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Thursday, 30 January 2014

10 More Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories – I can’t get enough of them! Fortunately there are so many floating about that we have been able to give you not one, not two, but now three lists of theories that many people believe with all their might. Be sure to read the earlier lists if you haven’t already and feel free to add any conspiracies missing from all three to the comments here.

10

Area 51

Area-51-1

It makes the list because it appears in almost every alien or UFO conspiracy theory ever devised. The fact is Area 51 is real. It’s a popular target on Google Earth. Another fact is that the FAA has confirmed that no air routes go over or anywhere near Area 51, by direct order from the USAF.

There are television shows purporting to explain just what goes on there, one even including an interview with “a disgruntled employee,” who is provided with black-out lighting, but no vocal distortion, and who states that “it is a testing ground for experimental aircraft. It’s as simple as that.”

I considered putting the Aurora Aircraft on this list, but since its existence is tied so closely to Area 51, I use Area 51 as a catch-all of sorts. It is verifiable now, that the F-117 Stealth Fighter, the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber, and the SR-71 Blackbird were all invented at Area 51. This may account for all the strange lights people have recorded near the base through the years.

But the conspiracy theory goes on to claim that humans were unable to come up with these technologies. They were, instead, reverse engineered by studying the technology of the flying saucer that crashed at Roswell, NM, in 1947. In fact, there may have been other alien aircraft recovered or even shot down in the area over the years, all of which have led to the USAF’s mighty power of innovation. The theory claims that the flying saucer is still there, housed in a secret bunker or hangar, as are the corpses of the three or four aliens who crashed it and died.

9

The Clinton Body Count

Bill Clinton Yeahihitit

This one at least seems plausible, as it has nothing to do with science fiction. This theory states that Bill Clinton, while he was president and before, was quietly assassinating his associates (ostensibly anyone who got in the way of his career, such as Vince Foster). The Clinton Body Count is a list of about 50-60 associates of Clinton who have died “under mysterious circumstance.” The list began circulating over the Internet starting in the mid-1990s. The list grew out of a 1993 list of about 24 names prepared by the pro-gun lobby group American Justice Federation, which was led by Linda Thompson. The list was posted to the group’s bulletin board system.

The facts concerning Vince Foster’s death are that he died untimely, on July 20, 1993, of apparent suicide by gunshot in the mouth. His body was found in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia. Gunshot residue was found on the hand which had held the gun. Foster and Clinton were boyhood friends, both lawyers, and it is believed by the theory that Foster got too close to uncovering some embarrassing truth about Clinton, probably of a sexual and/or dishonest nature, and that Foster was assassinated, less than a year after joining Clinton’s White House staff.

The theorists argue that it is unlikely that a man with a wife and three children, and an extremely lucrative law practice, earning him $300,000 a year, would have manic depression, but Foster was diagnosed with it and prescribed anti-depressants.

8

The Christ Myth Theory

Christ-King2

Yes, you read that right. According to this conspiracy theory, the man himself never existed. His life story, his ministry, his status as the divine Son of God, is a fabrication of the Roman Catholic Church. Those who have proposed one form or another of this theory have documented the similarities between stories of Jesus and those of Krishna, Adonis, Osiris, Mithra, and a pre-Christian cult of Jesus (Joshua) within Judaism. Some authors attribute the beginning of Christianity to a historical founder who predates the time Jesus is said to have lived.

The theory appears to have been originated by two French Enlightenment thinkers, Constantin-Francois Volney and Charles Francois Dupuis, in the 1790s. The theory has always been largely dismissed by academic circles and biblical historians, in which case, the theorists simply elaborated on the theory. Not only did Jesus never exist, his presence in the New Testament is utter fiction, created by the Roman Catholic Church sometime in the very early 3rd Century AD, or late 2nd Century, as a means by which to control people. The authorities passed down the idea to their successors until Constantine considered it a very good means of control and called the Council of Nicaea to organize the Church into global domination.

Despite all of the historical proof that Jesus did exist – and there is plenty of it – there are still many people who would like to think he didn’t. That is the source of this bizarre revisionist theory.

7

The Antichrist

Satan And Demon Baby

Satan is alive on Earth, and has created the Antichrist, who is, at this moment, not quite old enough to seize power, but will in only a few years. He will do so in a very political manner, taking over some powerful organization, such as the United Nations.

Every generation, since St. John the Divine wrote the Revelation, has sworn that it would witness the Great Tribulation, Armageddon, and the second coming of Jesus. “The end is near,” everyone has been saying.

