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Creature Features, Episode Three
By Joe Pivetti

Sharpest eyed/3-eyed piscine, flashy bluefin tuna, non-stop swim with finlet efficiency and lymphatically tucked dorsal fins, and keep warm with retia mirabilia and high hemoglobin. Of vertebrates, great white sharks heal wounds with the most blood-clotting and scaffolding protein genes - while genome stability keeps them cancer free into their seventies. A binocular scallop hammerhead she-shark returns to the deep post-pupping in a coastal nursery - where she'll hold her breath in frigid dives and rise heated-up from that sea. Dolphins use pufferfish, baby talk, unihemispheric sleep, bubble-mistnet and mud-wall hunting...and tools (from mom, they learn benthic predation, using shelling and sponging). African elephants, largest of terrestrial animals, like dolphins, have names for each other, tusks from tushes, and 50,000 muscled trunks...that they entwine with their courter. The lowland streaked tenrec uses pate spikes for head-butting enemy animals - but it's the use of back-quills for ultra-sonic stridulation that makes him unique among mammals. An Alpine swift doesn't touch down for 180 days at a time, even sleeping in flight - while the common swift recorded the longest uninterrupted fly (over 300 days and a night). Carnivorous algae, Karldinium armiger, was hunting off the coast of Spain, but now, this karmitoxic dinoflagelate, is taking prey 10,000-times its size in the waters of the Dane. The wing-shedding sloth moth hatches from top-ratio-to-body-size poop weekly...and nitrates that three-toe's wet groove-stranded fur to feed algae he hangs around to eat meekly. Inflexible non-cornet flutemouthed and chromatophored trumpet fish use vertical sea whip sway, and lurking behind parrot fish, to sneakily hose-up and vomer-tooth prey. The stingless giant whip scorpion (or vinegaroon or grampus) is a 3-part pedipalp brigand...that aims acetic acid 15-times stronger than vinegar from a 5-shot tailed pydgial gland. Desert grassland whiptail lizards are all females who clone around after trysts...and whose genetically diversive triploid uniparens trait came from backcrossing by herpetologists. Sticky footed assassin bugs of Malaysia paralyze and extraorally digest and suck dry ants...and then don their exoskeletons, like an armored and bustled pair of pants. Big air-warming snouts, musky hydrophobic skin excretions and woolly secondary coats - plus 6-foot standing jumps, mean survival for Himalayan Sichuan-takin antelope-goats. Seahorses reshape via spine control and recolor via chromatophore cell dilation (baring liquid or granular pigment: white to black, green, orange or red), matching their station.   The only herbivorous marine mammal, the fusiformed and sirenian dugong, or sea cow, smell well, have pachyostosis (super dense bones) and whiskers that feel out their chow. Blue whales, Earth's largest animals ever, low-frequency sing to a mate up to 1,000 miles away, and, after a long swim, they've calves who drink 1-1/2 barrels of milk every day. Pre-dino centenarian coelacanths have fat filled brains and float bladders, electrosensitive rostral organs...plus maw widening skull joints, ctenoid elasmoid scale armor,        straight- tube-chambered hearts, and so many fins that they can do headstands. [These fish amaze me by more than a smidge - and are just too prehistoric for me to abridge.] The camouflaged looper adorns itself with leaves, flowers and branches and then sways at odd degrees - which makes it seem like its just foliage bending in the breeze. French Guinea termites accumulate blue crystalline toxins in dorsal glands and, when old, can blow themselves up, mixing  the blues with saliva to create a colonial poison stand. To build 500 meter canals and dams, ever growing beaver teeth have ferrous enamel of orangish hues - they've also a 75% one-breath air-exchange, and yellow castor sac ooze. The hard-scaled horned lizard (or horny toad) puffs up its body to deter predatory guys, but if that fails, it can shoot an aimed stream of toxic blood 5 feet from out of its eyes. Of ants, the Winter's poison might limit the "California large" supercolony of venom spraying Argentine, so as to revive the harvester population - the primary horned lizard cuisine. Male nocturnal hairy frogs (or horror or wolverine frogs) have papillae on the side - and crack toe bones for rapid pivot to thorn-like claws to thwart predators who're after their hide. Pacific barreleye fish (or spook fish) steal from stinging siphonophores, revealed...by vertical tubular eyes (leveled to feed) within a transparent brain-revealing nemocyst shield. Monotropa uniflora (ghost plant, ghost pipe, or Indian pipe), is achlorophyllous and mycoheterotrophic - abetted by a fungi, it's a parasite on the beeches (which are autotrophic). Thigmomorphogenic thale cress' (a mustard and first genome sequenced plant) pith...conducts R:FR light down to root phytochromes through its 6-week lifecycle in lunar regolith. Of morning glory's prey sniffing dodder*, a parasitic wasp might mute her gall weevil - but not before the evil weevil's larva directs the gall to produce more starch - and chlorophyl. Dicerocaryum senecioides' (Devil Thorn or Boot Protectors) flavonoid glycosides...are good for conditioning curly hair, growing hair on mice in vivo, and as an alopecia-cide. Henneguya salminicola (milky flesh), a myxosporean endoparasite, is a derived cnidarian, and features...no nervous, epithelial, gut or muscle cells and is a non-breathing creature. Owls feel prey via filoplumes on beak and feet, locate 'em via face-dome enhanced eccentric ears, and talon 'em on velvety wings (with serrated remiges) which rodents can't hear. A kākāpō is not Cockerspaniel/Poodle mix, but the largest, fattest and only blue-footed...polygynous flightless [owl] parrot who amplifies skraarks, via bowl shaped lek, for booty. The nocturnal great potoo mimics a tree stump or branch as it patiently sits...in wait of unsuspecting prey, with eyes closed, seeing through sneaky lower eyelid slits. Male dancing frogs wave their feet to attract females as an agonistic behavior, but the females only wave theirs...to cover eggs with pebbles to hide them from predators. Toxic male cheek-biting Japanese pufferfish flap fins to create peaks and troughs - plus a central nest, in 6 foot benthic ocean crop circles, edged with seashell and coral sloughs. Conk or Cone (or cigarette) snail victims do not feel the sting of its harpoon dart - because conotoxins (in the 100s) have paralytic properties - stunning prey to be eaten à la carte. Flounders crawl the seabed whilst changing binocularly-seen color and pattern sights - via googly-eye-to-skin control of melanophores, erythophores, xanthophores and iridocytes. Hogfish are born shes but mature to hes and have light sensors 'neath each color-changing cell - in their skin...that act as feedback control, so that, at camouflage, they excel. To attract a mate, a male beat-keeping hooded seal closes one nostril and, rather, inflates a pink nasal membrane out the other whilst blowing its top-mounted bubblicious bladder. Some non-iridescent jewel beetles have multiple abdominal infrared receptors to detect forest fires afar - which they fly to for mating, and to lay eggs in burnt eucalyptus over thar. Welwitschia (onion of the desert) is a Namib monotypic genus of gymnosperm with partial CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism), 2,000+ year lifespan, one leaf, and early head        loss (which is technically apical meristem). * Dodder (or amarbel) folk names include strangle tare, scaldweed, beggarweed, lady's laces, fireweed, wizard's net, devil's guts, devil's hair, devil's ringlet, goldthread, hailweed, hairweed, hellbine, love vine, pull-down, strangleweed, angel hair, and witch's hair.