The Bloodslug

We've discussed previously that blood-feeding gastropods already exist, but unfortunately, all of them are strictly marine. I think this is a very rude thing for the ocean to have done, having already hoarded all the Cephalopods, Cirripedes, Corals, Siphonophores and Nudibranchs to itself, to name just a few of the exclusively saltwater taxa. Pure greed on saltwater's part.

Maybe there's a reason why no terrestrial Gastropoda have evolved to feed predominantly on blood, considering there's so many other ripe and ready food sources for a slow-moving mollusk up here on the dirt, but exclusively carnivorous land-slugs and land-snails are abundant enough, even if they almost all just feed on things like earthworms and other, smaller mollusks, but there are also plenty of bloodsuckers we went over that aren't particularly mobile, either, or are able to wait a good long while between meals.

Let's say the bloodslug hatches from its egg extremely tiny. A barely noticeable speck of goo. Once it crawls into the fur of a sleeping vertebrate, it drills a nice long, proboscis-like radula into the host's flesh and stays there for a few days, maybe even weeks. Maybe it's not even a slug at this stage, either, but has a smooth and flat shell it can hide under, like a limpet, sealing in moisture and holding flush to the host's skin. After this extended period of ectoparasitism it drops off, only to feed again days later for a reduced period of time. The larger it grows, the shorter its feeding sessions, until finally it only feeds for a few hours at a time, sometimes months apart, and it's as big as a fat, happy banana slug, with only a vestige of its old shell. Why this particular growth pattern? This cycle of attaching, feeding and detaching again is common to many ectoparasites, the tried and true "bed bug model" that increases the odds of being passed from one host to another and dropped off in new locations. Losing their shells allows the adults to hide their soft bodies in crevices when they aren't feeding, and giving up their method of travel means adults will collect long-term in the same viable feeding grounds, where they can make lots and lots of eggs.

CULTURAL IMPACT: bloodslugs wouldn't easily spread among humans, but you never know if a few babies might decide to hop off a raccoon or opossum on your own back porch, or even a mouse in your own home, and start developing on you or your pets while you barely even notice. It would be fairly rare that they could reach maturity in the harsh conditions of the modern human lifestyle, but even one person waking up to a big, fat slug slurping off their veins, or the combination of an itchy welt and a slime trail, would quickly cement them in the public consciousness. If they have a distinct enough look to them, perhaps a tell-tale color pattern, there's no doubt these would become one of our go-to "spooky" animals, and maybe they would have already inspired mythological creatures the world over. Would we think of vampires as transforming into them, or at least having them as pets and minions? There can be no doubt that "giant" bloodslugs would be the subject of more than one monster movie, and perhaps a famous staple of fantasy gaming bestiaries.

The Ghost Frog

A frog that can suck blood is probably the second most far-fetched concept I'm going to posit here, considering that every single frog, and in fact every single amphibian ever discovered anywhere in the world at any point in the fossil record, shares the same identical feeding strategy of cramming any other creature into their mouth that the amphibian believes should be able to fit in its mouth. The evolutionary adventure that ends in carefully extracting some of the juices from a buffalo or a chicken are circumstantial enough that it's only happened once or twice to terrestrial vertebrate life at all, and frogs are seldom even graced with any sharp bits to work with.

But let's pretend that it did happen, somehow. Somehow, some way, it was more viable for a froggy to figure out how it can tap into a circulatory system than go on hunting everyday bugs and worms. Some pretty weird things have certainly emerged in them before, like the frogs whose tadpoles morph into a flesh-eating form just to cannibalize their own siblings. Maybe a tadpole that lives just like a lamprey wouldn't be far off from that one, given that plenty of tadpoles also have powerful sucker-like mouths for clinging to smooth surfaces and scraping algae from river rocks? But we're talking about grown-up frogs, here! Not little baby pollywogs! Lucky for us, there are even a few frogs that did evolve ways to cut things. A few species have makeshift "teeth," actually sharp and pointed projections of the jawbone itself. There's the bizarre "hairy frog" that breaks its own fingers to claw its rivals with its own shattered bones. And then there's the frog that's both poisonous and "venomous," because it stabs its attackers with a sharp dagger-like face, forcing its own toxic skin secretions into the wound! The numbing and anticoagulating compounds of sanguivores are thought to have evolved from what was once plain old deadly venom, or at least emerged very similarly to traditional venom.