Now, though, with the advent of global communications, especially the Internet, the theory has swelled exponentially. Christians who previously didn’t think much of it have changed their minds. It can be argued that the worldwide availability of press coverage only serves to heighten fear of terrible things happening at any moment. 9/11 was the most well covered, watched tragedy in human history. Wheneer a tragedy occurs, people who believe in the Christian end-times scenarios flock to church to pray away their fear.

But now, with the ability to control the entire world actually conceivable, the paranoia of the Antichrist showing up has become quite the pandemic. Most terrorists believe he will be male, will arise in Europe, probably Western Europe, and some even swear that he will be French. Plenty are sure, however, that President Barack Obama is in fact the Antichrist. Numerologists believe that the Antichrist is not yet old enough, but will make his appearance at the age of 30, symbolically equal to Jesus beginning his ministry. Worldwide terrorism, the current U. S. led war on it in the hotbed of political unrest, and the fact that almost every Arab nation seems to be threatening an invasion of Israel at every second, all serve to make this one feel very real. Every day CNN is loaded with horror stories about the Holy Land, and it just seems to keep getting worse. “The end is near.”

6

The electric car

Jetsons L51

It is a verifiable fact that the human land speed record was set in 1899 at 65 mph by an electric car. Steam and gasoline-powered automobiles could not achieve this for another 20 to 25 years. Today, technology has progressed immensely, and yet, we still have no electric cars. The best production model is the Toyota Prius, which gets 50 mpg. This only intensifies the theory that the U. S. oil companies currently possess the technology for purely electric cars, which you can plug into an ordinary, American wall outlet at night and charge up to a cross-country trip by morning.

But because this would, in truth, bankrupt the oil companies, they refuse to release the technology, and have even put out successful hits on various geniuses since the 1960s, none of whom became very famous, because he was killed before he could make his publish his discovery. A documentary in 2006, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” fueled the fire that if the technology is documented to have existed as early as the 1830s, why did it appear to hits its peak at the turn of the 20th Century, and then decline? Why are we still waiting for electric cars? Edison patented one in 1913. All the electrical pioneers of that time tinkered with the idea, and plenty of reasonable examples were produced.

5

HAARP

Haarp1

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program does exist. It is a research project funded jointly by the USAF, the US Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). When you put that many government organizations into one sentence about new technology, conspiracy theorists come running. Did you see the 2003 movie “The Core”? It concerns a stall in the earth’s magnetic field, allowing the sun’s microwave radiation to cook the planet, until a team goes into the core of the planet and jumpstarts it spinning again, so the magnetic field will resume.

The movie explains that the stall was caused not on its own, but accidentally by HAARP, which is researching the ability to create earthquakes for use as a weapon. The official description of the program, given by the program, is “to provide a research facility to conduct pioneering experiments in ionospheric phenomena… used to analyze basic ionospheric properties and to assess the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for communications and surveillance purposes.”

This sounds like the opposite of deep-Earth experiments, but conspiracy theorists believe the program is a cover for a kind of particle-beam weapon, first invented by Nikola Tesla, which has in fact been perfected, or brought close to perfection, by HAARP. The theory also claims that the ionospheric research is not a lie, but is being developed for use as a weapon to shoot down enemy spacecraft, or ballistic missiles, the latter popular especially given that HAARP’s facilities are all in Alaska, close to Russia. It even speculates that the weapon could become Tesla’s most infamous invention: “the Death Beam,” able to project a beam of extremely powerful electricity from the facility to any point on the planet and create an explosion as devastating as a hydrogen bomb.

4

The Vril Society

Nazi-Ufo Vril6

It has been suggested that there is a secret form of energy, called Vril, which is used and controlled by a secret subterranean society of matriarchal socialist utopian superior beings. Yes, you read that correctly. It is similar in this respect to the #2 theory. It also claims that Nazi Germany discovered this race, and its technology, at Shambhala, Tibet, and used it to create flying saucers (pictured above).

The whole theory is based on an 1871 sci-fi novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, titled, “Vril: The Coming of the Race.” It is generally considered an early example of science fiction, but because this genre was just getting off the ground at the time, it was seen by many as a non-fiction account of the subterranean race and their technology, a theory which persists today. The theory really took off in the 1960s.

