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Obscure Taxa; For interesting or obscure organisms you'd like to share.
Topic Started: Dec 14 2016, 09:46 PM (48,922 Views)
Archeoraptor
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"A living paradox"
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the wings look like some sticvks with fluff
how hat even works,they fky like normal moths?
Astarte an alt eocene world,now on long hiatus but you never know
Fanauraa; The rebirth of Aotearoa future evo set in new zealand after a mass extinction
coming soon......a world that was seeded with earth´s weridest
and who knows what is coming next...........

" I have to know what the world will be looking throw a future beyond us
I have to know what could have been if fate acted in another way
I have to know what lies on the unknown universe
I have to know that the laws of thee universe can be broken
throw The Spec I gain strength to the inner peace
the is not good of evil only nature and change,the evolution of all livings beings"
"
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HangingThief
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ghoulish
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Archeoraptor
Sep 28 2017, 05:12 AM
the wings look like some sticvks with fluff
how hat even works,they fky like normal moths?
Yeah. They're pretty small so the feathered wings still give them enough lift.

I feel like the wings of manyplumed moths are a defense strategy. They could break off if something grabs the moth, and the legs of a wasp or dragonfly or whatever would slip between them.
Hey.


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Pangolin12
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Nerd
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Coconut Crab (Birgus Latro)
Coconut crabs are live in the Indian and central Pacific oceans. They are the world’s largest terrestrial arthropod’s, at up to one meter in diameter and weighing four kilograms. Adult coconut crabs are entirely land-dwelling, though the young are not. They are a kind of hermit crabs, and juveniles use gastropod shells like other hermit crabs. They subsist primarily off coconuts, but also eat carrion and rats. Their claws can hold weights of up to 28 kilograms, which allow them to break open coconuts. They do this by peeling away the coconuts coating, then puncturing at the weakest point. They begin life as an aquatic larva, becoming amphibious after 28 days and after another 28-day period becoming fully terrestrial. They continue growing for most of their life, and may live to be 40.
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Kamidio
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The Game Master of the SSU:NC
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Coconut crabs are not obscure.
SSU:NC - Finding a new home.
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Yiqi15
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Prime Specimen
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Kamineigh
Sep 28 2017, 01:28 PM
Coconut crabs are not obscure.
No, don't say that!
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Chuditch
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Dasyurid
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Night Parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis)
The Night Parrot was once Australia's most famous extinct bird, but could now be considered the 'holy grail' of birdwatchers. Here's a little on the history on the bird and a little on it's biology.

History
John Gould, the 'father of Australian ornithology' named the Night Parrot the Nocturnal Ground-Parakeet in 1861. Yet, after the turn of the century, there had been no hard evidence of it's existence for such a long time that it gained a mythical status, many people claiming the bird to be long gone. It was one of two mainland Australian parrots to have been said to have gone extinct, the other being the spectacular Paradise Parrot, which I may cover in a later post. Then, in 1990, a roadkill parrot turned into an ornithological sensation. That dead bird was a Night Parrot. Everyone then speculated that the parrot still hung on in remote areas, and intense searches were made to find it. However, most searches failed.

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The 1990 Night Parrot specimen.

Then in 2006 another dead parrot was found, this one killed by a barbed wire fence, sparking new interest in the bird. It took several years but in 2013, scientists hit the jackpot. They found a colony of live Night Parrots in Queensland. This caused a media sensation on the bird that had 'returned from the dead'. In truth, the bird was never dead; it's cryptic nature and nomadic habits probably made it hard to observe. Since then, several more colonies of this special bird have been found, in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland and possibly in the Northern Territory. However, the bird is under threat.

