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.

Once upon a time, there was a person who saw this bug and thought that the protruding proboscis had the ability to light up, just like the tail end of a firefly.  This was wrong, of course, but the name stuck, and members of the Pyrops genus have been called lantern bugs ever since.

This particular lantern bug is called the blue winged lantern bug, and like most other lantern bugs, lives in southeast Asia, Borneo to be specific.  The brilliant blue wings make it highly desirable among insect collectors, but it can be difficult to find among the foliage, thanks to its green forewings.

Lantern bugs (which are also called lanternflies, elephant bugs, and planthoppers) use their elongated mouths to suck the sap from trees and plants.  Their forewings are also highly reflective, and occasionally play host to a species of bioluminescent bacteria, which further propagated the myth that they could glow in the dark.

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.  

The mountain katydid, as its name suggests, can be found living on the mountains of Australia.  They also live in grasslands, forests, and shrubby deserts.  The males have elongated bodies and fully developed wings, while the females are shorter, squatter, and only have the wing covers, but both sexes are the same mottled grey color that helps the blend into the ground.  Mountain katydids are virtually invisible if they aren’t disturbed.    

If something pokes or picks up this bug, it instantly raises its wing covers to display its brightly colored abdomen.  The striped bands of deep red, black, and electric blue greatly contrast with the ordinarily dull coloration of the mountain katydid, causing predators to back off, because in the animal kingdom, a prismatic palette is synonymous with poisonous.

Mountain katydids aren’t really poisonous though; it’s all a bluff known as Batesian mimicry, where a harmless organism adopts the bright colors and patterns of something that is deadly in the hopes that it will scare potential predators away.  However, the mountain katydid does taste really bad, thanks to its diet of ragwort, a plant that contains toxins that make other animals ill.  So when it flashes its abdomen at whatever is bothering it, mountain katydids really are issuing a warning, just not the kind the predator was expecting.

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.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s a …squid?  That’s right, Todarodes pacificus, aptly named the Japanese flying squid, is a squid that can actually fly.

Well, not fly fly.  It’s really more of a prolonged glide, although some scientists have argued that it technically does fly, since it has multiple stages of flight (launching, jetting, gliding, and diving) and can make adjustments midair to remain airborne.

Even if this invertebrate isn’t going to be challenging birds anytime soon, it’s still pretty impressive what the Japanese flying squid can do.  All squid swim by sucking water in with their mantle and then squirting it out through their siphon.  This squid takes it a step further by doing just that, only out of the water.  Once they’ve jet propelled themselves into the air, the Japanese flying squid spreads out its tentacles and fins to gain lift and stability.  They can cover a whopping 98 feet in just three seconds, making them faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest man on the planet.  When they start coming down, the squids will fold their fins and straighten their tentacles for a smoother reentry into the water.

When it’s not challenging the very concept of marine life, the Japanese flying squid is eating anything it can get its tentacles on.  Young squid start out eating plankton, and move on to fish, crustaceans, and other squid as they mature.  They’ll even eat each other if they become crowded, which has led Japanese fisherman to quickly haul in their catch, lest these squid (which are used for making sushi and calamari) eat it all.  

These squid aren’t just gluttons, though.  The reason for this constant caloric intake is that the Japanese flying squid only lives for a year and needs all the food it can get to grow from a tiny egg into a foot-long adult, as well as make the migration to the breeding grounds, all while dodging predators in both the sea and sky.  Not bad for something that most people associate with seafood.