Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar.

Bradley Miller

(Pseudechis porphyriacus) red-bellied black snake.
Two males engaged in combat.

This Tibetan woman living in a farmer village high in the Himalaya made friends with the local Marmots offering them food.

The mouth of a red velvet worm.

Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score

programaticallydelicious:

This is a didemnum molle, which is a species of sea squirt. A couple more pictures below:

Honduran white bats! They make a tent by chewing the leaf to cause it to
collapse downward like that, and then huddle up together inside to
roost.

Bolivian Titi monkeys (Callicebus donacophilus) sleep with their tails entwined, to aid balance and promote social bonding. Via Natural Selection.

The Fungus That Turns Ants Into Zombies Is More Diabolical Than We Realized

Science wasn’t actually certain how fungi
like cordyceps “hijacked” their host’s behavior, and we always kind of
assumed it was causing some simplistic damage to the brain.

As it turns out, it works much more elaborately and much MORE like
the dramatized sci-fi horror parasites constantly inspired by it.

These fungi integrate themselves on the cellular level with the
host’s tissues, actually seem to send signals to the host’s muscles and
even alter the host’s genes with their own.

All the while, THE BRAIN ISN’T INVADED AT ALL.

These fungi, all along, have been converting their hosts into
animal-fungal hybrids they control while the host’s brain and
consciousness remain helplessly alive and largely unaltered.

The Fungus That Turns Ants Into Zombies Is More Diabolical Than We Realized

There have been numerous reports of winged cats throughout history. The “wings” are sometimes made of matted fur, or flaps of skin made to look wing-like due to a condition called Cutaneous Asthenia.

They can’t fly, though!