BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jack Campin
Date: 04 May 20 - 05:04 AM

"...assemble in the same tree..."

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 May 20 - 03:10 PM

The South-East Asian fireflies do something which, in the entire animal kingdom, is only known of as a human behaviour - rhythmic synchronization. Only the males flash; thousands of them assemble in the same and pulsate their bums all together. Vietnamese lady fireflies find this an irrestistible turn-on.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 03 May 20 - 12:38 PM

This was 3 cliffs Bay on the Gower peninsula in 1974. It was quite a rare phenomenom. I only saw it twice in 7 years there.

Robin

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Senoufou
Date: 03 May 20 - 11:28 AM

BBCW, I have a friend who used to do a lot of sailing with her husband around the Suffolk coast, and she often noticed phosphorescence in the water. But she attributed it to Sizewell B nuclear power station!!

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Donuel
Date: 03 May 20 - 11:00 AM

Fireflies have peak years and waning years like spiders.

In Vietnam the fireflies only flash in unison. Here they have a mind of their own. Downtown has flashers but that is something completely different.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 May 20 - 09:12 AM

I loved the fireflies when I was in Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania ones fly at dusk and flash BRIGHT for a second at a time. It's like someone is throwing lighted cigarettes.

Sadly they've got quite rare now.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 03 May 20 - 05:17 AM

Going back to the original post:

My late first wife told me that as a child she used to watch dancing lights, pinhead size, in a corner of a room, down near the skirting board in the first house she lived in, in Suffolk. She assumed that they were what people called faries.

On the day that her father died we went down to the beach for a late evening stroll. As the waves came in they began to flash along their length just before they broke, in the vertical wall of water. It was phosphorescence caused by millions of tiny organisms. Imagine 10 yard long green flourecent lights.

Robin

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 03 May 20 - 04:31 AM

NATURALIST DISCOVER A NEW SPIECIES
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Donuel
Date: 02 May 20 - 08:18 PM

Tardigrades look like they are wearing space suits and can survive space for years. Ya just can't kill them. They are immortal in a different way than jellyfish which is stranger still.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 May 20 - 09:30 AM

The echidna at the London zoo looked like it had sat in rice and put its feet on backwards...

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Senoufou
Date: 02 May 20 - 04:02 AM

I've just looked that up Jack - how interesting! I'd never heard of them. The article said they haven't changed much in millions of years.
Good info for a pub quiz! 'What is a velvet worm?'
My father brought home two locusts when I was about ten. He'd got them from some lab in Kensington (no idea why they let him take them!) I kept them for ages - beautiful things, with an oily surface and a nice mottled pattern. They only needed some leaves popped into their vivarium. I called them Len and Larry!

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jack Campin
Date: 01 May 20 - 05:51 PM

My brother found a couple of peripatuses in the bush in New Zealand and tried keeping them as pets in a terrarium. Cute little things, like big slugs with velvety dry skin and about 30 little Michelin Man legs.

I never saw them eat, though. Their feeding strategy is extraordinarily disgusting (there are probably videos). One of them disappeared, probably because it was cannibalized.

The 11th Edition Enclopedia Britannica (1914ish) goes completely over the top with an article of several pages about their genus (Onychophora) with beautiful anatomical drawings.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Senoufou
Date: 01 May 20 - 05:41 PM

That's quite true Mrrzy. If one starves it of air (they breathe through the tip of their body) by putting grease over the top, they pop out themselves after a time. But the Plastic Surgeon just thought it would be best to make a small incision and cut it out, then put in some stitches.
That wasn't the end of the problem though, because my poor husband got keloid scarring (quite common with black skin) and had to have steroid injections many weeks later.
African women usually iron clothes with a charcoal-filled iron, which kills off any tumbu eggs. But I don't think my husband's sisters did this.
Fascinating creatures though (tumbus, not my lovely sisters-in-law, although they too are fascinating!).

