search far and wide for psychedelic sea mushrooms, talk about concepts such as time, space and the best way to eat Oreo cookies with there hommies and then construct the circles as spawning nests by swimming and wiggling in the seafloor sand. The nests, used only once, are made to attract females. The nests have double edges and radiating troughs in a spoke-like geometry. The designed ridges and grooves of the circle serve to minimize ocean current at the center of the nest which protects the eggs from the turbulent waters and possibly predators too.  Wow, this newly discovered species of pufferfish are clearly Euclidian scholars and super neat!   If only psychedelic sea mushrooms existed.  

Here's a video showing them creating some of their underwater designs:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOGvVn7IWVY

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!  

Moon Jellyfish

 

The Moon Jellyfish, or Aurelia aurita, are boneless, heartless, brainless, and made most entirely of water and relatives of the Portuguese man-of-war, other siphonophores and Donald J. Trump (except for the bone thing). The Moon Jelly's color can change depending on its diet. If the jelly feeds extensively on crustaceans, it turns pink or lavender. An orange tint indicates that a jelly's been feeding on brine shrimp. It's clear the Donald variety of Moon Jelly has been munchin' exclusively on shrimp cock...tail.

 

A new super neat study says that when a juvenile loses tentacles it rapidly reorganizes its remaining limbs to maintain symmetry through a repeated contraction of muscles that the jellyfishes use continually. Wow, how neat is that?

Finally, Moon Jellies are out of this world, or have been.  About 2,500 moon jelly polyps and ephyrae—two early stages in the jelly life cycle—went into orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia in May 1991 studying the effects of weightlessness on development of internal organs in juvenile jellies.  My brain is literally about the explode thinking about neat little moon jelly bros and bras floatin' around in Space.  How neat and freaky is that?   

 

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail Caterpillar

 The Canadian tiger swallowtail caterpillar has one of the neatest defense mechanisms against predators: when the caterpillar senses a bird nearby it quickly inflates the front part of its body, making it resemble a snake's head.

It grows concentric yellow and black rings that look like a giant pair of eyes. The caterpillar also have an osmeterium, an orange, fleshy organ that emits foul-smelling terpenes to repel predators.  The combo between the osmeterium and the blow up fake snake head make this butterfly a super neat member of the animal kingdom.