10 weird little aliens you can find right here on Earth

The strangest creatures already live among us

By Eleanor Cummins

Posted on Mar 22, 2017 7:59 PM EDT

Avoid eye contact and back away slowly
These deep sea creepers get a bad rap—and I'm not here to absolve them. Anglerfish live in near total darkness, they have big heads and truly incredible underbites, and the females glow thanks to bioluminescent bacteria on the end of a tiny probe growing out of their foreheads. But the anglerfish's strangest feature is its parasitic mating strategy. The male sinks his teeth into the female and in return, she slowly absorbs him. His eyes disappear into her abdominal wall, and then the rest of him follows, until all that is left are his testes, which the female wears like a statement necklace. Oh, and she wears as many as six of these testicular trophies at a time. Stay safe, my friends. Wikimedia Commons

Share

Sure, we’d all love to traipse over to Europa and go hunting for alien lifeforms. But in the meantime, we can enjoy the weirdos that already live right here on Earth. Here are 10 of our favorite Earth-dwelling aliens—organisms so strange they seem otherworldly.

immortal jellyfish
You're already doing their work, dummy
You wish you were "blind" like this bat
You... BEE!
a tardigrade
platypus
army ants
mantis shrimp
The original desalination plant