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 01 May 20 - 05:31 PM

Which is how we little American children got to calling them tumble flies.

All it takes is the dab of vaseline, though, then they come out on their own. I have never heard of surgical intervention.

The last one I had was in my eyelid. I thought it was a zit but what I squoze out wriggled, so...

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Senoufou
Date: 01 May 20 - 01:32 PM

Ah Mrrzy, my husband came back from Cote d'Ivoire five years ago with one of those growing in his leg. I had to explain to our doctor what it was (the School of Tropical Medicine is in London, not Norfolk, so they'd never even heard of such a thing!)
Luckily he got a slot in the Plastic Surgery Dept at our local hospital, and I was asked to gown up and go in with him to translate. (he had just a local anaesthetic). Luckily I'm not in the least squeamish. I had to advise that they got all of it out (they have tiny red spines which cling onto the flesh and can cause infection) It was removed wearing a little black hat (husband's skin!)
Husband called it a 'tumbu'. It was so interesting that crowds of medical staff came in to have a look! Very exotic.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Donuel
Date: 01 May 20 - 01:11 PM

I've seen them.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 01 May 20 - 10:19 AM

Tumble flies, as we called them. First encountered when one of my sisters complained A worm came out of my knee.

They lay their eggs on things drying in the sun, like us or dogs or sheets, then the larvae burrow into you or your dog and make a kind of zit that squeezing, or if vaseline is put on it so they (the larvae) can't breathe, makes a worm come out. If left alone, eventually a fly will fly out.

Once mom stopped drying sheets in the sun we rarely got them, but a pediatrician we knew fainted when the salve she put on what she thought were my friend's rash of boils caused a field of worms to emerge, and an embassy party was enlivened by flies bursting out of a woman's cleavage as she had not treated what she thought was a painful rash her bra, sun-dried, had given her.

And every Sunday I sat with our basset hounds, and removed ticks and squoze out tumble flies. We all enjoyed that communning... The things kids think are normal!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordylobia_anthropophaga

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 01 May 20 - 08:26 AM

I think that I will never see
A think more lovely than a FLEA
lea
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Donuel
Date: 01 May 20 - 08:16 AM

Scotty G. Those insects are called Dobson flies that live as flying creatures for only 24 hours to mate.

Subject: RE: BS: Strangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Donuel
Date: 01 May 20 - 08:06 AM

I was going to go with octopus but I am more fascinated by the human donald trump.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: gnu
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 11:56 AM

About twenty-five years ago, I had the occasion to see a Blue Moose in the mountains near Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, Canada. I had heard stories about these huge beasts from my father, but never knew anyone who had seen one as they are extremely rare. They were thought to be extinct over two hundred years ago because the early European settlers did not have the same respect for them as the native peoples and killed them off indiscriminantly.

They were easy to kill because their legs on one side were six inches shorter than on the other side, which made them well suited to the mountainous terrain. All you had to do was jump out from behind a tree, holler at them and when they turned around to run, they fell over and injured themselves, often fatally because of their tremendous girth.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: English Jon
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 11:27 AM

You're lucky he didn't attempt to sodomise your grandma!

Cheers LH

EJ

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 11:20 AM

English Jon - With pleasure. He scattered the garbage all over the place, ate the goldfish, terrified the budgie, shed on the furniture, and shit in the closet. He is an utterly disreputable animal! You are welcome to him.

