Animals
Where to go when you need to know what an animal is.
Reference
- A-Z Animals (Website) — a wildlife encyclopedia of 2,773 species from aardvark to zorse, browsable by letter, by continent, by conservation status, or by scientific class, with extinct oddities like Amphicoelias and Arsinoitherium filed alongside the living.
Species
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Axolotl (Article) — the Mexican salamander that reaches sexual maturity without metamorphosing, keeping its external gills and staying aquatic for life. It regrows limbs, tails, and tissue of the eye and heart, and accepts transplanted organs from other individuals; its 32-billion-base-pair genome is about ten times the size of ours. Critically endangered, with an estimated 50 to 1,000 adults left in the wild, and on Mexico’s 50-peso note since 2021.
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Colugo (Article) — the “flying lemurs” of Southeast Asia, which neither fly nor are lemurs: two species make up the whole order Dermoptera, and genetics puts them closer to primates than to bats. The patagium runs from the shoulder blades to the tip of the tail and carries them 70 m between trees without losing much height; mothers fold it into a pouch for a 35 g newborn that clings on for six months.
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Mussel (Article) — the saltwater and freshwater bivalves, which are less related than the shared name suggests (zebra mussels sit with the clams). Marine mussels anchor with byssal threads, the “beard” removed in cooking, and use them to tether invading dog whelks until they starve; freshwater larvae (glochidia) encyst on a fish’s fins or gills for two to five weeks, and some species lure the host in with mantle flaps shaped like minnows. Farmed mussels are usually ready to harvest in under two years.