Look At This Ridiculous Creature

I think it's safe to say the ocean has the highest ratio of ridiculous looking animals per capita

haysoos will know!

In many cases, especially in insects it is indeed that predators see those colours as dangerous.  Technically, this is known as aposematic colouration.

Predators learn pretty quickly that when you try to eat one of these brightly coloured critters, you get a mouth full of bitter foulness, horrible smells, stings or even lethal doses of poison.  

Because their protection from predators relies on the predators seeing these signals, many critters with aposematic colouration also seem pretty fearless.  They wander about right in the open, even in predator rich environments.  Some examples include poison dart frogs, monarch butterflies, ladybird beetles and even the black and white stripes of the skunk.



Some of these aposematic colour schemes takes advantage of what is known as Mullerian mimicry - where groups of animals with defense systems evolve very similar markings to each other, so that when a predator learns to avoid one, they learn to avoid them all.  The myriad species of bees and wasps are an example, where many of them have the same kind of flashy black and yellow stripes.



There is another form of this colouration, known as Batesian mimicry, where an actually harmless critter takes on the colour pattern of a stingy, bitey, toxic bastard critter.  Hover flies, for example, are completely harmless, but have very few predators because they have stripes like a bee.  They'll even fly right up in your face and hover in front of you going "Nah ha ha ha!  FEAR ME!  I am a stingy bastard!" even though they literally cannot harm a fly.  I call Batesian mimicry the "Everyone's afraid of a loonie" strategy.



In some critters, the vibrant colours are the mark of what's called epigamic colouration.  You see this often in sexually dimorphic species, where the male is really colourful, while the female is sensibly camouflaged and stealthy.  Many songbirds have this, as well as quite a few insects.  These colours are used just to show off how awesome they are, because apparently nothing impresses chicks more than a dude who does incredibly stupid, dangerous things and yet manages to survive.  That it actually works is evident in the fact that evolution actually favours these displays, and the stupid, flashy males actually do mate more often than drab, sensible males.  A quick look around your average High School will show that this sort of behaviour is tragically successful even in human gene pools.  I call this the "Here, hold my beer" strategy.



For nudibranchs, it's often thought that the bright colours may be aposematic.  Many of them feast on critters like sea anemones, and are somehow able to ingest their venomous stinging cells (called nematocysts) without triggering them, and migrate them intact into the fleshy, vividly coloured projections on their backs and sides.  Some feed on toxic (brightly coloured) sea sponges, and become toxic themselves.  Eating a nudibranch is pretty risky, and so have warning colours seems like it would be a good idea.

However... there is very little evidence of any kind of Mullerian mimicry in nudibranchs.  Each one of them is vividly coloured in a completely different and spectacular way.  If it was an aposematic colouration, there should be an advantage in sharing a signal, and more species would look alike.  There's also the fact that many of these bright colours aren't really visible underwater.  Short wavelengths like red, orange and yellow don't travel far underwater, and so aren't really visible to most of their predators, who don't usually go diving with bright spotlights like underwater photographers use.  Many of the nudibranchs are nocturnal too, and are actually pretty cryptic in their lifestyle - they hide under rocks and don't advertise themselves much.



So maybe they're epigamic colours.  Except nudibranchs themselves can't really see for shit.  They're probably not choosing mates by how colourful they are.  Also, many are hermaphroditic.  No advantage for expendable males, but cryptic females there.  Not all nudibranchs are brightly coloured too.  The largest one, the California black sea hare is just a big blob of black.



These problems are even more pronounced for deep sea critters, where there's very little or even no light at all for anyone, predator or potential mate alike to see how colourful they are.

Which is all a long way of saying... um, we don't know.  

Is it some kind of weird dog/spider hybrid from the director's cut of The Island of Dr. Moreau? Nope, its real. And of course it has a ridiculous (but kinda creepy) name to go with it: Bunny Harvestman

btw, doesn't Bunny Harvestman sound like a housewife from the Upper West Side in the 60's?

Ok, I think we can go ahead and shut this down. 

*shudders violently*

I'm so happy this thread has been resurrected. I hadn't seen it before. It is delightful!

And as a cephalopod bonus, how about a short film on the flamboyant cuttlefish, a tiny but amazing little creature that wanders the sea floor of the Indo-Pacific hypnotizing prey and being fabulous?!

Here are some true facts about the carnivorous dragonflies



Seriously, this video has some of the best footage of dragonfly larvae I've seen anywhere, especially of their hunting and feeding.

The saiga disdainfully scoffs at your cynical skepticism