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: English Jon
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 11:16 AM

Steve Brett

EJ

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: ScottyG
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 11:04 AM

In June of '82 while driving up to Michigan from Virginia, we stopped at a convenience store in Maryland, just below the Pennsylvania state line. (I can't recall the name of the town.) It was around 11 PM. These really ferocious looking insects were everywhere; on the store windows, all over the ice dispenser, on parked vehicles, everywhere. They were grayish brown, about 5 inches long, and their wings were more like moth wings than fly wings (they weren't transparent or opaque). Some of them were flying around the lights in the parking lot, and I swear, they looked like friggin' birds! These things had some major mandibles. They looked like they could take your finger off if they got a hold of you. Gave me the creeps walking from the car to the store with these things all over the place. Folks inside the store, including some locals, had never seen anything like them. One dude was saying how he had unknowingly put his hand near one of them, and it grabbed on to the fleshy part. Scared the crap out of him and hurt like hell. Actually drew blood, he said. I believe it. Despite my warriness, my curiosity won on the way back to the car. I prodded one of these strange creatures that was on the ground with the toe of my boot. It latched on to the edge of the sole, and I had to step on the thing with my other boot to pull away from its grip. I swear, its pinchers left a visible mark in the hard leather of the sole. Damdest things I ever saw! I've never been able to determine exactly what these nasty buggers were. Anybody have a clue?

ScottyG

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: English Jon
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 10:05 AM

Please Little Hawk,

Can I have my Cat back?

Ta,

EJ

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 08:21 AM

I recall as a child doing the bathtub swing routine, and finding just the right frequency to cause a flood to happen...very neat! And messy, of course.

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 08:01 AM

Jim, would you mind me citing your story (with your name and source) and my explanation in the Journal of the German Skeptics (assuming that the editor agrees). In case you would mind, I'd retell it without using your actual words or your name.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 21 Jun 01 - 05:13 AM

Jim,

that's a fine puzzle and with a little help from a colleague I have worked out what I think the most probable rational explanation is.

The start of course is that water flows from a higher level to a lower and never vice versa. So there had to be a fluctuation in water level. I then first went a wrong trail of thinking and thought the ten minutes should be a chance coincidence. Only when I made the 10 minutes an integral and necessary part of the solution I succeeded.

Here you go: Like any children's swing each body of water has an Eigen frequency that is the frequency with which it swings to and fro. If you have water in a bowl and you swing the bowl with the Eigen frequency of the water you'll easily make it spill over. Use the wrong frequency and you need much more force to achieve the same effect. Same in your bathtub. With the correct frequency of moving your body you can make a flood easily. The frequency however is lower for your bathtub than for a bowl. With swings, the Eigen frequency is determined by the length of the ropes, with water the main determinator is the mass of the water involved. The more water the lower the frequency. With an enormous reservoir the Eigen frequency can be in the region of minutes.

Now make your bathtub water swing to and fro and imagin observing two connected 'puddles' in the middle, then the water will flow first one way and then the other and change direction about once a second. Hard to see.

Now take your two puddles connected to each other and connected to a large body of water. Assume that the large body of water swings with a very low Eigen frequency of once every ten minutes and that the amplitude of the swing is extremely low and usually not seen. The the 'slope' of the water surface will change every ten minutes so minimally that you can't see it. But if you are at a place where two puddles are connected by something which is an obstacle to the free flow of water (small opening, very shallow connection or so) then the flow of water will be slower than the build up of level differences and in such rare situations you'll see actually the water flow. The same physical principle leads to the famous maelstroms of Norway (I link to a particular one I have seen once).

The last open question is what is the force behind the swing (everybody knows a swing without additional force will come to a standstill under real life conditions). The force behind the maelstroms is the moon and its gravitation. Your account is precise enough to find a possible 'driving force'. The Mississippi it is. It is connected to the swampland and continuously leads to small random perturbations in the reservoir of water we are talking about. These minor perturbations lead the water reservoir to swing continuously with its Eigen frequency of once per ten minutes. Under extreme circumstances like the one you have encountered, this swing can be seen by the unaided eye.

Isn't science fun?

But let's not forget other hypotheses. It could be a big hidden factory run by aliens below the swampland and every ten minutes they pump off the waste water of their activities. Or a band of leprechauns fancied to fool you. Or the earth is a big living being making cosmic music and the ten minutes are the time between two draws of breath when playing a particular invisible instrument....

