How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?  Sounds nice, doesn’t it?  Warm sunny days, sandy beaches, tropical forests, what’s not to like?  Well, if you’re not a fan of creepy-crawlies, you might want to avoid this island paradise, since Christmas Island is home to the world’s largest land dwelling invertebrate, the coconut crab.

Although coconut crabs do eat coconuts (they climb up trees and break open the fruit with their massive claws), they aren’t a significant part of their diet.  These arthropods also eat other fruits, nuts, seeds, and the occasional dead animal, such as other crabs, baby tortoises, and cats.  In fact, coconut crabs will eat just about anything, and as a result are thought to be the reason no one has ever found the remains of Amelia Earhart.

Coconut crabs are fairly unusual.  They are part of the hermit crab family, yet only the young ones wear shells.  They need water to survive, but will drown if fully submerged.  These crabs can also live up to 60 years, spending most of that time in their burrows, only coming out to feed and breed.  However, there is an exception to that rule.  Sometimes coconut crabs will break into houses and steal flatware and other shiny utensils, which has led to its other name, the robber crab.

Some explorer in Southeast Asia saw this enormous beetle (up to 4 inches long), and instead of fleeing in terror, decided that it reminded them of a violin.  Thus, the violin beetle was named.

Since the violin beetle lives in rainforests, which are some of the most diverse habitats on the planet, there are a lot of animals that would like to eat this beetle.  This results in two adaptations.  One is the shape- violin beetles are flat and brown, mimicking a dead leaf, so potential predators will ignore it.  The other is a little stranger- violin beetles secrete a poisonous acid that is strong enough to numb a human hand.

While the violin beetle is strictly carnivorous, this acid isn’t used as a weapon for hunting.  This is because both the larval and the adult stages of this beetle feed on other insect larvae, which are pretty much defenseless against the beetle’s fearsome set of jaws.

The Isabella Tiger Moth is a lovely yellowish-orange moth that lives throughout North America.  It is unremarkable, except for the fact that it only has a few day to find a mate and reproduce after it pupates.  This is not what this entry is about, though.  The larval stage of this moth is commonly known as the wooly bear caterpillar, and it is a remarkable insect.  

Not only can it be used to predict the weather (the smaller the orange band is, the colder the winter will be), it has the ability to become frozen solid and thaw out completely unharmed.  This unusual adaptation is the result of living in the arctic, where temperatures easily reach -40°F in the winter.

Another feature of the wooly bear caterpillar is that it has a relatively long lifespan for an insect. The summers in the arctic are short, so the caterpillar doesn’t have much time to eat enough food to pupate. This means that the caterpillar takes several years (14 in one case) to reach the optimum size to create a cocoon and hatch into a moth.

This colorful arthropod, which is favored by aquarium enthusiasts, hails from the Pacific coast of Mexico and Central America.  The common name of Gecarinus quadratus is the Halloween crab, which is derived from its black, purple, and orange coloration.

Like all crabs, the Halloween crab will grow continually throughout its lifetime (up to 10 years in captivity) and will periodically have to molt its exoskeleton, which does not grow with the crab.  The Halloween crab will then eat the exoskeleton (it’s an extremely opportunistic feeder) in order to get the calcium needed to harden its new skin.

While most crabs are strictly aquatic, the Halloween crab is amphibious, choosing to spend most of its time on land, where it comes out at night to forage for leaves and carrion.  Despite this, the Halloween crab must make its home near a water source, like a mangrove forest, because its offspring cannot survive out of water.

In 2007, after collecting specimens from a cavern, scientists in Thailand introduced a newly discovered species; Desmoxytes purpurosea.  It was type of dragon millipede (named for the spikes all along their backs) that was a brilliant hot pink, so it was named the shocking pink dragon millipede.

Although this millipede is one of the largest in its genus, it’s still only about an inch long.  You’d think that the bright coloration of the shocking pink dragon millipede would cause predators to make a bee-line towards this tiny bug, but you’d be wrong.  This millipede’s hot pink body is a warning sign; shocking pink dragon millipedes secrete cyanide, which is one of the strongest toxins on the planet.  

Shocking pink dragon millipedes live in leaf litter found in limestone karsts (a geologic formation where rock has been dissolved, resulting in sinkholes and caves).  Here forages for decaying plant matter, such as fallen leaves, to eat.  When it isn’t looking for food, this millipede will sit on the rocks to sun itself, regardless of any danger it is putting itself in, because it knows that nothing will touch it.  Shocking, isn’t it.

Despite its name, the hummingbird clearwing is actually a moth.  It does look like a hummingbird, though, and acts like one, too.  This moth can be found throughout North America and spends most of its day hovering around flowers (preferably ones that are pink or purple), using its long proboscis to extract the nectar that it survives on.

While it is easy to mistake the hummingbird clearwing for an actual hummingbird (size, behavior, and coloration classify it as a hummingbird mimic), this remarkable moth does have some variations.  Some are solid green, some have colored abdomens, and some are black and yellow, which leads some to believe that they are giant bumblebees.  

