Why It Does??

hey, you wanna learn about the largest amphibian in the western hemisphere? you do? 

GREAT. 

(no takebacks)

then without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to

found in the eastern half of the United States, the Hellbender is a giant fucking salamander. they are the largest amphibian in the western hemisphere by a wide margin, with adults clocking in at around two… feet? (that definitely says feet. jesus) long.

large enough to use as a blunt instrument

no one is really sure how these giant salamanders earned the name “Hellbender”, but it is thought that white settlers thought it was “a creature from hell who was bent on returning”, or that its wrinkly skin reminded white settlers of “the horrible tortures of the infernal regions.” (white settlers should not have been allowed to name things.)

…all right, yeah, it does sort of look like it crawled out of a Bosch painting.

these days, locals just tend to give them endearing vernacular names like: Snot Otter! Lasagna Lizard! Devil Dog! Grampus! Allegheny Alligator! aaaand for some fucking reason, Leverian Water Newt! 

these poor guys just can’t catch a break.

you’re hurting his feelings

the Hellbender is found in fast water streams and rivers from New York to Missouri. they breath completely through their skin (weird, but mammals can be judgey about this so I’ll let it slide) and hide under large rocks on the streambed, where they feast on crayfish and also regular fish.

maybe also feet

they are active at night and remain in dark areas during the day. to stay hidden, they have evolved light-sensitive cells all over their bodies. that’s right, they literally turned themselves into a single giant weird eyeball. what the fuck, evolution.

this seems like a good survival strategy (sort of), but it also means that to catch one you just have to go flip a bunch of muddy rocks over.

aaaaa! my plan, foiled!

unfortunately, human activity has been decreasing their number for years, and they are now regarded as Threatened. that said, there are many programs now in place for their recovery, including extensive captive breeding and environmental repair. 

hopefully in the future these amazing giant snot otters will make a recovery. we wish only good things for the lasagna lizard.

This is a marine ribbon worm and it's one of the most common critters you've never heard of. Seriously, there's a ton of different kinds and they come in all sorts of trippy colors! (10/10 recommend googling if you aren't disgusted)

They eat with that weird branchy thing, (called a proboscis even though it's a little different from what you're used to with bugs) though the vast majority have one long one and not a branched one.

Further, this one has either been cut up or started breaking up from a lack of pressure. Either way it's dying, but its nervous system is so basic that it thinks it's being attacked and is shooting out its proboscis to try to deflect the attack.

There were 20-something of us in the classroom, all dying of sleep deprivation since it was the first day back to school, first class of the day. Mr. Moses was that teacher you weren’t sure how to deal with. I mean, the man’s name was Noah Eugene Moses, for starters. He drove a Harley to school, but also drove the bus. He had giant cokebottle glasses and a doofy mustache with shaggy ex-Beatles hair. He always wore suspenders and a grease-stained t-shirt because he had a potbelly and taught the shop/electrical classes. He wasn’t even really lecturing; he was throwing in tidbits of the syllabus in the midst of bad jokes and fun stories. We were all a bit nervous, because none of us had taken a class from him before, but his tests were legendary—nobody had ever made it out with an A (until I did, but that’s another story for another time and involves a really awesome bet and some hair cutting scissors).

Well, as we were fighting to stay awake, and attempting to take notes of whatever he was talking about, he was pacing around the room from here to there, straightening things and moving stuff. He was very scatterbrained, and it was easy to tell from how he kept forgetting where he put his coke. Turns out, that was just a ruse. He had the can filled with just a tiny bit of water, and the things he was moving around were stacks of papers and books hiding the hot plate and water basin. So he set his coke can down onto the hot plate, continued talking loudly enough so we wouldn’t hear the water boiling, and then knocked it over really fast into the water basin.

BANG!!!!!!!!

Three girls fell out of their seats, one dude swore so violently I’m pretty sure the devil himself cringed, everyone at least jumped and screamed, and I actually broke my pen in half.

See, with rapid decompression comes a vacuum, and with a vacuum comes a rushing of air that creates a massive sound. Think “thunder”. That’s the same principle behind it. His little tiny coke can of steam into a bucket of ice water, and we had a bang so loud the band teacher came in from across the hall to see “what was exploding today.” To which Mr. Moses responded, “Nothing, it imploded. Explosions are chapter 3.”