Animals never cease to amaze

As featured April 13, 2012, on www.cnjonline.com

Every now and then we all need to be wowed and amazed a little, a fact capitalized on by circuses for centuries.

But three rings and a tent are not required to have one of those “wow” moments.

Instead of glitter and tall hats, red honking noses and flaming hoops, one can always look to the animal world for off the wall stuff that isn't just part of a show, it's reality.

Just to illustrate life wins every time, here's a collection of random, gee wiz factoids and freaky creatures:

• The state of Maryland has offered $200 gift cards to those who catch and kill the “fish from hell,” properly known as a snakehead fish. A native of Africa and Asia, the snakehead's invasion of the state's waters has wildlife folks worried. With a couple nasty rows of teeth, no natural predators and the ability to survive up to four days on land, the 2-foot-long fish is able to destroy entire ecosystems.
• Never feel alone again. It's estimated there are 50,000 spiders for each acre of land containing plant growth.
• It might be time to go for brighter colors. Stricken with poor eyesight and estimated to only be able to see a target from about 30 feet away, dark colors, particularly black and blue, attract mosquitoes.
• And you thought it was exhausting to watch them get from one place to another... turns out the snail's pace drains them too making it possible for some snails to sleep for more than three years at a time.
• Dante couldn't have written it better. Apparently the most important purpose of a cockroach's head is chowing down. Decapitated, a cockroach is capable of living for up to a month, finally expiring when it starves to death.
• Sometimes called “Kamikaze ants,” there are nine different types of ants that commit suicide. When in a losing battle, they sacrifice themselves by exploding glands in their bodies that contain toxins, spraying and defeating their foe.
• Think hermit crabs are creepy looking? Their relative the robber crab grows to about 40 inches long and weighs as much as 10 pounds. Living on land, the giant night creeper lives in the southwest Pacific and Indian oceans and likes to crack coconuts.
• At 180 feet, one type of ribbon worm is thought to be the longest critter on the planet and if that weren't icky enough, ribbon worms can live up to a year without food by self-digesting.
• Sweating like a pig is actually not a bad thing. Pigs are a little short in the sweat gland department, hence the cooling mud baths.
• Aside from being a newly documented species discovered in a restaurant in Vietnam where it's long been listed on menus, belonging to an all female species with the ability to reproduce by self-cloning has earned the lizard Leiolepis ngovantrii some notoriety.
• With a lifespan close to that of humans, the Chinese giant salamander can grow to be more than 70 inches long (longer than most people are tall) making it the largest amphibian in the world.

While the human world spends a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly normal is, no matter how hard they look, the answer the animal world gives back unequivocally is, everything and nothing at all.

Now that's a circus.