3

The suppression of Free Energy

Tesla

This one actually sounds plausible. Nikola Tesla claimed that free energy was indeed possible, and worked for most of his career to achieve it. The theory claims that he did, in fact, succeed, just before his death in 1943, in discovering the mathematics and mechanics involved, but that the FBI immediately broke into his home and seized all his papers and work, and has never released any of it to the public.

The concept of free energy is, in very general terms, the ability to input x amount of energy into a machine, which will output x + 1 amount of energy. This seems to conflict with the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Tesla believed the law to be incorrect. He invented the Tesla Coil as an attempt to create free energy.

If it is possible, free energy could be perfected and result in the entire planet being powered by a single power source, such as a nuclear power plant, and output all the energy anyone could ever need. An infinite supply of energy at our fingertips, all based on electric output. You can see how this would irritate the oil companies.

They are the cause of the suppression, the theory claims, as no one would have to depend on fossil fuels anymore. Electric input is just as viable as coal input, or gasoline input. Thus, the electricity required to power a lightbulb could be all we need to power the whole world, invent spacecrafts capable of interstellar travel, anti-gravity, etc.

2

Jesus was a different species

Rosslyn Chapel

This theory is a lot of fun. It has been alleged that the U. S. and Israeli governments led archaeological digs in the past, which discovered the True Cross, on which Jesus Himself was crucified (along with many others, as crosses were reused). The theories disagree on the location, most claiming Jerusalem, many claiming Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, or various places in England.

Minute traces of blood were discovered on the cross and analyzed. The DNA was of several strains, and one was encoded not on a double helix, but on a triple helix! Is this good stuff or what?! The DNA is unlike any other known, and was labeled as a new species, Homo superioris. The theory continues that there are other people of this species currently living underground in various places around the world, including most of the major cities, and they have been around as long or longer than Homo sapiens. Jesus made the unprecedented decision to come up to the surface and live among us, and try to teach us to be good, and kind and peaceful.

His species possesses phenomenal supernatural abilities, including telekinesis, levitation (walking on water), telepathy (knowing people’s thoughts), healing, etc. They are also very difficult to kill, and when no one was looking, presumably during the freak storm and earthquake, Jesus got down off the cross and disappeared, having done his job. This ties in with the Jesus bloodline theory.

1

The Montauk Project

Montauk

In the annals of paranoia, no conspiracy theory is more labyrinthine, more convoluted, more encompassing of other conspiracy theories as the Montauk Project, based out of Camp Hero, Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. At the extreme northeastern tip of the island there is a massive AN/FPS-35 radar dish that has long since been decommissioned, but has been saved from demolition by a petition from the local civilian residents, who find it a better sea-faring landmark than the nearby Montauk Lighthouse. This dish features prominently in all the theories surrounding a hyper-top secret military research facility which supposedly operated from 1967 to the early 1980s.

Some theories claim that research still goes on there, deep underground in a facility that was frequently expanded since its inception. But the theories involving what went on in Camp Hero from the 1960s on are the best stuff you’re likely to hear in terms of science fiction realism. The Project began on US Government initiative in 1952-53, when a secret committee was organized to discuss possible research into time travel. The methods by which this could be achieved have never been adequately explained in the theory, but are based primarily on the work of the two favorite scientists of conspiracy theorists: Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla.

Einstein’s general relativity theory is considered the only plausible jumping-off point to a Unified Field Theory, which has so far not been discovered. Or so the public thinks. The Montauk Project resulted directly from the Philadelphia Experiment, which topped a previous list of conspiracy theories and is claimed by the theorists to be the accidental discovery of time travel. Nikola Tesla, who supposedly died in 1943, did not die, but perfected Einstein’s theory, and invented the mechanics required to stabilize a wormhole, a rip in the fabric of space-time.

The Montauk Project furthered this research, funded initially by $10 billion in Nazi gold bullion, stolen by American soldiers from an underground railroad tunnel in Switzerland in 1945. Some theories include Tesla as the immortal head of the project, traveling through time to cheat death. The base is said to have created and stabilized a time tunnel into the past, enabling anyone to go into it and arrive at any programmed point in the past. But then something terrible happened. No one can agree on precisely what, except that a mechanical failure in the 1980s resulted in a horrible monster from a foreign world (and perhaps from the past or future), which came through the underground tunnel without warning and severely destroyed the base, before being killed by unknown means.

The government immediately scrapped the Project, having learned how to travel through time, and sealed off the entire base, which had grown so large that it actually extends, to this day, under the town of Montauk itself, several square miles. The massive radar dish was used to transmit messages to alien worlds in various times through the history of the Universe.

