The story of Kitti’s Hog-nosed Bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), also sometimes referred to as the Bumblebee Bat, is a tiny story and a sad one. This little bat, a native to parts of Thailand and Burma where it lives in limestone caves, measures in at a mere 2.9 to 3.3 cm (1.1 to 1.3 in) in…

Pufferfish. They are toxic (tetrodotoxin, to be precise). They can inflate when threatened to become huge, unwieldy balloons that are hard to eat. Most species have spines. These are things that just about everyone knows about Pufferfish. However, this is all that most people know about Pufferfish, and yet there is so much more to know. Pufferfish represent…

Animals have evolved to wonderfully conform to the environments in which they live, and animals that live in particularly extreme environments have some particularly amazing adaptations. One such animal is the Weddell Seal (Leptonychotes weddellii). With a large and stable population (estimated at around 800,000 individuals) and the ease with which humans can approach them,…

Any idea what the smallest species of Armadillo is? You guessed it! It is the tiny (only 3 or 4 inches long), and ever so cute, Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus)! This little resident of a small area of central Argentina is found in sandy desert areas where it lives by digging under ground with…

Ever wonder how big the biggest arthropod in the world is? I have, so I figured I would do a bit of poking around and see what I could find. Turns out, the world’s biggest arthropod is really big indeed! It is a crab called the Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi).

There are some really cute insects out there, and one genus of especially cute insects is the genus Euspinolia, called the Panda Ants. Panda Ants are actually not ants at all, but instead are wasps of the family Mutillidae, commonly called the Velvet Ants. The Panda Ant was first described to science in 1938 and is…

‘What is a Solenodon?’ is a question that I have been asked by absolutely no one, ever. This is a shame because Solenodons are really cool animals that I think more people should be curious about! So here is some information about them. Solenodons belong to a family (Solenodonidea) of mammals that is sort of…

Have you ever heard of a salp? Probably not, but they are organisms that we should all probably be a lot more aware of! Salps are planktonic tunicates. What does that mean? Tunicates are members of the phylum Chordata (the same phylum that you and I are in), and are actually pretty closely related to…

I was out walking at the Yolo Bypass National Wildlife Refuge, yesterday, and was treated to the sight of a flock of about 30 White-faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi) flying overhead. This is one of the species that I always look forward to seeing in the summer, here in Central California. They are beautiful and elegant…

Ever eat a fig; a nice, ripe, juicy fig? Then you have also eaten essence of fig wasp! The name Fig Wasp is actually a bit confusing as it can apply to several groups of wasps. Some of those groups are parasitic fig wasps that bore holes in ripening figs and so damage the crop….