Perhaps the most interesting features of these creatures are its wings.  When they first emerge from their cocoon, the wings of the hummingbird clearwing are a solid red or black.  This all changes when the moth decides to test out its new two inch wings. As it flaps, colored scales fall off, leaving the moth with the distinctive transparent patches that give it its name.  Interestingly, hummingbird clearwings in the north and west end up with a smooth border between the scales and the membrane of the wing, while the ones in the south and east exhibit jagged wing borders.

It lives throughout the world’s tropics, coming out only at night to hunt.  It is an ambush predator, waiting for its unsuspecting prey to come close enough to be caught in its net.  Its body is only an inch long.  It is… the ogre faced spider.

Deinopis subrufa (aka the rufous net-casting spider) is a species of ogre faced spider that lives in parts of Australia and Tasmania.  The scientific name is a mixture of Greek and Latin, which roughly translates as ‘slightly reddish’ (for the coloration of the females, which are also slightly larger than the males) ‘terrible appearance’ (hence the common name of ogre faced).

Ogre faced spiders are different from other spiders.  They do have eight eyes, but two of them have become so large (to help them see at night) that the other six are hard to see.  They do spin webs, but they also take it up a notch, and create nets.  The ogre faced spider will then hang close to the ground and wait for something to walk (or fly) by, and then throw the net at it. Unlike the web, the net isn’t sticky, but insects and other spiders will still get tangled up in it and eaten.

If the prospect of a spider using something other than a net to hunt absolutely horrifies you, do not look up trapdoor (or fishing, bolas, spitting, and funnel web) spiders and remember that these small spiders are 100% harmless.  There have been zero recorded ogre faced spider bites on humans in the history of everything.  That doesn’t stop them from looking freaky, though.

If you can imagine a slug covered in armor like a pill bug, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what a chiton is.  A chiton is a type of marine mollusk that is found in oceans across the world.  They don’t get very big (the largest chiton only gets about a foot long) and stick to the sea floor, where they crawl around eating algae off of the rocks.  The lined chiton makes its home in the northern Pacific ocean, with its habitat stretching from Russia and Japan to Alaska and California.  

Lined chitons come in a variety of colors, but they all share the same pattern; fine stripes on each of their eight shell plates.  This particular chiton is less than 2 inches long, but that doesn’t stop it from defending itself.  Like all others of its kind, if disturbed, the lined chiton will curl up into a ball (or as close to a ball as it can get) to protect its vulnerable underside.

Chitons also have a really cool way of eating.  All mollusks, from snails and slugs to squids and scallops, have a specialized tongue covered in teeth, called a radula, that they use to scrape plant matter (or flesh, if they’re carnivorous) into their mouths.  As mentioned earlier, chitons eat algae.  But, this isn’t the green scummy stuff that grows in your fish tank; this algae is hard, like the rocks it grows on.  This means that the regular toothed tongue just won’t cut it, so chitons take it up a notch.  

The lined chiton radular teeth are made of magnetite (a mineral made of iron), as are every other chiton species, making them unique among animals.  Scientists also think that the metallic teeth also help chitons navigate by using the earth’s magnetic field, which can be useful when you don’t have real eyes.

The paper nautilus (despite the name) is neither paper nor a nautilus, but an octopus, also known as the argonaut octopus.  The so called ‘shell’ of the paper nautilus is actually an egg case made by the female of the species, so that she can keep her eggs close at hand (or tentacle, in this case).

Unlike most octopuses, the paper nautilus lives near the surface of the ocean, rather than the sea floor.  The paper nautilus also differs in that it will eat jellyfish, along with the regular crustaceans.  Each species of paper nautilus has a different looking shell, the largest of them creating shells about a foot wide and the smallest reaching only 2 ½ inches.

Paper nautiluses show extreme sexual dimorphism, with the females growing up to five times the male’s size.  The females live longer as well, and can mate multiple times, while the males were thought to be an entirely different species, due to the fact that they had no shell and died so quickly, until the late 1800s.

Not much is known about this octopus, since they are not frequently encountered, although there is a myth that has come from them.  One interesting factoid about the male paper nautilus is that it has a special detachable arm that it uses during mating.  The female will hold on to the arm and receive a steady supply of sperm as she drifts, eliminating the need to actively seek out another male.  This has led to the mistaken belief that all male octopuses mate in this manner, which (as all the other guy octopuses will tell you) is a lie.  

What if I told you that there is an animal that can be found in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, is carnivorous, has 15 sets of legs, and is probably IN YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW AND IT LOOKS LIKE THIS!!

Although it may look like some sort of alien monster, it’s actually the humble house centipede. They’re relatively harmless (most of these arthropods couldn’t hurt you if they tried due to their tiny teeth) and eat the bugs you should really be worrying about (aka cockroaches, termites, silverfish, and bedbugs).  House centipedes don’t carry disease, don’t destroy your property, and try to stay out of people’s way.  

The body of a house centipede is only about an inch long, but thanks to those ridiculously long legs and antennae, it can look much bigger.  It also spends a significant amount of time keeping those legs clean. Like a cat, it will groom itself, meticulously making sure that everything is in proper order.  So next time you see one of these centipedes crawling out of your drain, try not to scream or panic, and remember that this is one bug that you don’t want to squish.