Nature Goes Nuts

I'm back! And while I was gone, a whole lotta weird stuff happened around the world. So prepare yourself--this post is just the beginning.




A Japanese woman recently found these pretty (and real) bugs hiding out in her flowerbed. Relatives of the katydid, they usually come in unremarkable shades of brown or green. The white one may be an albino, while the pink . . . well the pink is just bizarre.




In 1979, a young student at Bangor University planted the seed of a rare Mexican plant in the university's greenhouse. Known as the Century Plant, the Agave americana was long thought to bloom only once every hundred years. No one expected the plant to fare well in the damp British weather. But a few days ago, university scientists arrived for work and discovered that the plant had grown five feet in a single night, burst through the greenhouse roof, and sprouted thousands of blooms.
Read more here.




The photo above shows a one-of-a-kind creature that has Argentinean scientists baffled. The otherwise ordinary pig has a thick sheep-like fleece that must be sheared every summer to prevent it from suffering in the heat. My favorite part of the article that brought this phenomenon to my attention? According to the farmer, "Other pigs do not trust it."




Last but not least, this photo may well be doctored, but the coconut crab, which lives on islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, is the largest land crab in the world. And apparently quite tasty, too!