Question: What is the wierdest animal you've came accross ?

Sive Finlay answered on 13 Nov 2013:

Hi Caoimhin,

Great question! There are lots of weird animals out there but I haven’t met many of them personally 🙂 I do, however, write a series of articles called “weird and wonderful animals” for the magazine science spin so I’m always interested in strange animals.
One weird animal which I wrote about recently is called the stoplight loosejawfish. They’re about 30cm long and live in the deep sea where there’s very little sunlight. They have enormous jaws – nearly half the length of their bodies – and they don’t have any bottom to their mouths so their lower jaws on the right and left sides aren’t connected. This means that they can open their mouths really wide and project their jaws forwards to catch large prey.
The weirdest thing about these fish though is that they can produce two different colours of light. They have organs just below their eyes that produce red and green light (I would have called them traffic light rather than stoplight fish). It’s really unusual for deep sea organisms to be able to produce red light because red light from the sun doesn’t reach down to deeper waters so most creatures are blind to red light. So, by producing their own red light, the stoplight loosejaw fish can effectively sneak up on their prey because the animals that they’re hunting can’t see red light!
So there’s one type of weird animal but there are lots of other ones. Do you have any favourite weird animals?
Sive