Tiny but just visible globular springtails feed on a newly emerged mushroom.
Image credit John Caddy.

Saddleback caterpillar.

A stingray barb in the sole of someone’s foot.

Michio Hoshino was a photographer that was known for his pictures of wildlife, especially  bears. On August 8, 1996 he was mauled to death by a brown bear on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia.

Tom and Eileen Lonergan were a married couple from Baton Rouge, Louisiana who had just recently completed a three year tour of duty with the Peace Corps. They were stranded January 25th, 1998 while SCUBA diving with a group of divers off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and were never found. The group’s boat from the Outer Edge Dive Company accidentally abandoned Tom and Eileen due to a faulty head count taken by the dive boat crew. Upon leaving the diving area, the twenty-four other divers and five crew members failed to notice that the couple was not aboard. The couple was left to fend for themselves in shark-infested waters. Although their bodies were never recovered, they likely eventually died of dehydration, drowning, shark attack, or a combination thereof.

Oogpister Beetle

This large, predatory ground beetle preys almost exclusively on ants, but doesn’t bother trying to trick them; it storms in to ant territory, gobbles them up in its jaws, and uses its legs to kick away any ants who try to ward it off. Amazingly, the beetle extracts acids from the ants which it can then spray from its abdomen to defend itself from larger predators.

The Satanic Leaf Tailed Gecko, is a species of gecko endemic to the island of Madagascar.

A black fawn.

Jellyfish Lake, Palau

In the nation of Palau, more than 12,000 years ago, a rock island sealed off from the ocean and jellyfish were trapped inside as it changed to a marine lake. With few predators at Eil Malk rock island, the jellyfish thrived and multiplied. Now this lake holds more than 10 million jellyfish and is known as Jellyfish Lake. Their ability to sting disappeared over time, so now swimming with them is completely harmless. These jellies vary from blackberry- to basketball-sized and swim with the path of the sun across the surface of the lake each day.

Most spiders are aggressively solitary, treating even their own species as just an edible invader in their territory. A few species, however, are highly social and may build tremendous, complex web systems shared by thousands of individuals. One such spider is Ecuador’s Theridion nigroannulatum – these spiders hang upside-down in large groups, dangling hundreds of silk strands to the ground. When a large insect brushes by these tripwires, dozens of spiders may drop down together and wrap it in silk.