Today, Camp Hero is now a state park where anyone may go and picnic or hike, and yet there are verifiable reports of backpackers and campers being suddenly accosted by men with automatic assault rifles in the middle of the night and threatened with death if they didn’t leave. In all these reports, the men have been said to wear olive drab uniforms with no insignia of any kind. The film “Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was filmed in the area, but not in the state park itself, because the local authorities charged exorbitant fees, apparently to dissuade the production from accidentally uncovering any secrets.


Top 10 Worst Products Ever

Modern life is filled with a myriad of products; many of them are useful, but many of them are junk. Unfortunately we so often buy into the idea that life is better with these junk products and billions of dollars are spent every year acquiring them. This is a list of the ten worst products in modern times.

10

Disposable Eating Implements

Plastic-20-Teal

It is becoming more and more common these days for people to use throw away cups, plates, and cutlery instead of glass, china, and metal. Not only is this a ridiculous waste of money (for the sake of saving a few minutes of dish-washing time) it places a burden on our natural environment. I am not an environmentalist but even I can’t see any benefit to using disposable eating equipment. There is no reason that children shouldn’t use glass like everyone else – they did in the old days and it didn’t kill them. Do yourself a favor, save some money and buy a real dinner set.

9

Disposable Razors

Bling-3

The razor companies have it made – they have a virtual monopoly on the shaving market and people have become so reliant on them that they no longer know how to shave without a throw-away razor. These razors use cheap blades which go blunt quickly and can’t be re-used. Prior to these razors becoming so popular, men would use a straight razor which could be sharpened as needed on a razor strop. The initial price of the razor and strop needed to be paid once in most men’s lifetimes. You can still buy straight razors (or as they are affectionately known: cutthroat razors) and it is well worth the investment.

8

Diet Products

Diet Shake 1Kg Chocolate

There are two main types of diet products – the first are strong medications that can be very dangerous, and the others are powders, herbal pills, and drinks. At the worst end of the scale we have drinks that solidify in the stomach so you feel full without eating (anorexia anyone?) and at the safer end of the scale are protein drinks used as meal substitutes. The fact is, all of these products are bad because they perpetuate the myth that you need to “diet” to lose weight. The only diet that truly works is moderation – eat less. It saves you money and makes you feel better.

7

Cough Mixtures

Tixycalbenl 468X271

When you get a cold or a flu, there is virtually nothing you can do except keep warm and eat well. Cough medicines are marketed to people who are suffering and want respite – but it doesn’t come in a bottle. Instead of buying incredibly expensive mixtures (which do little or nothing to help), mix together a little beaten egg white, honey, and vinegar and take it by the spoonful – it is cheap and just as effective at clearing phlegm. If you have flu ache, take tylenol (or paracetamol) and lie down for the afternoon. The flu will run its course naturally and you won’t be out of pocket.

6

Self Help Books

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Self help books don’t help. They are merely a marketing gimmick to get people to part with their hard earned money. When was the last time you met a person who had become a property tycoon after reading “Rich Dad Poor Dad”? When was the last time you saw someone beat depression after reading a self help book? This huge market now has books for virtually everything you could need, and ultimately the only person being helped is the author who is slowly getting rich. If you really feel that you need advice on life, try searching the internet for examples from real people who really found a way out of their problems.

5

Sleeping Pills for Children

Pills-1

Takeda Pharmaceuticals is a company that produces sleeping tablets for pre-pubescent and pubescent children. They used loopholes in the US marketing laws to advertise their products without mentioning the fact that they had not been fully tested on children and without listing any of the potential side effects. While that is bad enough, it is even worse that there are people who would consider buying these for their children. In most cases, a child who is not sleeping well can have their insomnia cured by more vigorous activity during the day. You don’t get side effects from turning off the television and computer.

4

Microwave Ovens

Microwave

It is no secret that I despise microwaves. They have played a large part in the removal of decent cooking from so many of our homes and have helped the chemical laden “ready meal” market to blossom. In some supermarkets it is nearly impossible to find raw ingredients for cooking as the pre-cooked, pre-made meals now take up so much room. In most cases, there is nothing you can do in a microwave that can’t be done better on a regular stove and oven – and in many cases it can take as little time! Furthermore, oven cooking won’t give you food that is soggy, limp, and colorless – a microwave will. Every time, guaranteed.