Biology
The Night Parrot is one of a few nocturnal parrots spread around the world, others including the two species of ground parrot (the Night Parrot's closest relatives) and the Kakapo of New Zealand. It is a bird of the arid inland, and it lives in stony or sandy spinifex grasslands, samphire and saltbush shrublands, and along the edges of creeks, claypans and salt lakes. They roost by day in a short tunnel inside of a long-unburnt spinifex hummock on stony or sandy substrate. It probably also roosts in dense chenopod bushes. It is almost completely terrestrial, but can still fly, readily flying long distances to food sources. The call of the Night Parrot could be compared to that of the Bell Miner. It has a bright white eye-shine. They may visit surface water to drink but are not reliant on this. Current distribution is probably centered on the Mt. Isa Uplands, the eastern Lake Eyre Basin and eastern Pilbara. They are under threat from feral animals and habitat degradation. Let's hope such unique birds are around for much longer. Conservation companies are fighting to protect the parrot. We would hate for a 'second extinction'.

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A live Night Parrot, one of the first ever photographed.
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flashman63
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The Herr From Terre
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I love non-tropical parrots.
Travel back through time and space, to the edge of man's beggining... discover a time when man, woman and lizard roamed free, and untamed!

It is an epoch of mammoths, a time of raptors!

A tale of love in the age of tyrannosaurs!

An epic from the silver screen, brought right to your door!

Travel back to
A Million Years BC

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Proceedings of the Miskatonic University Department of Zoology

Cosmic Horror is but a dissertation away

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Chuditch
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flashman63
Sep 29 2017, 07:23 PM
I love non-tropical parrots.
There are plenty of them here in Australia. Even in my home city, which has a Mediterranean climate, we have Rainbow and Musk Lorikeets, Adelaide and Eastern Rosellas, Red-rumped Parrots, Galahs, Little Corellas, Sulfur-crested Cockatoos and several more. It's called the Land of Parrots for a reason!
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flashman63
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The Herr From Terre
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The Gondwanian
Sep 29 2017, 07:45 PM
flashman63
Sep 29 2017, 07:23 PM
I love non-tropical parrots.
There are plenty of them here in Australia. Even in my home city, which has a Mediterranean climate, we have Rainbow and Musk Lorikeets, Adelaide and Eastern Rosellas, Red-rumped Parrots, Galahs, Little Corellas, Sulfur-crested Cockatoos and several more. It's called the Land of Parrots for a reason!
By far, my favorite of the non-tropical parrots is the Kea. So cool.
Travel back through time and space, to the edge of man's beggining... discover a time when man, woman and lizard roamed free, and untamed!

It is an epoch of mammoths, a time of raptors!

A tale of love in the age of tyrannosaurs!

An epic from the silver screen, brought right to your door!

Travel back to
A Million Years BC

-----------------------------------------------------

Proceedings of the Miskatonic University Department of Zoology

Cosmic Horror is but a dissertation away

-----------------------------------------------------

Some dickhead's deviantART
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Archeoraptor
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"A living paradox"
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Yiqi15
Sep 28 2017, 07:08 PM
Kamineigh
Sep 28 2017, 01:28 PM
Coconut crabs are not obscure.
No, don't say that!
for most people they are obscure,here most know about them
do you all have a point
Astarte an alt eocene world,now on long hiatus but you never know
Fanauraa; The rebirth of Aotearoa future evo set in new zealand after a mass extinction
coming soon......a world that was seeded with earth´s weridest
and who knows what is coming next...........

" I have to know what the world will be looking throw a future beyond us
I have to know what could have been if fate acted in another way
I have to know what lies on the unknown universe
I have to know that the laws of thee universe can be broken
throw The Spec I gain strength to the inner peace
the is not good of evil only nature and change,the evolution of all livings beings"
"
Spoiler: click to toggle
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Octoaster
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Meanwhile at Customer Support
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flashman63
Sep 29 2017, 07:23 PM
I love non-tropical parrots.
Have you ever seen a corella? It's like a pink crestless cockatoo that lives in cool environments, and they make huge flocks to come and graze. They appear all over my town, only to start screaming.
"The only thing that would scar me for life would be pics and videos of hetero sex." - Flisch

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"though critising misseppls is hypcocresi on my part" - Archeoraptor

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Chuditch
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OctoSharkTasaurus
Sep 30 2017, 04:04 AM
flashman63
Sep 29 2017, 07:23 PM
I love non-tropical parrots.
Have you ever seen a corella? It's like a pink crestless cockatoo that lives in cool environments, and they make huge flocks to come and graze. They appear all over my town, only to start screaming.
There are like a gazillion corellas here in Adelaide. In general I like the birds, they are cheeky and quite fun to watch, but they make an nuisance of themselves destroying people's property and causing a racket, and due to massive population increases they drive the rare Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo out of nesting hollows.
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HangingThief
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The rain beetles, Pleocomidae, are a monogeneric family of scarab- like beetles consisting of the genus Pleocoma.