Let's imagine a little "tree frog" here, nimble and sucker-toed and great at getting around, even pretty far from bodies of water. I used to live in Florida, and those invasive Cuban tree frogs were just everywhere, even in the drier summers! Heck, they even got into houses quite a bit, where they were often welcome to eat their fill of the equally ubiquitous plethora of cockroaches. They might not be so welcome, however, if they had a thirst for people's life essence, anaesthetic slime and natural surgical scalpels on their heads. Their skulls, not their jaws, would terminate in their weapon of choice, just like those venomous guys, but in this case it could taper into a beaklike hook the frog could employ, like the fangs of our friend Vampire Bat, to pick open a tiny little hole in your skin and start lapping up your secret sauce. As for their physical appearance, it's tempting to give them the spooky transparency of a glass frog, but that feels too "on the nose" for my taste. I still don't want them to look like just any old frog with a beak, however, so how about we make this one a dead leaf mimic, ranging from a bright yellow to a black and brown?

CULTURAL IMPACT: the combination of slimy amphibian, rotten leaf disguise and vampirism wouldn't just slam-dunk this animal into every spooky-tinted subculture, but maybe we would find it distinctive enough that we wouldn't even call it a frog, but something else entirely, in much the same way we decided (rather arbitrarily, from a biological perspective) that some frogs are instead to be known as "toads." Or that the weirder groups of lizards get special designations like gecko and chameleon. What name would we give this thing, then? I'd like to think, just like "frog" and "toad," it would be an original word all its own. Just a weird noise, basically, like "glink" or "vetch." Actually, I like vetch. It's already the common name of one group of plants, but that's okay. It can be both things, or in this hypothetical alternate timeline, a devilish little Anuran might have claimed it first. Do you think a Vetch would sneak into any amphibian-centric media, if it had always existed? Would kids read Frog and Toad and Vetch, in which best friends Frog and Toad do their best to avoid their kind of creepy neighbor? Would Kermit have a skeevier distant cousin who shows up for Halloween specials?

Regrettably, there's one possible downside here in that the very existence of the vetch might actually damage the cultural image of its fellow Amphibia. There's people out there terrified of everything spider-shaped no matter the danger level, people who not only hate rats but even hate opossums for being incidentally rat-shaped, and I swear I used to encounter grown adults who assumed that any kind of bat, in any kind of country, could in fact be the vampire kind, which they also assumed would just swoop down on any unsuspecting human and attack them where they stood. I haven't heard that one since I was a kid in the 80's, but to this day, I've still heard dumber, too. Maybe it would still all be worth it to live in the world with the Vetches in it, though. You and I would have always loved them anyway.

The Mudsticker

One of my favorite animal groups in all the world is also easily one of the most surreal, distorted predatory vertebrates evolution ever concocted, and yet, for some reason, it also has a cute, wholesome, completely saccharine cultural image. SEAHORSES however are NOT just a cute shape for pastel bathroom decor! Have you LOOKED at a seahorse? Have you thought about how that is a fish? What the hell happened to that fish?? A seahorse looks like someone left a lizard fetus lying in the sun for too long. Evolution broke its bones and mangled its flesh into exactly the shape of something that isn't any sort of fish, all because it took to just hooking itself onto objects and waiting for food to drift in front of it, which is any other animal tiny enough to slurp into its tube-shaped skull. POSITIVELY beautiful and enchanting, yes, but a beautiful and enchanting monstrosity if there ever was one.

