Hi, it’s Katrina!
My friend David is actually going to be helping me out today so hope you enjoy!
Hi, it’s David!
Number 10: Monkey Island In 1974, a young scientist from New York was
working in the remote jungles of Liberia, hired by a non-profit organization called
the New York Blood Center.
The nonprofit was trying to find a vaccine for a bunch of different diseases all relating
to the blood.
They funded the creation of a laboratory, headed by the scientist Betsy Brotman.
Betsy was to conduct medical tests on dozens and dozens of chimpanzees.
These chimps were infected with everything from hepatitis to onchocerciasis.
Once a chimpanzee tested positive for whatever disease they were injected with, they were
sent to an isolated island to keep the infected away from the normal population.
What's really amazing is that the laboratory, called Vilab II, continued its work in Liberia
even throughout civil wars in 1989 and 1999.
What ultimately brought the tests to an end would be the outcry in the US about the cruelty
associated with testing on animals.
In 2005, the lab was shut down for good and about 60 chimpanzees were transferred to uninhabited
mangrove islands.
Amazingly, these monkeys still live there now.
The nonprofit organization continued caring for the chimps for a whole decade after leaving
them on the island.
It wasn't until 2015 that they fully withdrew all financial support, saying they could no
longer take care of the chimps.
Taking care of these animals had cost them about $30,000 each month.
In the end, the work Brotman did in that lab led to a vaccine for hepatitis B, and a few
other important things like screening tests for hepatitis C. The main issue now is that
the chimpanzees are no longer being cared for, despite suffering immensely from the
medical breakthroughs the lab was able to produce.
9: The Monster Eagle and Giant Penguin Researchers at the bottom of the world made
two rather interesting discoveries.
In Australia, experts discovered what's being described as a terrifying eagle.
While in New Zealand, researchers have discovered a monstrous penguin.
The eagle lived 25 million years ago near Lake Pinpa.
Archeologists only managed to discover one specimen, a single collection of 63 fossilized
bones forming its skeleton.
They say it’s closely related to the wedge-tailed eagle, yet on a separate branch of the family
tree.
Professor Trevor Worthy told the British press that it was the most amazing fossil ever found
in Australia.
The fierce bird is called Archaehorax sylvestris, and it wasn’t actually that big.
Its wings were only about 6 inches (15.2 cm) long, pretty miniature all things considered.
However, this is still the largest species of eagle ever found in Australia.
And even though it was small, it was dangerous.
Its feet were about the same length as its wings, meaning it had extraordinarily long
talons that it could use to slash and claw prey, making it one of the most dangerous
predators that ever lived in prehistoric Australia.
Now let's move to New Zealand for the penguin.
The penguin was about the size of a person, over five feet tall (152 cm) and weighing
nearly 180 pounds (81.6 kg).
Imagine standing eye to eye with an enormous penguin!
It went extinct 56 million years ago, with Paul Scofield calling it one of the largest
penguin species that has ever been found.
It’s dramatically different to the biggest species today, the emperor penguin, that only
grows to be slightly over three feet (91 cm) tall.
8: Cannibal Lemurs A new study has found that lemurs living in
Madagascar are not only cuddly and cute, but also cannibalistic.
The gray mouse lemur is being called the cutest cannibal anywhere in the animal kingdom.
This is shocking for a lot of reasons.
Before this study, scientists assumed primate cannibalism only occured when an adult was
eating their baby.
And while this is disturbing enough as it is, it’s something that happens throughout
much of the wild.
But scientists had never witnessed a primate feeding on another adult… until 2010.
That was when they witnessed with their own eyes an adult male lemur picking the bones
clean of a female lemur that was found hanging from the vegetation.
Scientists don't know if the male lemur killed the female specifically to eat her.
It’s more likely that the male lemur discovered the dead female and proceded to temporarily
take on the role of other carrion-feeders.
This is, however, rather shocking and disturbing and is the first time a lemur has been discovered
engaging in cannibalism. 7: Exotic Antarctica
There are creepy creatures living in Antarctica that have been alive for a very long time.
Researchers Ian Hogg and Byron Adams went to the Transantarctic Mountains in search
of these strange animals, to a region where the peaks rise over 9000 feet above the Antarctic
ice, where the temperature is a steady -40 degrees.
(Both in Fahrenheit and Celcius) Because of how dry the environment is, much of the soil
on the mountains hasn't seen water in tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.
This means they've been steadily accumulating salt, much like the surface of Mars.
And yet despite such a harsh environment, small creatures called Tullbergia mediantarctica
live here.
They’ve been thriving for the last 30 ice ages.
These creatures are very tiny insects with dozens of pale white legs, each organism smaller
than a sesame seed.
They live beneath the surface of the soil and scavenge for food among grains of fine
sand.
They're so susceptible to dehydration that if they’re removed from the sand and exposed
to the frigid air, they immediately die.
It makes you wonder how such a thing could have survived for so long.
If you're familiar with the springtail, one of the most primitive insects that you can
find in any chunk of dirt in your garden, then you’ll know the Tullbergia.
They're different creatures, but pretty similar, just highly specialized to living in the Arctic.
Researchers believe these creepy critters were left behind when Antarctica stopped being
a jungle and turned into a frozen wasteland.
But they were able to save themselves by burrowing into the soil.
Whereas pretty much all the other animals were killed off, these insects adapted and
remained.
6: The Tentacled Snake There is a snake with tentacles growing out
of its face.
I'm sorry to alarm you, but it's true.
The tentacled snake, as it's so appropriately named, is the only serpent in the world with
tentacles growing from its face.
The tentacled snake is an aquatic species.
It makes its home in freshwater lakes and rivers, where it can stay submerged for 30
minutes before resurfacing for air.
