Author: Internship

For the first time ever, this month the United Nations General Assembly convened a high-level meeting on the topic of antibiotic resistance. At the meeting in Geneva, members committed to develop action plans to reduce antibiotic use.

The urgency for this rare meeting stems from news over the last few months, when we’ve seen the emergence of resistance to the antibiotic colistin in humans and pigs in the U.S. Colistin, an old drug, is one of our “last resort” antibiotics. Physicians have been reluctant to use it because it can be toxic, and because of their restraint, resistance to the drug hasn’t historically been much of an issue in people. But while its use was rare in the U.S., it was commonly used in agriculture in China. Resistance genes ended up on a plasmid (a piece of DNA that can “jump” between bacteria species) and due to travel and trade, is now in the U.S. This is alarming, as once resistance to an antibiotic evolves, we know it can spread very quickly.

Colistin resistance is far from our only problem. There are now many common bacteria already resistant to antibiotics or carrying a resistance gene that may jump between other bacterial species. Antibiotic resistance leads us to a cornucopia of abbreviations: MRSA, VRE, NDM-1: bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; vancomycin-resistant Enterococci) or carry a resistance gene that can jump between bacteria species (NDM-1), like the colistin resistance gene can (abbreviated MCR-1). Even gonorrhea infections are becoming untreatable. A report released earlier this year suggests that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant infections will kill more people each year than cancer.

The bottom line is that we’re losing our last effective antibiotics, and it will change the way medicine is administered in the future.

It can be hard to visualize the enormous impact antibiotic resistance will have, so here are five ways antibiotic resistance might change your life.

1. A SCRATCH COULD BECOME DEADLY.

Infectious disease journalist Maryn McKenna wrote about her great-uncle’s death at age 30, in 1938, five years before antibiotics became widely available. “Through one of the scrapes, an infection set in. After a few days, he developed an ache in one shoulder; two days later, a fever. His wife and the neighborhood doctor struggled for two weeks to take care of him, then flagged down a taxi and drove him fifteen miles to the hospital in my grandparents’ town. He was there one more week, shaking with chills and muttering through hallucinations, and then sinking into a coma as his organs failed. Desperate to save his life, the men from his firehouse lined up to give blood. Nothing worked.”

Though this was 80 years ago, this scenario could become common again. As the available drugs fail, any breach of the skin could once again result in a deadly, untreatable infection. Something as simple as gardening or getting a tattoo could be fatal.

2. MINOR ILLNESSES WON’T BE MINOR ANYMORE.

Infectious disease physician and researcher Eli Perencevich tells mental_floss, “The post-antibiotic era will be your sister or mother dying of a urinary tract infection or your brother dying of a simple appendicitis. But I can’t offer a description of life cut short quite like Alfred Reinhart’s death.”

As a medical student at Harvard, Reinhart had survived a bout of rheumatic fever at age 13, leaving him with a chance of developing rheumatic heart disease later in life. He was also concerned about the potential to develop a bacterial infection in his heart—which he tracked by keeping close watch on his own symptoms during his time in medical school. He meticulously documented his irregular heartbeats, heart murmurs, and faint skin rashes for months, telling his own doctors he was going to die. He continued to take notes on himself until two days before his death at age 24 from subacute bacterial endocarditis following rheumatic fever.

“Both conditions would be prevented or treated with antibiotics only a few short years later,” Perencevich says.

3. SURGERY WOULD BECOME NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE.

Even now, infections occur after 1 to 3 percent of surgeries. Most of these are still treatable with antibiotics, but about 3 percent still lead to death. Even surgeries many consider “routine” now could easily become complicated without antibiotics, such as Caesarean sections or knee replacements. Infectious disease physician Judy Stone tells mental_floss, “Joint replacements, which are now routine, would be enormously risky. Without effective antibiotics, 40 to 50 percent of patients undergoing hip replacement would develop infections, and approximately 30 percent would die.”

