So far, superheroes are only fictional. But some of their powers already exist in the world, possessed by a whole range of strange species. Some creatures have even more amazing, surprising, weird, funny or disgusting powers than any superhero.
Sure, some animals can leap the equivalent of a tall building in a single bound. But others have ultra-strong faces, crazy loud voices, toxic blood, the ability to devour virtually anything, and indestructibility. Can you guess what the penis bug's superpower is? Here are some of the less-celebrated but truly awesome animal superpowers.
1. Superpower: Heat Sensing
Pit vipers (several species, including Cryptelytrops albolabris, below)
Images: Thomas Brown/Flickr (viper)/David Julius lab, via Nature (mouse)
Pit vipers, as well as some pythons and boas, can sense the body heat of their prey from several feet away. Small pit organs on the snakes' faces detect infrared radiation, allowing them to create a thermal profile of, say, a nearby mouse.
Nerves connect the pit organs to the brain's somatosensory system, which processes the sense of touch, suggesting that the snakes literally feel the heat. In 2010, scientists identified the heat-sensing receptor molecule. The human version of this receptor is thought to be responsible for the mild burn that comes with swigging carbonated drinks, as well as the stronger burn of wasabi.
2. Superpower: Indestructibility
Tardigrade, aka Water Bear (Tardigrada)
These tiny, adorable creatures grow to be only a millimetre long but may be the hardiest organism on the planet (or perhaps any planet). Tardigrades are virtually indestructible [pdf]. They are polyextremophiles, meaning they thrive in multiple kinds of extreme environments.
Among the things they are known to survive: Freezing temperatures as low as -200 C (-328 F), scorching temperatures up to 150 C (302 F), outer space, no food or water for over a century (or only a decade if you are a spoilsport scientist), ionizing radiation up to 570,000 roentgens (a dose of just 500 roentgens would kill you), solar radiation, gamma radiation, ultraviolet radiation, high salinity and lack of oxygen.
How can a creature so tough be so cute and cuddly looking at the same time? It hardly seems fair.
3. Superpower: Incredible Mimicry
Lyrebird (Menura)
Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos/Wikimedia
The Australian lyrebird loves to sing songs to woo its mates. The male’s courtship display includes beautiful tunes that each individual creates, mixed in with a bunch of stolen sounds from its environment. Because they have the most complexly-muscled vocal chords of any songbird, lyrebirds can reproduce an insane variety of sounds both natural and artificial, including chainsaws, car engines, barking dogs, and human voices.
Source: BBCWorldwide/Youtube
If you ever get bitten by a radioactive lyrebird, you can probably expect a Top 40 pop career while moonlighting as a masked vigilante fighting crime with the power of voice.
4. Superpower: Loud Lovesongs
Water Boatman, aka Singing Penis Bug (Micronecta scholtzi)
Photo: Jerome Sueur
The loudest animal on Earth, relative to its body size, is the water boatman. Singing songs of love from its perch on a river bottom, a male boatman can be as loud as an orchestra.
Turns out, the sweet serenade comes from the bug’s penis.
Water boatmen “sing” by rubbing their penises along abdominal grooves, a process called stridulation. Their resulting melodies can reach 100 decibels and can be heard through the water by people walking along the riverbank.
Not bad for a bug the size of a grain of rice, eh?
5. Superpower: Invisibility
Cuttlefish (Sepiida)
Image: Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory
There's nothing to see here. Nope.
In reality, the yellow thing in the photo above is a cuttlefish doing its best to impersonate an aquarium plant. Shape-shifting masters of camouflage, cuttlefish can rapidly blend in with the scenery to avoid predators. They can disguise themselves to look like just about anything aquatic, assuming a vast array of postures and colours - the latter being the result of pigment-containing sacs in their skin. A cuttlefish can control the size of the sac, called a chromatophore, and change colon accordingly.
The end result is a spooky feat of invisibility that's much more successful than James Bond's car.
6. Superpower: Iron Face
Elephant (Loxodonta)
Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Wikimedia
Imagine being able to lift a one-ton weight with your face.
Well, elephants can easily hoist about that much with their trunks. These long appendages are a combination of nose and mouth. Flexible and boneless, with a prehensile tip, elephant trunks serve many purposes: They can function as snorkels and hoses, forks and fingers, pokers and peanut-crackers.
Elephants aren’t alone in their ability to do amazing things with their faces. The trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus bauri) can slam its jaws shut faster than you can drive a car down the freeway - between 75 and 140 miles per hour. In so doing, the ants create enough propulsive force to launch themselves into the air, sometimes landing more than 15 inches away.
That’s like an average-size person enthusiastically chomping on a carrot and winding up 100 feet away.
7. Superpower: Magnetolocation
Salmon (several species)
After hatching in freshwater rivers and streams, salmon eventually migrate to the sea. They spend their adult lives feeding in the open ocean, thousands of miles from where they were born. Then, when it's time to spawn, they return, somehow finding their way back to the waters of their birth.
How salmon perform this incredible feat of navigation is a longstanding mystery, but scientists now think they know. The fish appear to use a geomagnetic compass, perhaps involving specialized magnetite-containing brain cells, that encodes the coordinates of their birth.