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They're found exclusively in mountainous forested regions of the western US- California, Oregon and Washington. Their range is restricted to areas that haven't been glaciated in the past several million years, probably because the females are flightless and don't travel much if at all from where they developed.

The grubs spend a decade or more underground feeding on tree roots before emerging as nonfeeding adults. The inactive females can live for months as they gradually lay their supply of eggs, but the males only have enough energy to fly around in search of females for a matter of hours. They fly during rainy or snowy weather in fall or winter, which may only occur for one day in an entire year.

Fossils show that the family was once more diverse and widespread and dates back to at least the Cretaceous.




Phileurus is a genus of American rhinoceros beetles often called triceratops beetles.

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A major difference between Phileurus and most other Dynastinae is that both males and females have horns of similar size. Most rhinoceros beetles feed on sugary liquids and males use their horns for fighting rivals, but in this genus, adults are predatory on other insects. Like their relatives they have tiny mandibles, but both sexes can use their horns to pin down, gore and crush prey.

Presumably as a result of this diet, triceratops beetles can live several years as adults. Some other rhinoceros beetles are among the largest insects in the world, but they don't live more than a few months as the fat and other nutrients they acquired as larvae runs out.

Phileurus larvae are pretty normal, feeding on decaying wood and leaves, though they do have a defensive behavior in which they vibrate their bodies like an electric razor. That's a pretty normal thing for an adult insect with flight muscles to do, but rather strange for a grub.

The adults feed largely on larvae and pupae of other insects they find in rotten logs. In addition to this behavior surely reducing competition for their offspring, I assume that the confined environment of wood tunnels makes it easier for them to capture and kill things, considering that they must do so with rigid horns that aren't very good at grasping. Perhaps the vibrating behavior of the larvae allows adults to recognize and avoid cannibalizing them?
Edited by HangingThief, Oct 4 2017, 01:50 PM.
Hey.


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IIGSY
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A huntsman spider that wastes time on the internet because it has nothing better to do
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So...that's a thing apparently...
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opeFool
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Bagheera kiplingi, a mostly herbivorous species of jumping spider from Central America.

Copy paste from Wikipedia

B. kiplingi inhabits Mimosaceae trees, Vachellia in particular, where it consumes specialized protein- and fat-rich nubs called Beltian bodies. The nubs form at the leaf tips of the acacia as part of a symbiotic relationship with certain species of ants. The spiders actively avoid the ants that attempt to guard the Beltian bodies (their food source) against intruders. Although the Beltian bodies account for over 90% of B. kiplingi diet, the spiders also consume nectar and occasionally steal ant larvae from passing worker ants for food. Sometimes, they cannibalize conspecifics, especially during the dry season.

Despite their occasional acts of predation, the spiders' tissues have been found to exhibit isotopic signatures typical of herbivorous animals, implying that most of their food comes from plants. The mechanism by which they process, ingest, and metabolize the Beltian bodies is still unresearched. The vast majority of spiders liquefy their prey using digestive enzymes before sucking it in.

While they feed almost exclusively on a herbivorous diet in Mexico, where they inhabit more than half of Acacia collinsii trees, populations in Costa Rica, where less than 5% of Acacia are populated by B. kiplingi, do so to a lesser extent. Although this species is mostly territorial and forages solitarily, populations of several hundred specimens have been found on individual acacias in Mexico, with more than twice as many females as males. B. kiplingi appears to breed throughout the year. Observations of adult females guarding hatchlings and clutches suggest that the species is quasisocial.



I just found out about these beauties when I was researching spider eyes, and I was thoroughly shocked to learn the extent to which they feed on plants. If this could evolve once, perhaps the adaptation could eventually lead to lineages of herbivorous arachnids?
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