Aliens Among Us

I’ve been an avid science fiction fan since I read Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time” when I was a teensy one. Since then I’ve read Asimov and Bradbury, Le Guin and Heinlein, and countless others, and despite the feats of imagination and storytelling they’ve achieved, I have to say, you seldom see a depiction of an alien that beats real life earth creatures for their strangeness.

To wit:

Pistol Shrimp

These tiny crustaceans, also known a snapping shrimp, are the loudest animals in the world - louder than hyenas, elephants, or even whales, the previous holders of the “loudest animal” title. How do they manage to out-shout the whales, whose songs can be heard hundreds of miles away?

Each pistol shrimp has a large, rounded claw which they can snap shut very quickly. It’s not the the clank of the claw coming together that makes such a loud sound. What happens is this: the claw snaps shut in 300 microseconds, about a third of a second. At this speed, jets of water are pushed away from the claw so fast that a low pressure bubble is formed. The resulting shift from low pressure back to normal pressure causes a sonic boom, just like what you hear when a supersonic jet passes overhead. Researchers have also noticed flashes of light coming from the shrimps’ claw. They believe that temperatures inside the claw as it snaps shut can reach 18,000 degrees farenheit.

The shrimps’ snaps can be as loud as 220 decibels. To give a sense of just how loud that is - 90 decibels is loud enough to cause hearing loss with sustained exposure. 160 is loud enough to immediately kill hearing tissue. In fact, 194 decibels is the loudest possible sound that can exist - in the air. Because water and air have different densities, sound travels differently in them. So when we compare the shrimp’s snapping to a rock concert, we have to adjust the former, lowering it by about 60 decibels. So a shrimp’s snap in air is about 160 decibels - just loud enough to instantly break your ear drum.

Why do these shrimp make such a godawful racket? The snap is loud enough to stun or even kill small fish swimming by, which the shrimp can then eat at its leisure. That’s an awful lot of sound and fury, just to signify lunchtime.

Bombardier Beetle

The bombardier beetle is such a neat little creature that some creationists claim it as proof of intelligent design. Many others see it as an example of evolution at its best. What makes both sides so appreciative is this: when attacked, the bombardier beetle spews out boiling liquid from its abdomen.

How does it manage to expel boiling liquid without getting burned? By keeping a first class chemistry lab inside its belly. Two reactants, hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide, are produced in glands and stored in reservoirs until needed. When the beetle is attacked, it causes the reservoirs to open and the two chemicals to mix together, causing an exothermic reaction. The resulting hot mess is pushed through an outlet valve before it can damage the beetle. The muscle that opens the reservoirs pumps like a tiny, over-excited heart and so the liquid is pushed out in pulses - usually about 70 times, all within a fraction of a second.

Parasitic Wasps

You won’t do better than Stephen Jay Gould for a description of the ichneumon wasp, which lays its larvae in the bodies of still-living caterpillars. From his essay, Nonmoral Nature:

Since a dead and decaying caterpillar will do the wasp larvae no good, it eats in a pattern that cannot help but recall, in our inappropriate anthropocentric interpretation, the ancient English penalty for treason --- drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient. As the king’s executioner drew out and burned his client’s entrails, so does the ichneumon larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the caterpillar alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system. Finally, the larvae completes its work and kills its victim, leaving behind the caterpillar’s empty shell.

(Creepy, huh? And familiar - several people have claimed the movie Alien was inspired by this particular species.)

Other parasitic wasps play out variations on this theme. The Emerald Jewel Wasp attacks its host, the cockroach, with two quick stings. The first temporarily paralyzes the cockroach. The second injects a venom which blocks the neurotransmitters responsible for the fight-or-flight response. When the first sting wears off, the cockroach begins to move: it obediently follows the wasp, who tugs it by its antennae back to its burrow. The wasp lays its egg on the cockroach’s abdomen, the cockroach waits contentedly in the burrow, the hungry little wasp hatches and - well, you know the rest.

The curious - and stout of heart - can see videos of these guys in action here and here.

So.

What earth creatures do you think belong in a science fiction story? And what science fiction authors have surpassed even mother nature for their inventiveness?