Something like a bone marrow or organ transplant, where the host’s immune system must be compromised to accept the new tissue, would no longer be possible at all; the risk of an untreatable infection would be too high. Stone notes this trend has already started. “I already regularly see men who develop sepsis following prostate biopsies,” she says. “They are routinely given Cipro as antibiotic prophylaxis by their urologist, and the bacteria causing their bloodstream infections are now often resistant to Cipro.”

And “elective” surgeries, such as most cosmetic procedures? Forget about it.

4. ANTIBIOTICS COULD BE RATIONED OR ONLY AVAILABLE TO THOSE WITH MEANS.

It may sound far-fetched, but we’ve seen in recent months how easily critical medicines—EpiPens, insulin, treatments for HIV-associated infections, even acne creams—can quickly become financially out of reach. Because antibiotics are “community drugs”—use in anyone can affect how well they work in the whole population—as we find ourselves with fewer and fewer options available for treatment, the few remaining drugs may become strictly rationed—and expensive.

5. IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING.

In many developing countries, deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections are already far too common. In 2015, approximately 1.8 million people died of tuberculosis—in part because drugs weren’t available, and in part because their drugs did not work.

The grandfather of antibiotics, Alexander Fleming, famously predicted in his speech for the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he received for his discovery of penicillin, that in the future, penicillin might be misused and rendered ineffective. He was all too correct. By 1950, 40 percent of Staph bacteria found in hospitals were already resistant to penicillin.

Now, we have an almost impossible task ahead of us—to preserve the antibiotics we still have by using best prescribing practices in hospitals and clinics, reducing unnecessary use in livestock, and working to develop novel ones before it’s too late.

On the morning of July 25, 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Saturn and was surprised to find that it appeared to be flanked by two round blobs or bumps, one on either side. Unfortunately, Galileo’s telescope wasn’t quite advanced enough to pick out precisely what he had seen (his observations are now credited with being the earliest description of Saturn’s rings in astronomical history), but he nevertheless presumed that whatever he had seen was something special. And he wanted people to know about it.

Keen to announce his news and thereby secure credit for whatever it was he had discovered, Galileo sent letters to his friends and fellow astronomers. This being Galileo, the announcement was far from straightforward:

SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS

Each message that Galileo sent out contained little more than that jumbled string of letters, which when rearranged correctly spelled out the Latin sentence, “altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi”—or “I have observed that the highest planet is threefold.”

As the outermost planet known to science at the time, Saturn was the “highest planet” in question. And unaware that he had discovered its rings, Galileo was merely suggesting to his contemporaries that he had found that the planet was somehow divided into three parts. Announcing such a discovery in the form of an anagram might have bought Galileo some time to continue his observations, however, but there was a problem: Anagrams can easily be misinterpreted.

One of those to whom Galileo sent a letter was the German scientist Johannes Kepler. A keen astronomer himself, Kepler had followed and supported Galileo’s work for several years, so when the coded letter arrived at his home in Prague he quickly set to work solving it. Unfortunately for him, he got it completely wrong.

Kepler rearranged Galileo’s word jumble as “salve, umbistineum geminatum Martia proles,” which he interpreted as “be greeted, double-knob, children of Mars.” His solution was far from perfect (umbistineum isn’t really a grammatical Latin word, for one thing), but Kepler was nevertheless convinced that, not only had he correctly solved the riddle, but Galileo’s apparent discovery proved a theory he had been contemplating for several months.

Earlier in 1610, Galileo had discovered the four so-called “Galilean moons” of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Although we now know that Jupiter has several dozen moons of varying shapes, sizes, and orbits, at the time the announcement of just four natural satellites had led Kepler to presume that there must be a natural progression in the heavens: the Earth has one moon; Jupiter, two places further out from the Earth, has four; and sat between the two is Mars, which Kepler theorized must surely have two moons, to maintain the balanced celestial sequence 1, 2, 4 and so on (his only question was whether Saturn had six or eight).

Kepler got the anagram wrong, and the presumption that Jupiter only had four moons had been wrong. Yet as misguided as both these facts were, the assumption that Kepler made based on both of them—namely, that Mars had two moons—was entirely correct. Unfortunately for Kepler, his theory would not be proved until long after his death, as the two Martian moons Phobos and Deimos (named after Ares’s sons in Greek Mythology) were not discovered until 1877, by the American astronomer Asaph Hall.

