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Excuse me mr bogged leech but why do jellyfish need such unbelievably potent venom? Especially that one extremely tiny jellyfish whose poison makes you feel the worst pain possible for days on end and has a symptom along the lines of "makes you feel impending doom." What evolutionary factors could there be for such a tiny creature to evolve a toxin that makes you feel like Death is personally coming for you

It is Precisely just because they prey on fish! A fish is a highly active vertebrate that evolved for lightning fast movement and reflexes through deep, heavy water, so more than half of a fish’s body is a dense hunk of proportionately high-powered, dense muscle all the way through! Look how little space is devoted to organs in even just an anchovy, muscle and bone fills ALL the remaining space:

That’s muscle for escaping sharks and dolphins! Muscle that can fight currents stronger than hurricane winds! But a jellyfish evolved for an extreme conservation of resources: just barely enough tissue to hold it together, which allows it to grow and multiply on barely a sliver the resources it takes to make a vertebrate, a high efficiency approach to building, growing, and multiplying a living body that has allowed jellyfish to keep thriving in the harshest conditions and through global extinction events.

So, relative to one another, a fish is practically built like a cheetah, a stallion or an ox while a jellyfish is built like...a cobweb, a snowflake or a latex balloon. The only way a latex balloon can possibly hunt oxen for a living is with sheer firepower alone, or some kind of magical instant-death-touch, so that is exactly what evolution resulted in. While box jellies prey on fish seldom larger than themselves, a single sting delivers venom potent enough to kill a THOUSAND little fish in an instant, or completely wreck an entire massive human. The venom equivalent of a point-blank shotgun blast.

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in honor of shark week starting tomorrow 🦈

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🐟 trip to an aquarium 🐟 recorded by me - please credit if using, ty!

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PAPER MACHE PAPER MACHE PAPER MACHE

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Favorite animal(s)? Any cool facts about them?

oh man. im glad i can finally share this creature with the world.

this question was pretty hard 4 me because i love many many animals but i decided to highlight my true #1 fave this beautiful animal is called a longhorned cowfish. ive been a fan of this fish for many many years and it is my dream pet!!!!!!!!! (someday i will get one... someday...-) sum fun factz cowfish actually start off their life as just little cubes, which is so so adorable. as they get older they adorn their horns!!! said horns can grow back after being bitten/attacked by a predator!! cool regenerative stuff :P

another thing i rlly love abt these fellas is how small they start n how big they get! cowfish can get as big as 20 INCHES in the wild, and 15 in captivity!!!!!!!!! when in captivity cowfish can only grow to the size of their enclosure (same as plecos and goldfish, n many many other fish) so its best to have a 150+ gallon tank for this guy... cowfish also secrete a toxin when stressed, sort of similar to pufferfish. but instead of only harming the threat/predator, this fish actually gets affected by its own toxin and kills itself and all life around it! (real) thank yu sm for this ask ily and i hope u can understand this mumbo jumbo

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By NOAA/MBARI - , CC BY-SA 3.0

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A lighthouse can be a sort of wizard tower

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What deep sea creature are you?

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Got any cool info on cow sharks?

YES

There are five species of cowshark: Broadnose sevengill, Bluntnose sixgill, Sharpnose sevengill, Bigeyed sixgill, and the Atlantic sixgill.

My favorite fact about these adorable little sharks is that they have more gills than most sharks do (which is why its mentioned in their name). Most sharks have five gill slits! They also don't have the notably large dorsal fin synonymous with sharks.

These sharks have even been observed to hunt in packs for larger prey like seals and other sharks! They're commonly found in shallow, warm waters.

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This is a juvenile mola mola, or ocean sunfish, the largest species of bony fish. It comes to most people's surprise that such a large adult animal produces such small and vulnerable offspring (when first hatched they are a mere 2mm), but they also produce around 300 million eggs, their fecundity surpassing all other vertebrates on earth! This particular youngster was spit up by another fish that was caught, and had already passed away. (Credit to @derin.goya.fishing on Instagram)

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Deep-sea angler fish Life on Earth, David Attenborough, 1979

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come on in!

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Cephalopod Spectrum of Friendliness