3

Ab Machines

Ab Roller1

Infomercials have been pumping out a variety of ab building machines for the last ten years. The fact is, these machines are used once or twice and then end up in the garage or a cupboard never to be used again. The machines do nothing that the human body can’t already do, and if you are earnest about building up good abs, you would be far better off doing regular sit ups and getting a gym membership. It will probably cost the same price and won’t clutter up your home!

2

Sugared Cereals

050328 Cereal Hmed 4P.Hmedium

It was a true genius that came up with the idea of taking something healthy and coating it with loads of sugar to appeal to children. Unfortunately this concept has now become so popular that many children will refuse to eat any cereal that is not sugary. All around the world governments are whining about fat children and trying to find a solution by banning all manner of things and trying to promote healthy living – but no one seems to be concerned about the fact that the majority of children start their day with a huge sugar rush followed by a crash and carbohydrate cravings.

1

Bottled Water

Dasani-Tapwater

Bottled water is an utter waste of money and resources. To illustrate just how ridiculous a concept it is, I will demonstrate with Dasani Bottled Water. This product was created by Coca Cola and was marketed as superior bottled water. First of all, bottled water is a ridiculous concept in the western world where we all have easy access to tap water which is drinkable in most areas. Coca Cola wanted to be part of the ridiculous fad so they entered the bottled water market, but they simply filled their bottles with tap water! When the product was released in the UK it was a disaster. They used the slogan “bottled spunk” which may seem innocuous to the Americans who came up with the idea, but unfortunately in the UK “spunk” is a slang word for sperm. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, scientific testing of the bottled water showed traces of bromate – a carcinogen. Coca Cola had to withdraw half a million bottles of the water and they pulled the product from the UK market.

10 Underwater Animals With Astonishing Abilities

Humans have a lot of talents. Some of us can juggle, others can play the guitar, while others can juggle guitars (probably). Yet most of what we can do relies on our brains and hands. That means that there are a whole bunch of things we’ll never be able to do, like tie ourselves in a knot, liquefy our bodies to squeeze through small spaces, or swallow a guitar (short of some horrifying juggling accident). Those kinds of talents are left to other animals, like the underwater critters here.

10Black Swallowers Eat Enormous Prey

1- swallower
The horrifying black swallower has a talent that’s given away by the huge sack of a stomach that dangles beneath its body. Chiasmodon niger has many of the features that make other deep sea fish frightening, like its bulging black eyes and abominable teeth. Yet it’s the fish’s ability to swallow its prey whole that makes it stand out. When the black swallower finds something it wants to munch on, it darts out, grabs hold, and inches its jawsover the victim until the entire prey is consumed.

It’s not fussy about what it eats, and it can swallow animals twice its length and over 10 times its mass. Its stomach becomes so stretched that it ends up translucent, so you can see the swallower’s latest meal being digested. And digestion takes so long that the swallower can’t process some of its bigger targets before they start to decompose. This ends up filling the stomach with gas, and turns the fish into a balloon. It’s these inflated black swallowers that end up floating to the surface, and they are the ones we find most often.

9Sea Slugs Can Perform Photosynthesis

2- sea slug
The sea slug Elysia chlorotica has an ability that’s never been found in any other animal—it’s able to photosynthesize its own food using sunlight. The ancestors of the slug lived on a diet of algae. The slug is able to steal the chloroplasts—organelles that perform photosynthesis—from the algae and incorporate them into its own cells. This gives the slug a distinctive green color, and they have been nicknamed “leaves that crawl.”

Even more surprisingly, the slug has stolen genes from the algae and is able to produce its own chloroplasts. Researchers found the genes even in juveniles that have never eaten. Yet in an added wrinkle, other scientists have found that the slugs are able to go for long periods of time in the dark without eating, and still survive quite happily. It suggests that the photosynthesis may not be the only key to their survival strategy. However much importance it has for the slug, it’s a unique talent that no other animal can boast.

8Planarians Heal Better Than Wolverine

3- planarian

Photo credit: Vengolis

Planarians are a type of freshwater flatworm, which is an animal notable for its ability to regenerate. In fact, their regenerative abilities have given them two list-worthy talents. If you decapitate a flatworm, it will grow a new head. That’s impressive by itself, but researchers have found that the new headgets the memories that developed before the old one was removed.

Scientists trained some planarians to tolerate light, which the worms normally avoid, then chopped off their heads. Two weeks later the worms had regenerated their missing noggins, but retained the learned tolerance to brightness. The researchers aren’t certain how this happened. It may have been a change to the animal’s DNA, or an unknown mechanism.

