The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #35477   Message #484654
Posted By: CarolC
15-Jun-01 - 07:14 PM
Thread Name: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
The neon orange stringy stuff is definitely 'dodder', as MMario suggested. It looks like neon orange silly string sprayed all over a bunch of plants. I thought I was seeing something 'not from this world' first time I saw it.

This one was strange more for its location than anything else...

When I was a zookeeper, I was responsible for the 'North American Small Mammals'. One day, I was working in the outside run of the Arctic Fox enclosure. The foxes were inside the building and the outside run was empty. The enclosure had walls on two sides, chain link fence on two sides, and chain link fence above. About two or three feet above the upper chain link fence, there was a corrugated metal roof supported by I-beams.

I never really used to look up at the roof, so I was startled to the point of jumping when something landed with a loud chinky thump on the chain link above me. I looked up at it and didn't recognize it as anything that occurred naturally in that area. And I was very familiar with the native species because I had spent a recent summer working as an interpretive naturalist, where it was my job to know those kinds of things.

Turns out it was one of the brown lemurs from the primate section that had escaped.