Nevertheless, a misinterpretation of the anagram had accidentally predicted a major astronomical discovery of the 19th century, nearly 300 years before it occurred.

So remarkable was Kepler’s misguided—yet ultimately true—misinterpretation of Galileo’s puzzle that other stories and tall tales regarding his misinterpretations of Galileo’s anagrams soon began to emerge. According to the legend, Galileo sent a second coded message to Kepler later in 1610 when he discovered that Venus, like the Moon, has phases and therefore does not emit light itself but merely appears to shine due to reflected sunlight as it orbits nearer to the Sun than the Earth. The message this time read:

Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy

… or, “I am now bringing these immature things together in vain, oy!”

The correct solution was “Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,” meaning “The Mother of Love (an epithet for the planet Venus) copies the forms of Cynthia (an epithet for the Moon).” Kepler however misinterpreted the message this time as “macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem,” or, “there is a red spot in Jupiter, which rotates mathematically.” Kepler had done it again. Entirely by mistake, he predicted the discovery of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot more than two centuries before it was officially discovered.

Unlike the earlier account of Galileo and Kepler’s word play, however, this second story might be apocryphal. Galileo certainly sent out this second anagram to Kepler later in 1610, but the idea that he (albeit unintentionally) managed to make a second groundbreaking astronomical prediction entirely by accident appears to be a step too far. One accidental discovery, it seems, is more than enough. 

The human body is an amazing thing. For each one of us, it’s the most intimate object we know. And yet most of us don’t know enough about it: its features, functions, quirks, and mysteries. That’s why we’re launching a new series called The Body, which will explore human anatomy, part by part. Think of it as a mini digital encyclopedia with a dose of wow.
 

Everyone knows that when you get cut, you bleed—a result of the constant movement of blood through our bodies. But do you know all of the functions the circulatory system actually performs? Here are some surprising facts about human blood—and a few cringe-worthy theories that preceded the modern scientific understanding of this vital fluid.

1. FROM HIPPOCRATES’ HUMORS TO BLOODLETTING AND LEECHES

Long before we had scientific proof of the importance of the circulation system, ancient people knew it was important to health. That may be one reason for bloodletting, the practice of cutting people to “cure” everything from cancer to infections to mental illness. For the better part of two millennia, it persisted as one of the most common medical procedures.

Hippocrates, for example, believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of four “humors”—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. For centuries, doctors believed balance could be restored by removing excess blood, often by bloodletting or leeches. It didn’t always go so well. George Washington, for example, died soon after his physician treated a sore throat with bloodletting and a series of other agonizing procedures.

By the mid 19th century, bloodletting was on its way out. That said, it hasn’t completely disappeared. Bloodletting has actually been proven an effective treatment for some rare conditions like hemochromatosis, an excess of iron in the body that can lead to liver disease and heart problems.

Today leeches have also made a comeback in medicine. We now know that leech saliva contains substances with anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, and anesthetic properties. It also contains hirudin, an enzyme that prevents clotting. This lets more oxygenated blood into the wound, reducing swelling and helping to rebuild tiny blood vessels so that it can heal faster. That’s why leeches are still sometimes used in treating certain circulatory diseases, arthritis, skin grafting, and reattaching fingers and toes. (By the way, it turns out that even the blood-sucking variety of leech is not all that interested in human blood, contrary to popular belief.)

2. SCIENTISTS DIDN’T DISCOVER HOW BLOOD CIRCULATION ACTUALLY WORKED TILL THE 17TH CENTURY.

William Harvey, an English physician, is generally credited with discovering and demonstrating the mechanics of circulation, though his work developed out of the cumulative body of research on the subject over centuries.

The prevailing theory in Harvey’s time was that the lungs, not the heart, moved blood through the body. In part by dissecting living animals and studying their still-beating hearts, Harvey was able to describe how the heart pumped blood through the body and how blood returned to the heart. He also showed how valves in veins helped control the flow of blood through the body. Harvey was ridiculed by many of his contemporaries, but his theories were ultimately vindicated.