Another team of researchers have found that a single cell has the ability toregrow an entire body. They bombarded a flatworm with radiation until its tissues were destroyed and its cells were no longer able to divide properly. They then injected a single cell from another adult, which was able to regrow every single part of the animal. This shows that adult stem cells in flatworms are able to turn into literally any body part, unlike adult human stem cells, which tend to be more limited.

7Hagfish Tie Themselves In Knots

We’ve mentioned hagfish here before, but being around for 300 million years gives you plenty of time to develop more than one interesting trait. There’s one talent possessed by these gooey not-really-fishes that we’ve never covered—hagfish are able to tie themselves in knots, an ability that comes in useful both in defense and when catching prey.

When hagfish hunt, they do so by searching for fish burrows. When they find a fish hiding in a hole, they lunge face-first into the hole to pull it out. But sticking your head into a tunnel while your rear end flails around isn’t the easiest way to pull out a fish that doesn’t want to be eaten. To make it easier, the hagfish tie their rear end into a knot which is bigger than the hole. This gives them a perch around the top so they can pull themselves—and their lunch—back out.

Hagfish have also turned this ability into an escape trick. If they’re being held at one end, they’ll tie the free end into a knot. They can then push the knot up their body, and when it reaches whatever’s gripping the hagfish, the knot pushes against the predator and pulls the hagfish free.

6Sea Cucumbers Liquefy Themselves

4- sea cucumber
Sea cucumbers have a famous defense mechanism that we’ve told you about before. They eject their guts at predators, and regrow them later. Yet they have a second, equally unusual defense mechanism—they can liquefy themselves. Essentially, they unhook the bonds keeping their cells together and let themselves flow into (or out of) awkward spaces.

When it’s where it wants to get to, the sea cucumber can solidify itself again and become difficult to extract from a hiding place. This talent is so extreme that it’s even possible for a cucumber to liquefy itself to death. It would turnpurely into goo, and would simply flow through your fingers if you were holding it (at which point you would tell aquarium staff, “I swear I didn’t do anything!”).

5Mudskippers Can Climbs Trees

5- mudskipper
There’s a famous quote attributed to Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” If you search Google for “Einstein fish tree,” you’ll find thousands of motivational posters with Einstein’s face and the quote included, even though he never said it.

Should you come across any of your friends sharing one of those pictures, feel free to show them this video of a fish climbing a tree. That genius of the fish world is the mudskipper, a fish that spends much of its life out of the water. It lives in areas filled with mangrove trees, and is quite happy to pull itself up a log or branch. It uses its pelvic fins as a sort of suction cup to keep it attached, and pulls itself up with its pectoral fins.

Mudskippers have developed small sacks around their gills that let them hold a breath of water, much the same way we would hold a breath of air. They climb trees so they can stay out of the water during high tide.

4Archerfish Shoot Down Prey

Despite what Hollywood may have taught you, talented archers aren’t all rebellious young women or Jeremy Renner. The archerfish is small tropical fish that feasts mainly on insects. It gets its name from the astonishing way it catches its prey. The fish, which are typically no more than 10 centimeters (4 in) long, can shoot a jet of water up to 2 meters (6 ft) at insects hanging on vegetation near the water.

They’re able to accurately hit their small targets, in the dark, with enough force to successfully knock them into the water. They produce the jets by pressing their tongue against a groove in the roof of their mouth, much like the barrel of a gun. The speed of the water leaving their mouth increases throughout the spit. That allows all of the water to arrive at the same time, and hit the prey with six times the force the fish could produce with just the force of its muscles.

3The Teddy Bear Crab Makes Living Weapons

6- teddy bear 2

Photo credit: honorsbio2

The teddy bear crab is a small crustacean covered in bushy, white bristles. While a furry crab is curious enough, the species Polydectus cupulifer also has an unusual behavior. It picks up stinging anemones, one in each claw, and wields them as weapons. The crab doesn’t just stand there looking like a miniature yeti with red pain-pompoms, though. It can tell which anemones are useful, and turns the anemone around so it can grip it from the right angle. Then, the crab is able to strike with just the right part of its weapon.

The anemone isn’t just something to attack predators with, either—it’s also a food source. The crab will happily collect food from its “companions,” even going so far as to reach inside the anemone’s digestive system to pull out anything the anemone has already eaten.

2The Pirate Perch Hides In Plain Sight

7- pirate perch