Interesting Animals

Tagged by Julia, our friendly neighbourhood palaeontologist!

An interesting animal I had

I'm not into keeping pets (for fear that one day alien overlords will tie me up to a wooden post naked and force me to bite rubber toys... wait a sec) but my family has kept a few small animals such as birds and fish.















One interesting fish that we had was this little dude. She was a feisty fish that went around attacking other fish and chasing them away from food.

We called her Mrs. C in honour of a particularly tyrannical teacher who afflicted one of my siblings for a few years. To stop her from attacking the other fish, we installed a plastic barrier to separate them.

But it was too late - her injured and starved aquarium-mate soon died.

It sounds funny now, but at that time we really hated her, as if she had really become the embodiment of the human Mrs. C. But yet, she continued to live on for months and months, managed to lay many eggs and eventually died of old age.

An interesting animal I ate

That would be one of these.















I bit through the transparent part of the candy and then nibbled cautiously at the mealworm. It had a flaky, powdery texture and no distinctive taste.

I wasn't brave, just bored.

An interesting animal in a museum

Opabinia at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, why of course.














Could anyone at Lucasfilm have imagined an alien species with two rows of swimming appendages, five eyes and a vacuum-cleaner mouth that can grab prey between its sharp, merciless spines?

Reality is always more bizarre.

I bet it used to make "sluurp-sluurp" sounds just like Noo Noo!

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

This crab spider tried to hitch a ride into the lab on my T-shirt one day.















I trapped it in a Milo cup, observed it for a few hours and let it go in the garden outside.

Sounds boring? It is.

But can you imagine what would have happened if it succeeded in infiltrating the lab?

Instead of being an ordinary disillusioned grad student - I could have become Spiderman!

Stand aside Tobey McGuire. I want Kirsten Dunst.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

















No... erm... I mean... fireflies! Fireflies are cool because they make dots and dashes of light while flying through the night, like some kind of Morse code.

I first saw them while on a stargazing trip at Pulau Ubin, one of the offshore islands northeast of mainland Singapore.

In addition, the protein that makes them light up is called luciferase - a commonly used tool in molecular biology.

Lucifer-ase. How much more evil can an animal get?

Simply awesome.