3. BLOOD TYPES WERE ONLY DISCOVERED IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY.

Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered different blood groups in 1901, after he noticed that blood mixed from people with different types would clot. His subsequent research classified types A, B and O. (Later research identified an additional type, AB). Blood types are differentiated by the kinds of antigens—molecules that provoke an immune system reaction—that attach to red blood cells.

People with Type A blood have only A antigens attached to their red cells but have B antigens in their plasma. In those with Type B blood, the location of the antigens is reversed. Type O blood has neither A nor B antigens on red cells, but both are present in the plasma. And finally, Type AB has both A and B antigens on red cells but neither in plasma. But wait, there’s more! When a third antigen, called the Rh factor, is present, the blood type is classified as positive. When Rh factor is absent, the blood type is negative. Got it?

Scientists still don’t understand why humans have different blood types, but knowing yours is important: Some people have life-threatening reactions if they receive a blood type during a transfusion that doesn’t “mix” with their own. Before researchers developed reliable ways to detect blood types, that tended to turn out badly for people receiving an incompatible human (or animal!) blood transfusion.

4. BLOOD MAKES UP ABOUT 8 PERCENT OF OUR TOTAL BODY WEIGHT.

Adult bodies contain about 5 liters (5.30 quarts) of blood (except pregnant women, whose bodies can produce about 50 percent more blood in order to nourish their fetus.)

Plasma, the liquid portion of our blood, accounts for about 3 liters. It carries red and white blood cells and platelets, which deliver oxygen to our cells, fight disease, and repair damaged vessels. These are joined by electrolytes, antibodies, vitamins, proteins, and other nutrients required to nourish all the other cells in the body.

5. THE LIFE SPAN OF A HEALTHY RED BLOOD CELL IS ONLY ABOUT 120 DAYS.

Red blood cells contain an important protein called hemoglobin that delivers oxygen to all the other cells in our bodies. It also carries carbon dioxide from those cells back to the lungs.

Red blood cells are produced in our bone marrow. But not everyone produces the healthy ones. Sufferers of sickle cell anemia, a hereditary condition, develop malformed red blood cells that can’t move easily through blood vessels. These blood cells last only 10 to 20 days, which leads to a chronic shortage of red blood cells, often causing to pain, infection, and organ damage.

6. BLOOD COULD POTENTIALLY PLAY A ROLE IN TREATING ALZHEIMER’S.

In 2014, research led by Stanford University scientists found that injecting the plasma of young mice into older mice improved memory and learning. Their findings follow years of experiments in which scientists surgically joined the circulatory systems of old and young mice to test whether young blood could reverse signs of aging. Those results showed rejuvenating effects of a particular blood protein on the organs of older mice, as well as muscle stem cells.

The Stanford team’s findings that young blood had positive effects on mouse memory and learning sparked intense interest in whether it could eventually lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The scientist who led the research is now testing the effects of young plasma on Alzheimer’s patients.

And in August, a California start-up announced it would conduct a clinical trial with volunteers 35 and older to see if a young (human) plasma injection offered anti-aging benefits. That trial is proving controversial, however, because of the price tag: The company will charge patients $8000 to participate.

7. AFRAID OF BLOOD? THERE’S A DIAGNOSIS FOR THAT.

If you’ve cringed your way through this list, you’re not alone—many are a bit squeamish about blood. But for 3 to 4 percent of people, squeamishness associated with blood, injury, or invasive medical procedures like injections rises to the level of a true phobia. It’s called blood injury injection phobia (BII). And most sufferers share a common reaction: fainting.

Most phobias cause an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, and often muscle tension, shakes, and sweating. This is part of the body’s sympathetic nervous system’s “fight or flight” response. But sufferers of BII experience an added symptom: after initially increasing, their blood pressure and heart rate will abruptly drop.

This reaction is caused by the vagus nerve, which works to keep a steady heart rate, among other things. But the vagus nerve sometimes overdoes it, pushing blood pressure and heart rate too low. (You may have experienced this phenomenon if you’ve ever felt faint while hungry, dehydrated, startled, or standing up too fast.) For BII sufferers, this so-called vasovagal response can happen at the mere sight or suggestion of blood, needles, or bodily injury, making even a routine medical or dental checkup cause for dread and embarrassment.

