Weird Animal Attacks

[User3]

This isn't directly related to D&D wildshape, where it is mathematically possible to prove the best animal for the best situation.

Rather, this is for a superhero game where my protagonist has the ability to selectively use the traits of animals; something like animal man.

I'm looking for wild, weird, strong, and fast.

Something like..

Pistol Shrimp- Has the ability to generate underwater sonic attacks.

Bombadier Beetle- Ability to shoot incredibly painful caustic liquids.

Starfish- Can split into seperate animals when cut up and regenerates.

[Username17]

Peregrine Falcon - 349 km/h diving flight speed.
Barracuda - accelerates to 43 km/h from a dead start in less than a second.
Honey Ants - significantly more food storage capacity than a snake.
Tuna - maintain a swimming speed of over 60 kn/h for hours or days
Bees - See ultraviolet and polarized light and detect magnetic fields.
Vulture - can see a stationary rodent from 5 kilometers away.
Earthworm - can taste with every single part of its body.
Mouse - can generate and hear high frequency sound that is indectable by humans (by up to 80,000 Hz)
Platypus - Can sense electric charge with its beak and has poison spines in its legs.

And as always when mentioning the platypus, I think it's important to stress that this is a real animal and not just some made up chimera. It really is a mammal with a beak, and poison spines on the insides of its legs, and it really does have an electro-sensitive bill. And webbed feet. Fvcking platypus.

-Username17

[erik]

1146725695[/unixtime]]It really is a mammal

Monotreme. But your point stands. Fvcking platypus.
[edit: yah yah, mammal too, I'd swear that when I was back in school our text books listed monotremes as a class, not an order, oh well]


Fun animals also include:

* Puffer/Blowfish (I'm imagining the thunder ninja from Big Trouble in Little China)
* Hyena jaws (I dunno what kind of pressure they exert, but I hear it cited as bad-ass all the time)
* Phosphorescent animals (Fireflies, some fishies, etc.)
* Electric Eels (zap!)
* Cuttlefish (polymorphic and amazing chameleons too)
* Salamanders (some can let their tail rip off without much ado... not sure of the applications for this in superhero life, but hey)
* Dolphins/Bats (sonar)
* Snake venom (there are all sorts of kinds of venoms going by what they do to a victim, how deadly they are, what they are made of, this is a really diverse category... and some snakes spit too)
* Porcupine quills

[PhoneLobster]

Ahem.

If I recall correctly. And there is no guarantee that I do.

The monotreme is a mammal in the same way that a marsupial is a mammal. Ie there are three categories of mammal.

Placental mammal (us, cows, horses, dogs, etc...) Mammals because they feed milk to their young, are warm blooded and do the whole live birth thing.

Marsupial (Kangaroo, wombat, sugar glider possum, bandicoot, etc...) Same as placentals only their young are born basically premature and finish development in an external pouch or something similar. They also seem oddly fond of hopping, but thats not really a group trait just a hobby of most of them.

Monotremes (basically just the platypus and its buddy the echidna) A bunch of nutbag half mammals that give milk are, well, basically warm blooded, and LAY EGGS.

Franks got the platypus summary mostly right, but let me stress the LAYING EGGS thing as a trait. Point out that the "beak" is soft and leathery. And that the poison is like totally monotreme super ninja nerve toxin that baffles and excites scientists with its freaky magical properties. It also lives in burrows that it digs, like an otter. Oh yeah and its rare and shy and the first person to do the whole successful platypus breeding thing was the infamous "Man in The Cat Skin Hat".

I'd also point out that its closest relative is the Echidna. An anteating egg laying, young in pouch, heftily clawed ant mound burrowing critter which shoots a long sensative prehensile toungue out of its beak like nose and has a forest of thick boney quills sticking out its back. I'm pretty sure they aren't poison nerve ninjas though.

Once upon a time there used to be giant platypi in Australia, like really really big ones, they died out along with the giant horse sized wombats and ten foot tall carnivorous primate like kangaroos (I'm not kidding these animals really existed).

I hear there are still giant echidnas in Papua New Guinea, but they aren't nearly as big as the extinct wombats.

On a completely pointless ramble this reminds me of Tree Kangaroos. Possibly the most hilarious branch of evolution I've heard of in the region. The Queensland ones mostly hang around the lower parts of easily climbed trees.

But the zany Papua ones live right on top of the canopy. These are basically dwarf kangaroos with nearly ZERO adapation to a tree born existance and they live right on top of trees. I've seen footage of these guys sitting up there looking exceedingly neurotic and stumbling around very carefully in a dizy stumbling haze of what looks a lot like vertigo.

You can see the look on their sad sad face that screams out "fvcking evolution, why the fvck are we up here?"

I'd expect to see some treeborn druid say "Form of Tree Kangaroo GO!" then spend the rest of a combat trying to balance on a branch with one clumsy oversized foot before falling off in the first light breeze.

[erik]

1146821621[/unixtime]]they died out along with the giant horse sized wombats

The bbboy censors are officially messing with my head, I translated that phrase differently as a result of their influence.

Sad thing regarding the monotremes is that I do recall what I was taught, and it didn't happen to be what is considered correct... well, as far as any taxonomy can be considered correct (fashionable is probably a better descriptor). My highschool beat it into us that mammals were a different class, rather than dividing into 3 subclasses of mammals. Ho hum.

In college I didn't have to deal much with taxonomy, even as a bio major, so my awkward highschool taxonomy learnins stuck. Genetics and plant physiology are much moreso my thing.

[Fwib]

PhoneLobster: A post both informative and hilarious

[Count Arioch the 28th]

1146821621[/unixtime]]ten foot tall carnivorous primate like kangaroos (I'm not kidding these animals really existed).

If those still existed, I'd totally get a few and train them to guard my property.

Because that would be awesome for so many reasons.