Rangga Satrya,Thoughts of the Mind

AMAZING CREATURES OF THE EARTH, PART ONE

You know, many people are so downright fascinated with the prospect of alien life out there in the huge, expansive space, and this fascination brought forth all kinds of things from the movie Alien until NASA Space Program. Of course, that kind of fascination is not wrong, but we should not also forget the fact that Earth is also filled with numerous amazing living organisms that are often even beyond our wildest imaginations. I want to dedicate this post to inform all of you about some of those living organisms, and by knowing this information I would hope that you would appreciate our Blue Planet and all the amazing things inside it a little more.

This is the first part of my next series of posts with this topic.

The first animal on my humble list is the Stripe Polecat, or Ictonyx striatus for those of you that like to get fancy with scientific names. This animal lives in Africa, and it has the ability to emit extremely foul-smelling secretions from its anal glands, which allegedly can be smelled from a distance of almost seven football fields away O_o This is used as a method of self-defense, but this animal also sometimes likes to play dead to fool its enemies. What’s so surprising that some of the natives in the Africa actually use the foul-smelling substances as perfume to mask their bodily scent when they go hunting. Well, I don’t know about you, but I am not planning on wearing that kind of perfume any time in my entire life… even when I want to go hunting myself, if you know what I mean ^_~

The second in my list is something so small that, individually, you can’t even see it without any visual aid devices. It is called Cyanobacterias. It is amazing in the way that these bacterias are responsible for creating considerable amount of oxygen in the Earth we live in. In fact, it’s these creatures that were responsible for stabilizing the Earth’s atmosphere during the Archaean and Proterozoic Eras, making the atmosphere habitable enough for us humans to start springing into life ^_^ Not only that, but these bacterias were also responsible for the origin of plants, which is of course an extremely crucial factor for our survival as a species. Also, the fossil form of these bacterias are known to be the oldest fossil of organism ever recorded–it’s about 3,5 billion years old. What’s so amazing about them is their ability to survive and adapt to their surrounding environments: from billions of years ago, they are still around up until this day, and in fact they are the most abundant and one of the most important bacterias to exist in this world.

The next in line in this personal list of mine is the Poison Dart Frogs. These amazing creatures live in humid, tropical environments of Central and South America. It may be a surprise to you to know that such petite, colorful, and seemingly cute animal is actually the most poisonous known creature in the whole world. The bright color combinations of their skins serve as a warning sign for anyone… or anything, for that matter, to stay away as far as possible. The potency of their poison is as such that it is said that it can kill 30.000 mice or 150 people at the same time. But perhaps even more amazingly, there is an animal that has developed an immunity against a poison of that magnitude, and uses the frogs as dinner menu… that animal is the Amazon Ground Snake (Liophis epinephelus)

Best Regards,

Rangga Satrya