Hogwarts letter got lost in the mail? Don’t worry: You can still experience Halloween the Harry Potter way by visiting one of these events. From fast-paced Quidditch tournaments to frothy mugs of butterbeer, these community festivals and private events will help you celebrate the most magical night of the year the way Dumbledore would have wanted you to.

1. WIZARDING WEEKEND // ITHACA, NEW YORK

Press Bay Alley in Ithaca, New York transfigures into Diagon Alley from October 28 to 30 this year, and you don’t even need to tap any bricks with a wand to get there. In fact, it’s free, so it’s extra easy for muggles to attend. Wizarding Weekend started last year as a one-day trick-or-treat route for the community, but blew up like a game of Exploding Snap and drew nearly 8000 attendees. This Wizarding Weekend will be just as magical as the last, with Quidditch matches (on electric bikes instead of broomsticks), advanced potions (a.k.a. cocktails) classes for adults, Horcrux scavenger hunts, Dark Arts coffee tours, and more.

2. HARRY POTTER HALLOWEEN // SCOTTSVILLE, VIRGINIA

If your permission slip is signed, visit Valley Street in Scottsvilla, Virginia from noon to 10 p.m. on October 29 for a day in Hogsmeade. Local stores transform into their wizarding world alter egos, like Honeydukes and Ollivanders, and host Harry Potter-themed activities.

3. POTTERPALOOZA // NORMAL, ILLINOIS

Adults (21 and over) take over the Children’s Discovery Museum on October 21 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Get sorted into your Hogwarts house and take classes like divination, herbology, and potions. Admission is $25, but includes food and a free drink ticket. Come in your finest wizarding attire or dressed as your favorite character from the series.

4. GREAT HALL HALLOWEEN FEAST // CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

The Ada Street restaurant gives Hogwarts a run for its galleons on October 28 to 30. The restaurant will serve guests a four-course dinner complete with firewhiskey dessert; each course is paired with Harry Potter-themed cocktails, like Pumpkin Juice and the Dementor Antidote. Diners will also enjoy a pre-dinner butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks, as well as house sorting and Quidditch beer pong on the patio. Tickets are $75 and include tax and tip.

5. A HAUNTING AT HOGWARTS // OMAHA, NEBRASKA

Hogwarts alums get to dust off their robe uniforms on October 22 at the Omaha Children’s Museum. Activities at this adults-only event include Harry Potter trivia and a costume contest, plus a special “potions class” science show. Appetizers and drinks, including nonalcoholic butterbeer, will be served. The museum’s permanent exhibits will remain open for this event as well. The event is sold out, but you can have your named added to the wait list by calling the museum.

6. HARRY POTTER FESTIVAL AND QUIDDITCH TOURNAMENT // PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

This festival, held from October 21 to 22, is more expansive than the underground vaults at Gringotts, spanning a full 10 blocks of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood and drawing in thousands of attendees. Attendees can have a cup of tea at Madame Puddifoot’s, explore the Triwizard straw maze, try hands-on activities at Horcrux stations, see live owls, ride thestrals, and more. There’s also a ticketed Potter Pub Crawl complete with glasses of butterbeer, and a Harry Potter conference with an academic bent, but admission is free to both the festival and the Quidditch tournament.

7. HARRY POTTER FESTIVAL // EDGERTON, WISCONSIN

From October 21 to 23, witches and wizards young and old celebrate all things Potter at this pay-as-you-go community festival. (Guests also have the option of paying $25 for the entire weekend.) There are plenty of Hogwarts classes on the roster, like Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions, as well as house sorting, live raptor demonstrations, wizard roller-skating, and Horcrux hunts. All the activities and events are laid out on the festival’s version of the Marauder’s Map; just solemnly swear you’re up to no good.