8. Superpower: Iron Stomach
Spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta)
Image: lydurs/Flickr
Hyenas, especially spotted hyenas, can eat pretty much anything. Their powerful jaws can crush bone, and they can consume up to a third of their body weight in meat in a single meal. Fresh kills, rotting corpses - it's all good. They've even been known to consume anthrax-ridden cattle carcasses without ill effects. But even this super stomach has its kryptonite: Hyenas can't digest hair, hooves, and horns. Those bits get barfed up in pellets.
9. Superpower: HORROR
Hairy Frog (Trichobatrachus robustus)
Photo: Gustavocarra/WikiMedia
When threatened, the hairy frog breaks its own bones, then pushes them through its skin to make claws. Kind of like Wolverine, except not quite.
10. Superpower: Toxic Blood
Eels (Anguilliformes)
Image: Vera Rayson/Flickr
Eels are long fish that look like ribbons, spending most of their lives in rivers and then venturing into the salty ocean to breed. Though they have been caught for centuries by fisherman and cooked up in delicacies all over the world (eel pie, anyone?) the wriggling swimmers have one weird ace up their fins: Their blood is totally toxic.
Plenty of other animals produce poisonous substances that they will readily spit at you or inject into you with a bite, but eels’ toxic blood acts like a terrible ‘Screw you’ to any predators thinking of snacking on them. Even very small amounts of the blood is poisonous to humans and other mammals, causing muscular spasms that affect the heart, but cooking eels will neutralize the toxic proteins.
11. Superpower: Sprays Evil From Its Butt
Striped Polecat, aka Zorrilla (Ictonyx striatus)
Photo: Mariomassone/WikiMedia
The striped polecat might be adorable, but when one of them chooses to unleash a cloud of defensive stink sauce, you don’t want to be anywhere within a half-mile.
These animals, also known as zorrillas, live in Africa and belong to the weasel family. But they look like skunks. And they smell like skunks on steroids. One of the zorrilla’s key defenses is a noxious, smelly fluid, launched at predators from anal stink glands.
And, as if creating a smell so bad that it fouls the air for a half-mile all around isn’t enough, the stink attack is also toxic: It’ll blind you temporarily.
12. Superpower: Long-Distance Flight
Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis)
Image: Duncan/Flickr
A well-made, conscientiously maintained automobile lasts a few hundred thousand miles. To a Laysan albatross, that's a couple years' travel.
Nesting in the mid-Pacific and feeding from the tip of South America all the way to Alaska, the birds can fly 50,000 miles in a single year. Wisdom, a Midway Atoll-dwelling albatross tagged in 1956 and considered the world's oldest bird, has flown between 2 and 3 million miles in her lifetime.
13. Superpower: Sneaky Stealth
Various animals
Though true invisibility remains the stuff of comics, many creatures have evolved the ability to sneak up on their prey with eerily silent stealth. Among the best known are owls, which can swoop down on field mice with nary a sound fluttering from their wings. Though no one knows exactly how the special shape of their wings and feathers eliminate aerodynamic noise, scientists are studying the ability to better mitigate loud aircraft sounds.
Another aerial predator, the Western Barbastelle bat, has also figured out how to remain invisible to the moths it eats: the creatures whisper their echolocation to avoid detection. The species’ echolocation pinging is 10 to 100 times lower in amplitude than their bat-cousins, preventing prey from being alerted to their presence.
Image: Steven G. Johnson/Wikimedia
Underwater, the scariest thing to encounter (if you’re a tiny plankton) is the North American comb jelly. While these squishy ctenophores don’t seem formidable, they voraciously chow down on zooplankton. The comb jelly (above) uses tiny hairs inside its mouth to generate a gentle current that makes it hydrodynamically invisible to zooplankton, which remain completely oblivious until they are devoured.
14. Superpower: Doesn't Get Cancer
Naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber)
Image: Trisha M Shears/WikiMedia
Tiny, ugly, and possessing poor eyesight, the naked mole rat of East Africa is one of the strangest creatures on the planet. Among its weird traits, the species is almost completely resistant to pain (good for superheroics) and lives ant-like in underground colonies with a single breeding queen and her army of workers and soldiers.
Source: zefrank1/Youtube
But perhaps its craziest ability is being invulnerable to cancer. The disease has never been observed in the little rodents, which live seven times longer than their more-familiar mouse and rat cousins. Scientists are looking closely at naked mole rats, decoding their genome and testing an array of proteins to try and replicate this amazing feat in other creatures such as ourselves.
15. Superpower: Jumping
Flea (Siphonaptera)
Source: Cambridge University/YouTube
Boing! Annoyingly, fleas are the most super-powered of the super jumpers. Their explosive power comes from a coil of energy-storing protein that acts somewhat like a spring. Located in the flea’s thorax, the spring transfers energy down through the flea’s legs, until it reaches and compresses the bug’s toes. Then, boom goes the flea, sometimes traveling roughly 200 times its body length.
Other super jumpers include kangaroo rats (able to spring a distance 45 times their body length), jumping spiders (100 times their body length), and tree frogs (150 times).
Related Posts:
1. Tardigrades: Earth's Toughest Animal
2. 7 Absolutely Insane Animal Defense Mechanisms
3. 9 Creatures With Incredibly Strange Characteristics
4. 7 Animal Species That Take Aim At Each Other
1. Tardigrades: Earth's Toughest Animal
2. 7 Absolutely Insane Animal Defense Mechanisms
3. 9 Creatures With Incredibly Strange Characteristics
4. 7 Animal Species That Take Aim At Each Other
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