I think seahorses could use an injection of extra edge, even if it means creating a seahorse that we might only loosely recognize as such. The mudsticker would be freshwater, for one, mostly so more people would get to experience its charms up-close and also so it would be easier for me to keep in an aquarium. Living a lot like a leech, it would dwell in lakes, ponds and swamps where it would cling to submerged objects and wait for something edible to brush by, snapping shut its wickedly fanged, teeny-tiny little mouth and bloating itself with enough blood to last its slow metabolism a year, if need be, which in case you missed me saying so is also a capability of leeches, while some species of tick can apparently last decades without food. Seahorses are also already rather spiny animals, but the mudsticker would be the prickliest by far; a necessary defense for a seahorse so much more exposed to hungry wading birds. Perhaps their spines would even be sharp enough that they easily grip passing objects in the same manner as some "hitch-hiking" plant seeds? I just always found those really fascinating in action, how easily they "stick" at the lightest touch. Getting rather easily caught up in duck feathers or lodged under turtle shells would also give them an easy transportation system, allowing the pests to turn up in even the most remote little marshes and stagnating ponds, which would be another thing: leeches are pretty sensitive about water quality, but with their tougher, less permeable hides, these aquatic bloodsuckers could adapt to some pretty foul conditions. Unappetizing to most predators, resistant to pollution and slow-growing, they could build up pretty densely over time and be misery to accidentally step in, but maybe that just serves you right, tromping around like that in what's equally likely to be a sensitive wetland habitat or a pit of sewage runoff. There are very different reasons why you don't belong in either of those!

CULTURAL IMPACT: these would look just different enough from "seahorses" that they probably wouldn't have any impact on one another's reputation. Maybe some people wouldn't even connect that they belong to the same group, and it would be a source of zoological "trivia" or a "fun fact" to point out that those nasty, thorny fish-leech things are actually a very messed up freshwater seahorse. Otherwise, perhaps we would just think of the two as interesting counterparts; lovely, cheerful sea-friends vs. creepy, wretched swamp-vermin. We love our light and dark dichotomies. Every time we gave an ocean-themed hero a seahorse mount, we would just have to give their rival villain a gnarly giant mudsticker to ride around on, even if any biology nerd would be quick to point out that those are not a saltwater animal, so the two would never be able to fight each other in the same environment. Absurd!

The Vampire "Butterfly"

I talked about this one once on tumblr, at some point, but even moreso than seahorses, butterflies have far too innocent an image. The reality is that they can be surprisingly brutal creatures and come with some exceedingly freaky adaptations, like genitals equipped with rudimentary eyesight. They also already exhibit a taste for blood, though they also enjoy feces, urine and basically any other pungent body fluids they can find. We just don't tend to see this often enough for it to have ever shattered their wholesome position in our world view, and they don't do anything to obtain those body fluids for themselves, like their vampire hawkmoth cousins. It's worth mentioning, of course, that "butterfly" and "moth" are taxonomically meaningless distinctions anyway; butterflies are just a small group of moths who trend towards diurnal activity cycles as well as bright colors, and they aren't even the only moths who can boast all that. So, technically speaking, a vampire butterfly would just be a different kind of vampire moth, which we already have and I should already be happy and content with, but I'm sure you get what I mean. A vampire moth with huge, bright wings that flutters around in broad daylight, just like the "butterflies" everyone treats as just sooOOOOooo romantic and delightful, not like, say, those mean and evil wasps, who it should be stated are sometimes the only thing standing between the ravenous larvae of butterflies and the utter decimation of local plant life.

To be fair though, I'd want this edgier butterfly to still have a distinctive appearance. A combination of wing shape and color scheme that can't be easily mistaken for any other species. Having looked again at a few butterfly taxa, there are some with largely transparent wings, and there are some with convincing owl-like eyespots we more often associate with moths, even some with multiple false eyes per wing, so how about crystal clear wings, except for all the eyespots? A collection of eyeballs flapping through the air. Maybe that's too conveniently rad to combine with draining blood, like the notion of a vampire frog with a visible skeleton, but first of all it's MY butterfly, and second, the death's head moth not only has a scary skull right on it, but it steals honey for a living and sometimes its caterpillars are raised on nightshade.

CULTURAL IMPACT: I think this would be a huge one. Butterflies are already everywhere in our iconography, on doilies and stickers and jewelry and postcards and just wherever you feel like putting something everyone likes to agree is "pretty," like a flower or a seashell or a snowflake. But what happens when we all know there's a "bad girl" butterfly out there, and we all know what it looks like? As long as it has that unique, recognizably unsettling wing pattern, you'll always know when the artist meant to say that this isn't the sunshine and cuddles kind of butterfly, but a butterfly tailor-made to juxtapose with images of bleeding roses and sexy vampires.

The Strix

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