8. HARRY POTTER AND THE TRANSFIGURED TOWN // GODERICH, ONTARIO

The Huron County Museum gets Potter-fied on October 29 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with activities like a costumed photo booth and face painting. The museum’s stationary train becomes the Hogwarts Express for the night, and Ministry of Magic officials have volunteered their services for misguided museum tours. Sweet tooths will be satisfied with a Honeydukes candy trolley and (nonalcoholic) butterbeer. Admission is $20 for adults and $10 for kids, with proceeds to support local food banks.

We’re all familiar with the most dramatic metamorphosizers of the animal kingdom: butterflies. They go from a tiny egg to an awkward wiggling caterpillar to mysterious pupa to a delicate, colorful winged creature. However, there are many other animals besides butterflies that undergo dramatic transformations from youth to adult. Here are 15 of the most epic metamorphoses seen in nature.

1. LADYBUGS (COCCINELLIDAE)

What’s black, white, and red all over? Mandy ladybugs are—but only in their final stage of life. Turns out these little beetles undergo one of the most epic metamorphoses in the animal kingdom: For most species, after adult female ladybugs mate, they lay a clutch of tiny yellow eggs right in the middle an aphid colony, usually on the underside of a leaf. Eggs hatch in a week, revealing spiky black worm-like larvae that readily gobble up the aphids around them. When a larva is fully grown, it changes into a blob-like yellow pupa. Finally, the black, white and red (or sometimes yellow or orange) insect appears.

2. MAYFLY (EPHEMEROPTERA)

Mayflies, the less-elegant cousins of dragonflies and damselflies, have one of the most unique metamorphoses of all insects. Most insects’ life stages move from egg to nymph to pupa to adult, but mayflies do not have a pupa stage. Instead, it is the only type of insect to undergo a subimago stage, meaning it’s almost an adult in the sense it grows wings … but cannot fly long distances and isn’t yet sexually mature. The mayfly’s final life stage, the fully flighted and sexually mature imago or adult, is extremely short, lasting just a few hours to a few days.

3. PEACOCK SPIDER (MARATUS)

Peacock spiders are tiny, venomous, and beautiful (especially the colorfully rumped males) arthopods native to Australia. Male peacock spiders are so beautiful, in fact, it’s hard to believe that, like all spiders, they go through some not-so-glamorous life stages: egg, egg sac, spiderling, adult. When male peacock spiders reach sexual maturity they try to seduce less-colorful female peacock spiders by performing a showy dance.

4. NUDIBRANCH (NUDIBRANCHIA)

While adult nudibranchs are essentially colorful and ornate blobs of the sea, they don’t start out that way. In fact, after hatching, nudibranch larvae are tiny, plain-looking and have small snail-like shells. Over the course of two months they morph from this plain stage into adults, along the way getting larger and more colorful, losing their shells, and growing gills and feelers, called rhinophores.

5. CROWN OF THORNS STARFISH (ACANTHASTER PLANCI)

Another sea creature that looks completely different as an adult than a juvenile is the crown of thorns starfish. When looking at an adult, it’s easy to see where this creature gets its name: It’s completely covered with dangerous-looking sharp spikes. But after hatching, it looks like not much more than a translucent, floating blob. Over time it grows arms, and later, spikes, then fixes itself to rocks where it feeds on coral.

6. IMMORTAL JELLYFISH (TURRITOPSIS DOHRNII)

The secret to a long and prosperous life, it turns out, is to be a jellyfish. The aptly named immortal jellyfish begins life as an egg, like all other jellies. It then enters the free-swimming larva stage, then settles down into a polyp on the ocean floor, and then finally morphs into a sexually mature jellyfish. Unlike most other jellies, an immortal jellyfish is capable of reverting back into the polyp stage at any time it faces environmental stress, attacks by predators, sickness or old age—essentially being reborn as a young jelly.

7. FLATFISH (PLEURONECTIFORMES)

Think of Pablo Picasso’s most asymmetrically painted human face, stick it onto a fish, and there you have a flatfish. These fish, which include flounder and sole among other species, begin life inside tiny eggs that float up to the surface of the sea. For a few weeks, a larval flatfish swims upright and looks just like a typical baby fish. But after a few weeks its skull bones shift and one eye migrates to the opposite side of its face, forcing the now-lopsided fish to swim sideways. Eventually, when its facial features all move to one side of its face, it changes color and moves to live on the bottom of the sea, its blind side facing down.

