Critter Ideas

“Male characins fish for females with ant-shaped body parts: Anglerfish... have worm-like growths on their heads that act as living fishing lures to entice their prey. The swordtail characin, a small fish from Trinidad and Venezuela, has a similar lure, and it uses it not to attract food, but sex. The male characin has a small bean-shaped patch attached to his gill flaps by a thin thread. When he swims, he holds these ‘flags’ against his body. When he encounters a female, he flares one of them out in front of her. The female clearly thinks that the flag is food, for she bites at it vigorously. While she’s occupied, the male sidles across and impregnates her with his sperm.”

 Filing this away as some possible aquatic version of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing.

“Absurd Creature of the Week: Foot-Long, Sex-Crazed Snails That Pierce Tires and Devour Houses: ...Florida finds itself overrun once again. The creature was reintroduced here in 2011, and this time, according to Cowie, it may well be ‘bizarre, voodoo-like religious proceedings’  to blame. The snail’s slime, he says, is coveted in certain South American rituals, and practitioners may have released the giant snails into their Miami-area backyards, hoping they’d breed freely....authorities questioned a Florida man said to have convinced his followers to drink the fluid from live giant African land snails, which he sliced open before squeezing the slime into their mouths. If you can believe it, the victims fell violently ill — ironic, what with this being a healing ritual.... Today, Miami is simply overrun with the things. Not only do the giant snails chow on some 500 economically important plants in the area, they’re devouring houses. It seems they have a taste for stucco, which contains precious calcium.... Yes, you can eat giant African land snails. But cook them well. I mean really well. Just boil them for a month. Grill them with napalm if you have it. Because like many snails and semi-slugs, this species carries the deadly rat lungworm. As its name suggests, the parasite attacks rats, which pass the larvae in their feces. Snails that eat this waste are infected, as are folks who eat the snails. In humans, the larvae attack the brain, leading to meningitis and often a pretty horrible death.” 

So many ideas and flavor here. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! The calcivore bit reminds me of M'Lee from Farscape. And then there's these two spider tidbits from NatGeo:

“How Do Spiders Fly for Miles? Mystery Solved: As if spiders aren’t unnerving enough, did you know that some of them use an electrostatic charge to leap into the air and fly for miles? They’re probably coming to your house.”

“Spider Webs Reach Out To Flying Insects. Cool, But So What? ...Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley from the University of California, Berkeley have shown that in the moments before a bee or fly careens into a web, the web reaches out to meet its victim.”

There’s got to be a cool electrostatically-powered/enabled spider in these two ideas. It’d be neat to have the “intensified-empowered-shocking grasp magus” run into something unexpectedly immune/highly-resistant to his schtick and able to use shocking attacks of its own; hope the magus remembered to prep for defense too. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!