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Sure, mother nature can be one cold hearted bitch. But then, that's evolution for you. Everything put in a giant agitator and shaken constantly, so that the fit survive, and the rest are packed up as somebody's lunch.
But all things considered, we humans shouldn't be handing out cutesy names to various nasty little buggers. Take, for instance, the Cookiecutter Shark. Sure, "Shark" should be your big give-away. It's a shark. Is it going to be nice? No. It's going to be one lean mean eating machine. It's going to be collecting the unfit for lunch just as it and the rest of sharky-kind have been doing for 400 million years. I mean, sharks have survived the last four extinction level events that have happened on this planet. While 99.87% of the Earth's biomass fell by the wayside in those events, sharks just chewed up the failures and kept on swimming. But don't let the mere label of "shark" fool you. The Cookiecutter is one vicious little piece of work, and I do mean little as he's barely over a foot and a half long. He's got tiny little stubby fines, big puppy dog eyes, a blunt little nose, a glowing green belly, and a set of huge fishy lips -- and I mean, huge. Really. Really big atypical fish lips. And it's what he does with these lips that lets him take the king-nasty cake home with him every night. Our little Cookiecutter Shark earns his daily meal by lighting up his belly in the deep dank waters and waiting for some poor traditional hunter to assume he's a tasty little treat. Now where-as this larger hunter would be willing to give our glowing little lure the honest quick merciful death he deserves, the Cookiecutter turns the tables and latches onto the side of the hunter at the last moment. Using the tremendous suction power generated by those obscene Mick Jaggerettes, the Cookiecutter then rotates its body and uses its tremendously oversized saw-like lower jaw to scoop out a plug of flesh up to forty cubic inches in size. And once it's scooped out its little plug-meal, it just drops away, leaving its prey to swim around with a huge three inch hole. The US Navy has actually found that the sonar-dome of their nuclear submarines have had pieces torn out of them by this frightful little bugger. It's the spitefully foul wolverine of the deep, it'll try to get a chunk out of anything it can. Fortunately the little blighter rarely comes to the surface, and then, only at night and in the warm oceanic waters where it lives -- notably the Mediterranean. Most of it's time is spent cruising up and down columns of water (from 300 ft down to almost a mile) looking for various large fish, pinnipeds, squid, octopus, whales, dolphins and even other shark that make up its regular diet. If you don't believe me, here, take a look at some photos of this piece of work: image 1, image 2, image 3, and image 4. Please, when you seek to name the rat-bastards of the animal kingdom, at least give those wretched beasties a name that lives up to their nature... like Malicious Flesh Boring Shark. |