It's basically a fish snake, and it’s pretty disturbing.
The only good news is that unless you live in Thailand, Cambodia, or Vietnam, you won't
have to encounter the tentacled snake.
It lives here in rice paddies, streams, and wherever the water is shallow enough that
it can slither around invisible in the muck.
But let's talk about the tentacles.
Researchers scanned one of these snakes using an electron microscope.
They discovered that the tentacles are able to wriggle on their own just like octopus
tentacles.
Though these ones are a lot shorter, scientists found huge amounts of nerve cells inside the
tentacles, suggesting the snake uses them for detecting prey while moving through the
muddy water.
Because the snake can't see while underwater in a haze of mud and dirt, it uses its tentacles
to detect where the food is, essentially treating the tentacles like an extra set of eyes.
5: Unknown Blob A creepy and disturbing blob monster was recently
discovered on a beach in Australia.
It immediately became an object of fascination for curious beachgoers, as well as scientists.
The blob was spotted laying beside the ocean at low tide on Kemp Beach, near the Great
Barrier Reef.
Nobody was able to identify the thing, not even the locals who are used to bizarre creatures
and miniature sea monsters washing up on their shores.
One guess was that it could be a tomato jellyfish, while others said it could be from the blobfish
family.
Given the vastness of the ocean and how little we actually know about the creatures that
live below the surface, it may simply be an as-yet undiscovered species.
What do you think the curious red-brown blob found on the Australian beach was?
A simple jellyfish?
Some type of blobfish?
Let me know your theories in the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe before the
end of the video!
4: Raucous Fish There is a fish out there that sounds like
a very loud machine gun.
And in a shocking new discovery by a rather unfortunate team of researchers, it has some
of the loudest intercourse of any creature in the animal kingdom.
In fact, the Gulf corvina fish is so excruciatingly loud during mating that it can cause other
animals to go deaf.
It’s basically the ocean equivalent of your neighbors being so inappropriately loud during
their private time that your eardrums rupture.
This wildly disturbing discovery came back in 2014 when a pair of researchers spent four
days underwater with microphones studying the spawning sessions of the Gulf corvina.
Between March and May, there are about 1.5 million of these screaming monsters gathered
in the Colorado River Delta to mate.
It becomes something of a group affair, with tens of thousands of the fish all mating at
the same time.
The sound level generated by all these screaming fish is so immense that it causes problems
for the dolphins and sea lions that live in the area, with some actually losing their
hearing for the rest of their life.
But why does this happen?
Researchers say it's the male corvina fish that makes the loud croaking noises to attract
females.
But each croak can go as high as 192 decibels.
That's enough to rupture a person's eardrums.
And when there are thousands and thousands of these fish all making the same sound at
the same time, it’s like the worst music concert in the world.
3: Trout Doing Meth In yet another shocking fish discovery, trout
are starting to get addicted to meth.
According to reports, illegal drugs are having a huge impact on freshwater wildlife.
Traces of methamphetamine – other drugs too, but meth in particular – have been
found causing fish to become addicted as it seeps into our waterways.
Laboratory experiments found that the brown trout, a fish that lives in Eastern European
rivers, when exposed to methamphetamine become addicted.
They get less active, they experience withdrawal when the meth levels in the water go down,
and they have difficulties reproducing and even hunting for food.
In other words, the fish become addicted to the drug, and incapable of so much as feeding
themselves.
Pavel Horky from Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, said the results of the
tests surprised him.
Especially since the implication is that users of meth in the human world are causing fish
in our ecosystems to become addicted just like them.
How does all this meth get into our freshwater streams and rivers?
It’s metabolized by a user’s body, then expelled through urine and waste.
A lot of his waste ends up back in the waterways, with tiny traces of meth leaking out.
But in this day and age, there are actually so many people cripplingly addicted to the
drug that those tiny traces are starting to pile up, impacting the wildlife.
2: Covid Deer In Iowa, researchers with Penn State have
discovered a terrifying and rather disturbing truth.
It turns out that white-tailed deer have been catching covid from humans.
Yes, people have somehow been transferring the virus to deer.
Then, the deer are spreading it rapidly to one another.
80% of the deer sampled by researchers between April of 2020 and January of 2021 showed infection
with the virus.
What's truly bizarre is that no one can quite figure out how the deer got the virus from
people in the first place.
It's not like people and deer are hanging out at the same coffee shops.
There's also no evidence that deer have been passing the virus back to humans.
Nonetheless, this has been a troublesome development.
While nothing crazy has happened yet, scientists say the fact that deer are so easily infected
means that the entire population is basically a melting pot for mutations.
It's possible that covid can mutate inside white-tailed deer until it is significantly
more dangerous than it is now, then hop back over to the human population.
1: Crow Funerals We all know how intelligent crows are, but
did you know that they actually hold funerals for their fallen friends?
According to a shocking report from National Geographic, intelligent corvids, meaning a
group of birds including crows and ravens, pay particular attention to dead friends.
These funerals usually involve the birds gathering around a fallen comrade, calling to one another
loudly, and being rambunctious.
But the funeral might not be quite so touching.
Students from the University of Washington recently made some findings that suggest the
crows aren't actually mourning for their lost friend, but rather trying to figure out if
the death represents a threat for themselves.
The crows squawk and investigate the departure of another crow solely to figure out if they
themselves are in danger.
It’s completely selfish, and not at all like a respectful funeral.
Though of course for the crows, it makes perfect sense.
The crows need to identify any potential threats and figure out if they should avoid the area.
What looks on the outside like a joyous celebration surrounding a perished crow on the sidewalk
is really a bunch of crows squawking in anticipation of danger.
Which of these disturbing animal discoveries surprised you the most?
Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button!
Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you again soon for another shocking video!