There is nothing "worldly" in today's article...

Today is the Zhongyuan Festival , also known as the "Ghost Festival". According to legend, on the night of the Zhongyuan Festival, ghosts in the underworld will be released. Ghosts that have descendants will return home to receive incense and offerings; lonely ghosts will wander around, lingering in the human world looking for food.

There are many taboos during the Ghost Festival, such as not picking up money on the ground, not looking back easily, and not wandering at night. ｜《About the time when I became a family with ghosts》

In light of this festive occasion, let’s take a look at some of the “hellish” things in nature…

There's a skull here.

The ripe and bursting fruits of snapdragon look like miniature skulls , complete with eyes and mouth, making them one of the representatives of the terrifying image of plants.

Horror movie guest star - snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus). | laajala / ces.ncsu.edu

Although the fruit looks scary, the flowers of snapdragon are still very beautiful. The flowers with a texture like silk flowers look like lips and goldfish tails , densely piled on the scape; the upper lip of the flower is split into two halves, and the lower lip has three shallow cracks, so it has a series of names such as dragon mouth flower, dragon head flower, foreign colorful bird, etc. to satisfy everyone's imagination.

The word "flowers in clusters" is the most appropriate to describe snapdragons. ｜lezumbalaberenjena / ces.ncsu.edu

If there is a breeze, it really looks like a swimming goldfish if you look closely. ｜David Marquina Reyes / ces.ncsu.edu

The home of snapdragons is along the Mediterranean coast. They can be found from Morocco to Portugal, from France to Turkey. As a beautiful plant of the Plantaginaceae family, snapdragons naturally have many fans . As early as the ancient Roman period, snapdragons were already a frequent visitor to gardens; during the Age of Exploration, Europeans took snapdragons with them when they took a stroll in the Americas; in 1578, people cultivated double-petaled flowers with different leaf shapes and colors, and by 1850, they had cultivated red double-petaled varieties.

Beautiful snapdragon｜euflora.eu

To this day, snapdragon breeding remains one of the important tasks of horticulturists.

The monster on the window

In Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Sphinx, when plague broke out in New York, the protagonist saw a "death-foreboding monster" outside his window:

"It was as big as a battleship, with a wingspan of a hundred meters, a skull painted on its back , and it let out a shrill scream."

Because of the perspective error of "Why are pigeons so big?", the protagonist mistakenly thought that this "monster" was lying on the mountain, but in fact it was lying on the window glass. Although it is a big insect, its wingspan does not exceed 12 cm - this is a ghost-faced hawk moth .

The genus Acherontia includes three species: Acherontia atropos, Acherontia styx, and Acherontia lachesis. The picture shows Acherontia lachesis. | Eric G Gagnon (Tobrook) / wikimedia

The image of the ghost-faced hawk moth is indeed creepy: there is a milky white pattern on the black chest, just like a skull, and two black "eye holes" are clearly visible. Its mouth has a strong sucking force, sucking in air and then spitting it out, and an organ called "epipharynx" in the mouthparts will quickly expand and contract, producing a sharp chirping sound like a mouse .

Because of its strange and terrifying appearance, people have attached all kinds of spooky symbolism to the hawk moth. In "The Silence of the Lambs", the killer "Buffalo Bill" loves to raise hawk moths, and the hawk moth also appears on the movie poster.

Movie poster of "The Silence of the Lambs". ｜Orion Pictures

The ghost hand that kills whoever it points to

If we were to select the scariest animal in Madagascar, the aye-aye would definitely be on the list.

The aye-aye looks like an alien, with yellow eyes that reveal a look of shock and ferocity, black hands that are skinny, and a very thin and long middle finger . People believe that whoever it points its finger at will die, and if it enters a village, the whole village will suffer misfortune.

"Hahaha! You're next!" Although the finger monkey (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a terrifying animal in local legends, its English name "aye-aye" is quite cute? | Tom Junek / wikimedia

The aye-aye is actually completely harmless to humans. It has such a strange appearance because of its peculiar lifestyle. The aye-aye is best at breaking through foods with strong "defenses" : fruits with hard shells and insects hidden in trees. It uses its front teeth as a chisel to peel the shells and dig through the wood.

Aye-aye monkeys are kept in the Frankfurt Zoo. | Elias Neideck / wikimedia

The "terrifying" middle finger of the aye-aye is also a clever tool. It can dig out the cotyledons (kernels) of nuts, dip in the nectar in the center of flowers, and catch insects in wood . The aye-aye's insect hunting is one of the most peculiar hunting methods among primates. It first knocks on the tree trunk with its middle finger, relying on the sound to find the holes made by insects, then bites through the wood and inserts its ultra-thin middle finger into the hole as a "probe" to search for insects.

Aye-aye monkeys use their middle fingers to tap tree trunks to locate insects. | Nat Geo WILD / YouTube

The joint where the aye-aye connects the middle finger and the metacarpal bone is very flexible and can rotate in all directions . If the aye-aye touches a bug, it will not blindly poke forward, but carefully wrap its middle finger behind the bug and hook it out by holding its buttocks (or head).

After finding the bug, the aye-aye will use its middle finger to dig the bug out of the hole. ｜Planet Doc Express Documentaries / YouTube

The "homework" of the aye-aye monkey in catching insects is quite similar to the hunting skills of the woodpecker, except that the "chisel" for the woodpecker to dig the wood is the beak, and the "probe" is the dexterous tongue.

Unfortunately, this amazing animal is in danger of extinction , not only because of human development that has destroyed the forests it depends on, but also because of its fearsome reputation - locals always try to kill the aye-aye in the hope of exorcising the curse.

No matter how infernal the things are, they cannot withstand the vicious hands of humans...

Author: Shi Jun, Red Queen

Editor: Calendar Girl, Little Towel

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)

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