8. EASTERN HELLBENDER (CRYPTOBRANCHUS ALLEGANIENSIS)

Also called the snot otter and devil dog, the eastern hellbender is a giant type of salamander not exactly known for being beautiful in its adult form. Slippery, wrinkly and the color of mud, they’re right at home at the bottom of rivers, where they can live up to 50 years. Like all salamanders, hellbenders begin as eggs. From their eggs they hatch, coming into the world small and adorable. As time passes, they grow larger and less cute.

9. CHALAZODES BUBBLE NEST FROG (RAORCHESTES CHALAZODES)

Don’t let this lime-green frog’s bright and cheery looks fool you: It lives in only one tiny area in India and is critically endangered, threatened most by an ever-shrinking habitat. These creatures were once believed to lay eggs that developed into tadpoles on pond surfaces like many other frogs. But in 2014, it was discovered that they had a different reproductive strategy: The frogs crawl into a living bamboo shoot that has a hole in it (probably created by insects or rodents) and lay their eggs there. The creatures skip the tadpole stage entirely, hatching as froglets. Because they don’t have a tadpole stage, the species doesn’t require water to lay its eggs.

10. MIMIC POISON DART FROG (RANITOMEYA IMITATOR)

Covered in bright hues spotted, striped, banded, and blotched with contrasting black, the poison dart frog is one of the most striking-looking of all amphibians. Yet they don’t start out that way. After hatching, young mimic poison dart frogs are looked after by their mother, who lays a clutch of unfertilized feeder eggs to provide them with some nourishment (and, at least for some species of poison frog, toxicity). Tadpoles are brown and black, growing more colorful with age until they reach their fantastic adult form.

11. KEA (NESTOR NOTABILIS)

The kea is a large, vulnerable species of parrot native to New Zealand, with green and blue feathers on its back and brown and orange feathers on its underside. While adult keas appear majestic and beautiful, they don’t start out that way. Baby keas retain an alien-like, sparse white hairdo for several months after hatching. Keas are considered a very intelligent species, observed working together and using tools.

12. LAYSAN ALBATROSS (PHOEBASTRIA IMMUTABILIS)

Laysan albatrosses are another species of bird where the babies are very little like their parents. But unlike baby keas, baby Laysan albatrosses hatch as adorable fuzzy gray blobs. As they grow older, the babies slowly grow adult feathers and lose their baby feathers. This leaves them with unique hairdos that sometimes make them look like human celebrities. Ringo Starr, anyone?

13. FLAMINGO (PHOENICOPTERUS)

Unlike keas and albatrosses, baby flamingoes look a lot like their parents, except they’re missing something: color. Flamingo chicks hatch with gray and/or white feathers, over time taking on the same pink hue as their parents, which becomes more intense over time. Why? Well, you are what you eat, and flamingoes eat shrimp and algae rich in carotenoids, the same pigments that cause shrimp to turn pink when cooked.

14. VIRGINIA OPOSSUM (DIDELPHIS VIRGINIANA)

Virginia opossums are scavengers, eating carrion and rotting vegetation, and that helps keep the environment clean. Virginia opossums are native to North America, where they’re the continent’s only living marsupials. This opossums have pouches for carrying their babies, just like kangaroos. Also like kangaroos they give birth to large numbers of navy-bean size babies, which grow inside their pouches. When they’re born, they look more like pink jellybeans than animals. Over the course of three to five months, they mature, growing fur, sharp teeth and long tails.

15. GIANT PANDA (AILUROPODA MELANOLEUCA)

Giant pandas are called giant pandas for a reason: They’re enormous in size, weighing up to 250 pounds. But these bamboo-munching bears don’t start out that way. When born, giant panda cubs weigh just 90 to 130 grams (about as much as a small apple). Besides being way smaller in size, baby pandas are also quite sparsely furred—and so they look very different than what they will as fuzzy black-and-white adults.