Bombardier beetles protect themselves with hot, caustic blasts from their rear ends (Image: Satoshi Kuribayashi/Nature Production/OSF/Photolibrary)
From sea beasts that disembowel themselves to lizards that make knives out of their own broken bones, you don’t want to mess with these kick-ass critters
IN The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams wrote about the “dish of the day”: an animal that wants to be eaten and can say so loudly and clearly, thus circumventing many of the ethical problems associated with meat.
Most creatures do not want to be eaten and many go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it. Some defence strategies are well known: fish and birds gather in shoals for safety, possums play dead, bees sting, and skunks spray a liquid so repulsive that humans caught in the blast are almost always reduced to vomiting.
Yet all of these are just the tip of a very big, very ingenious and very dangerous iceberg. There is a host of other even more peculiar tricks that animals use to convince their persecutors to pick on someone else.
Taking the point
Stabbing a predator with an offensive weapon is a tried and tested defence strategy: thousands of animals and plants are covered with horns, thorns or spines. Nobody who has tried to eat the fruit of the prickly pear – or a hedgehog for that matter – can be under any illusion that they make an easy meal.
But what if you don’t have any obvious means of stabbing? At first glance, the 30-centimetre-long sharp-ribbed newt (Pleurodeles waltl) looks innocuous enough, but it carries…