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 05:35 PM

I see from previous posts that we are not limiting this thread to "life forms" but also meteorological phenomena. Well, I don't know how to classify this one, unless it's a geological phenomenon.

I was walking with some friends along a built-up path through the flood plain of the Mississippi River near here (St Paul, Minnesota). A marshy area surrounded us, and the river was not far away. We stopped to rest, and for no particular reason, I began staring at a shallow puddle next to the path. Actually, there were two puddles, and water was slowly trickling across some mud from one puddle to the other. The far edges of the puddles disappeared into the tall weeds.

As I watched, the water gradually came to a stop and then changed directions and began flowing the other way. After a few minutes, it reversed directions again . . . and again . . . and again. I think we watched through 2 or 3 complete cycles. I didn't time it, but I'd estimate it took 10 minutes or so per cycle. Then we got bored and left.

The experience was sort of like watching paint dry. But wouldn't YOU watch paint dry if it dried, and then got wet again, and then dried again, all by itself with no apparent reason?

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Angie
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 05:00 PM

i am spoiled for choice

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Justa Picker
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 04:58 PM

Marty Feldman.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 04:24 PM

Richard Nixon was very strange as well. I blame it on his family...

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Melani
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 01:47 PM

Art T, after the chiton trick, it's amazing that you're still married. Carol must be a wonderful person.

When I was a teenager, our yard was invaded by a very large number of naked green caterpillars with two long tufts of white hair placed like horns, and red spots with some black trim. They were about an inch long, but there was one that was at least five inches. My mother and I gazed on them in horror, and she predicted that the vegetation in our yard would be stripped. Then we saw the five-incher. I said, "Step on it!" and she said, "Are you kidding? I'd be up to my ankle in caterpillar gush!" We fled inside the house, and the things were gone by the next day. I have never seen a caterpillar like that, before or since. We lived in the suburban Chicago area. Anybody have a clue what they were?

Actually, though, some of the strangest lifeforms I've encountered are here on Mudcat...

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Naemanson
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 01:34 PM

I haven't had time to read through this thread but I am currently in Washington DC so nothing described above is as wierd as what I am seeing on a daily basis.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 01:23 PM

Corrrrr....gotta get me some rancid kippers...tear open the bleedin' garbage bags and help meself...corrrr....

- LH (for the cat)

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Jim Cheydi
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 01:01 PM

I'm surprised no one's mentioned English Jon's talking cat.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 12:26 PM

LOL! Okay, Wolfgang, you have succeeded in putting a smile on my face this morning. :-)

As you've noticed, I get touchy over ETV's (or UFO's). I imagine we all get touchy over something...I used to be such a scientific-minded, utterly sceptical little conventional know-it-all prig that I have retained a lifelong anger against that particular attitude when I think I see it in somebody else...it's really my own past I am reacting against, in all likelihood, rather than you.

My father and his brother are/were like that too. His brother was in the Manhattan Project in WWII, and had to be the most insufferably arrogant person I have ever known. He had the answer to everything...supposedly...but I caught him on some errors when I was a kid, like the time he insisted that our Pearl Gourami was a Siamese Fighting Fish. When I showed him the fish book with the pictures of these fish, he glared at the book, and said "Some idiot has put the wrong headings under these pictures!" The man was utterly impervious to anything except his own ego.

Unlike you, he never admitted to an error in his whole life, and I don't think I ever met anyone who liked him much, except his mother. She thought he was a genius.

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 11:09 AM

And it is also humbling that a formula (an index) in a certain field of research that is (at least in Germany) named after me (the formula, not the field) has been shown later to produce artifactual results. So each congress I go to in Germany I may hear my name as an example of an erroneous approach.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 11:01 AM

Little Hawk,
Have I ever made an error? Many, and I add to them nearly daily. I have a printout of one of my bigger scientific errors as an enlarged picture in my room, to teach me modesty. I know that I have erred and will err again.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 10:47 AM

Wolfgang, you never took my interpretation of what I saw as gospel. Nor will you take any private individual's interpretation of such an incident as gospel. That's my opinion. And really, why should you, unless you knew that person very well, and felt that they were trustworthy and also of very good judgement?

