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this actually is rewiring my brain as we speak

Michaelsthulhu

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TUMBLR I HAVE JUST LEARNED SOMETHING AMAZING AND MUST INFLICT IT IN YOU

There is a Japanese water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata. It has developed an incredible adaptation to be being eaten by pond frogs.

It walks out the frog’s butt.

The beetles get swallowed whole, and usually that would be considered Kinda Fatal, but this particular species is just like “DID YOU THINK A FROG’S DIGESTIVE TRACT COULD HOLD ME?!” and proceeds to walk through the frog’s intestines, then presumably stimulate the frog’s hind gut with its legs so that the frog poops. The beetles emerge headfirst and 93% of them survive and live on for weeks afterward.

Apparently some beetles can do this obstacle course in six minutes! (Usually takes a few hours, but some people will speedrun ANYTHING.)

Isn’t that COOL?!

livescience.com

After being swallowed alive, water beetle stages 'backdoor' escape from frog's gut

Life's journey sometimes takes you to unexpected places.

The Benign Kraegrat

My response to this week's Bestiaryposting challenge, by @maniculum!

Wow, not a lot to go on this week - hopefully the narrative here is pretty self explanitory :D

Initial pencil sketch, mostly to get the proportions, then lines with a pentel brush pen - that was fun, but very hard to use!

As ever, reasoning below the cut...

"There is an animal called the Kraegrat, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the Kraegrat rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone." - I bolded the text for emphasis, but that's pretty much all we had to go off. I'm sorry, I couldn't get that image out of my mind, so please have a medieval hunter getting hit in the face with some hurled, severed testicles... (not a sentence I thought I would ever type...)

I tried to do some thinking around what sort of creature the Kraegrat might be; I'm not trying to guess what it's meant to be (that would be against the spirit of the challenge), but rather getting some very rough ideas where to start (particularly since this week's prompt did not give us a lot to work with). All we really had was it was gentle, it could bite (not narrowing it down a lot) and it could rear up on its hind legs to flash prospective hunters (something I missed until after I'd finished the drawing!).

The most gentle beast I can think of is the noble Capybara (which may have come to mind from one of the other participants in this challenge, perhaps?), but I ended up being inspired by vicuna, which have some of the softest wool in the animal kingdom, hence the floofy, shaggy, wooly appearance of the beast.

I also started thinking around what sort of animals might have valuable nether regions... Mustelids have their characteristic anal scent glands, but if we're looking at a gentle creature it would probably need to be (in the medieval mind at least) a herbivore... And this is the point when I realised I knew exactly what this creature was supposed to be and retreated to my previous idea...!