Animals That Horrify Me II: Cannibalism Edition

The odds are somewhat decent that you have never heard of caecilians. I hadn't, except in a very vague and dim sense.

They are related to some of the most adorable animals on the planet: newts and salamanders! And even adorable little frogs! A little more distantly, they're related to lizards, turtles and crocodilians (AWWWW, ADORABLE BABY ALLIGATORS, SO CUTE WITH THEIR LITTLE YELLOW MOUTHS GAPING), which are reptiles--fairly close relatives of the amphibians, which include the salamanders, frogs and caecilians.

Caecilians have developed as burrowing animals, losing all internal and external evidence of legs. Many have only vestigial eyes covered over with skin, and have replaced sight with tentacles that serve as some sort of sensory organ. Many are pretty small, but one species gets 1.5 meters long, or an inch under five feet. They have very small scales, making them unique among amphibians.

They are not adorable.

Now, there are a lot of disgusting-looking creatures out there, and really, caecilians aren't that bad. For example, hagfish are essentially boneless tubes of organs with small tentacles and an extremely unpleasant fleshy character, and they exude mucous in quantities up to a gallon. In essence, they're much like a caecilian, only without bones (except for a little cartilage, including a partial skull but no jaws), and far slimier.

So what makes them disgusting and caecilians horrifying? Well.

Not much is known about caecilian behavior, but they do know something about how they breed. Or, rather, how the young are raised. Caecilian mothers are devoted parents, especially by amphibian standards: they guard and even feed their young.

This is where things start getting terrifying.

One species of caecilian, Siphonops annulatus, feeds her young with her own skin. She lays her eggs and then curls around them. When the young hatch, they consume her skin as she lays there, tearing it off of her until she's been completely stripped bare--skinned, you could say. She regrows her skin over the next three days as her family rests, and then the pattern's repeated.

This is not the most horrific way that they feed their young. There is another species that is even more disgusting and frightening. And painful to think about.

The female holds the eggs within her until they hatch--they're an ovoviviparous species, or a species that produces eggs (which are unattached to the mother, differentiating them from live-birth (viviparous) animals, but the eggs are retained within the mother until they hatch, giving the appearance of live birth--at which time the young start eating the lining of her oviduct. THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF HAVING YOUR BABY EAT YOUR UTERINE LINING. And it still gets worse because this? Can go on for eleven months. They live inside her, eating her reproductive organs, for almost a year.

More posts later about amphibians that terrify me! Surinam toads! COMING SOON.

(Sources: Life in Cold Blood by David Attenborough, which provided the inspiration for this post and the next. Online, the pictures linked are all from outside sources--obviously. Also, this article about hagfish.)