I used to be just like you, Wolfgang. I didn't believe in anything unless it was confirmed and accepted first by the official on high authorities of this society...the government, the police, and the mainstream scientific community. I was a completely rational, mental, scientific minded, logical atheist. That was up till I was about age 20 or thereabouts.

Then I saw ETV's. And that changed a lot of things. Then I had some other experiences of a personal nature (outside of this discussion) and that changed a lot more things.

I appear to have made an honest error in repeating the Jimmy Carter story...well, fine. Have you ever made an honest error, Wolfgang? Ever? Or has every word that ever passed your lips been...gospel? You are practicing a mental religion with its own set of rigid holy scriptures...you just haven't realized it yet.

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 05:52 AM

Little Hawk, I only did the follow-up on Carter as an example for the unreliability of (UFO) reports and I choose Carter for the same reasons as you did: he is well known. And of course I want to sow some seeds of doubts into some minds: 'If even Carter...'

There's one more point where I am in total agreement (excerpt for the wrong date of Carter's sighting) with what you write: Whether or not Carter saw the planet Venus in 1970 doesn't change what I saw in the late 60's one iota. No, it surely doesn't change a iota what you actually saw (that's not my point), but it changes my willingness to take your interpretation of what you saw as gospel.

Venus doesn't have to come close to Earth to be mistaken for a UFO.

In case someone want to read the old discussion, click here.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 20 Jun 01 - 12:37 AM

Oh...Ha! Ha! Well, I meant Neil Young. Spaw is quite strange, of course, but I haven't actually seen him...well, a couple of photos, but...

Anyway, I meant Neil Young. Don't forget to send your prayers or good thoughts toward Spaw if you feel it will make a difference. He's being operated on tomorrow morning.

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Amergin
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 09:42 PM

Who may be, LH? Spaw or Neil Young?

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 08:45 PM

Wolfgang - Thanks for the info about Jimmy Carter. I mentioned him because people know who he is, whereas if I mention an airline pilot I've met whom no one has heard of, it doesn't pull much weight with anyone. Whether or not Carter saw the planet Venus in 1970 doesn't change what I saw in the late 60's one iota, but thanks anyway. If Venus had manuevered that close to the Earth, we would not be here to talk about it, I can assure you.

I Suggest you check out this site: disclosureproject.org

And watch the entire May 9/2001 press conference in Washinton D.C. on Real Player if you've got it, and then ask yourself why all these professional people would expose themselves in such a manner and risk public ridicule, etc...unless they thought it was vitally important that the public know what's going on...which is a coverup on the highest covert government levels of contacts which have occured since the 40's, if not before, with ETV's (UFO's).

And then, as Spaw points out, there's Neil Young! How the hell do you explain that? He may, in fact, be the only thing out there stranger than Ed Sullivan. :-)

- LH

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Kim C
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 02:29 PM

Philibuster, I have a dog just like that!

Sunday at the mall I saw a man who had his hair all wigged out just like Buckwheat. On purpose.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Patrish(inactive)
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 10:51 AM

RtS I am sure you do yourself an injustice, but you did make me laugh - and on a Tuesday
I once shared a caravan with Skip, Bill, and Sam - I saw many strange things ;-)

Patrish

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 10:22 AM

Well I got up in the night (as you do at my age) and coming back was faced by this hideous apparition, certainly the strangest lifeform I've ever seen, even the naked mole-rat... (Memo to self: drape something over the full length wardrobe mirror in future).
RtS (the elephant man's homlier twin)

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 10:02 AM

Yes, Matt.

Subject: RE: BStrangest lifeform you have ever seen!
From: Matt_R
Date: 19 Jun 01 - 09:14 AM

Wolfgang....a harmless little lizard??