It’s no secret: animals are out to kill us. While we spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the terrorist threat overseas, animal sleeper cells are biding their time, developing strange and fabulous powers far beyond those of man. Hawks sharpening their talons. Giant squids flexing their suckers. Dolphins waggling their prehensile penises. And leading the brigade, a very special cat that knows when you’re going to die. And that’s only the tip of the furry iceberg.
So, as a public service, we’ve decided to profile some of the world’s most superpowered creatures. As far as we know, none of them are on the Endangered Species list. Though with the help of fear mongering articles like this, and some generous gun control legislation, we can change all that. If we don’t, it just may be us humans living in protected enclosures and spending our days watching pornography to encourage mating behavior like nature’s loser, the Panda.
The Power: Atomic Climbing
How It Works: When they’re not using their British accents to hawk car insurance, geckos spend their time scurrying up surfaces with the ease of a machine specifically designed to do the same. But this isn’t just some snail-class gooey shit climbing we’re talking about here. Every square millimeter of a gecko’s footpads contains 14,000 tiny hairs, called setae, each of which branches into around 500 little tiny “spatulae” so small that they are below the wavelength of visible light. Using these invisible, atomic micromicromicrofibers, geckos are able to harness van der Waals interactions on a molecular level, sticking to almost every known surface outside of Teflon. Their grip is so strong, if it used all of its gripping power at once, a single adult gecko could hold aloft 290 lbs. At this point, it’s important to note that our brave men and women in uniform almost all weigh under 290 lbs., making them prime targets for roving bands of gecko hurl-squads.
Spirit Animal Of: Spider-Man, The Human Fly, Dan Osmond
Additional Powers: Can lick their own eyeballs, and expel feces when threatened.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: Outfit our soldiers with the latest in Teflon bodysuit technology.
#7.
The Animal: Bombardier Beetle
The Power: Energy Blasts
How It Works: A number of animal species are able to project ink, foul-smelling chemicals, or feces from their bodies. But in these cases, there is little to fear beyond stained clothing, a tomato sauce bath, or social ostracism. The bombardier beetle, however, takes bodily expulsion to a new threat level by harnessing the power of chemical reactions to release a boiling, exploding liquid from its body up to seventy times per encounter. In short, it shits napalm. We don’t even need to explain what kind of threat this poses to our citizens and toilet paper industry alike.
Spirit Animal Of: Me after a night of Tijuana-style Jalapeño Dogs.
Additional Powers: Starred in a children’s book that purports to disprove the Theory of Evolution.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: Spiking the beetle’s natural food source with boxes upon boxes of Gas-X.
The Power: Electrolocation
How It Works: Count your senses. If you’re fortunate, you’ve got one hand raised, five fingers splayed in sensorial triumph. If you’re less fortunate, a birth defect or lathe accident has knocked you down to three or four, or else you got your fingers chopped off in a bar fight. But if you’re a Platypus, you get to raise six fingers, all presumably snapped from the hands of girl scouts and dangling from a malevolent bill. Platapi are monotremes (the only other monotreme is the echidna, who we already know are after our Chaos Emeralds), a type of mammal endowed with the sixth sense of electroreception, the ability to sense electric fields generated by muscular contraction. That means they can sense your directional location if you so much as move a muscle. Even a blind, deaf Platypus with no sense of smell knows right where you are, and he and his echidna friends are on their way. With tire irons. And they’re angry drunk.
Spirit Animal Of: Daredevil, Radar O’Reilly, the raptors from the kitchen scene of Jurassic Park.
Additional Powers: Venemous talons on each foot, egg-laying, and the cruel mockery of all evolutionary and natural law.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: Convince them that their “protected habitat” is a Faraday Cage.
#5.
The Animal: Hummingbird
The Power: Superspeed
How It Works: Hummingbirds do everything fast. They’ve got the fastest metabolism of any animal other than insects, their heart rate can get up to 1,260 beats per minute, and they can flap their wings up to 70 times a second. One can only imagine the horrifying speed with which they’d fire shoulder-mounted rockets at our school buses. This incredible speed makes the Hummingbird the only animal capable of hovering in midair, and even flying backwards. The only device we have that can match them in aerial agility is the helicopter, and that’s got nothing on them for nectar-drinking ability. If terrorists ever decide to design and manufacture Hummingbird pistols, we’re going to be in for mobile, whirling vortices of sheer bullet.
Spirit Animal Of: This guy.
Additional Powers: A bifurcated tongue, the ability to hibernate in times of food shortage, and the observed ability to fly over 500 miles without stopping to sleep or eat.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: Because of their speed, hummingbirds need to eat up to five times their own body weight in nectar per day. Destroy the flowers, and we’ve got these bastards on the run.
#4.
The Animal: Archer Fish
The Power: Sharpshooting
How It Works: The archerfish of India and Polynesia feed primarily on insects. Only, unlike normal, International Law-abiding fish, they don’t just wait for a bug to fly into the water and drown. The archerfish uses a specially-shaped lower jaw to shoot a jet of water up to fifteen feet long to knock insects out of overhanging branches. They are such skilled marksman that they can routinely shoot and kill an insect six feet above the surface of the water, while compensating for light refraction. Which is all well and good when they’re only shooting at bugs; let the animals wipe each other out, we say. But how long can we allow our children to cavort and play on the branches overhanging Polynesian rivers before we lose one to these deadly snipers?
Spirit Animal Of: Leon from The Professional, Simo Hayha, Robin of Loxley
Additional Powers: Enough PR to get two U.S. submarines named after them.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: Polluting some of the world’s rivers might fuzzy up their aim a bit. Get on it.
#3.
The Animal: Ring-tailed Cat
The Power: Agility
How It Works: Your average house cat is already fairly threatening: claws, the evil eye, and an internal “righting mechanism” that guarantees that no matter how high a building you drop them off of, the best you’re going to get is four broken kitty legs. Enter the ring-tailed cat, probably shimmying backwards down a pipe. The ring-tail cat has taken “cat-like agility” to an absurd degree, routinely performing cartwheels on narrow branches in order to change direction, rotating their feet up to 180 degrees, and climbing up cervices in rock by ricochet-jumping back and forth between each side. That’s right; they can’t just out-agile us, they’ve got to rub it in our faces too. Word has it the Russians are busy recruiting ring-taileds for their 2012 floor gymnastics team. All that, and the evil eye is strong as ever.
Spirit Animal Of: Altair from Assassin’s Creed, Sam Fischer, Shawn Johnson
Additional Powers: The ring-tailed cat is omnivorous. Now, we don’t want to frighten anyone unduly, but did you know that the literal translation of omnivorous is “eats everything?”
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: A nation-wide pole-greasing campaign.
#2.
The Animal: Anglerfish
The Power: Post-Mortem Impregnation
How It Works: Even a carpet bombing of the sea floor may not be enough to wipe these things out for good (although it’s not a bad start). Some particularly stubborn anglerfish species are able to procreate even from beyond the watery grave. The males of the species, when they find a female, will proceed with foreplay in the manner any of us would: by biting into her skin, then secreting an enzyme that dissolves his lips and part of her body, permanently attaching himself to her in the form of a decaying food tube. At the other end of the tube are the gonads, primed to release their precious payload at the woman’s discretion. That’s the human equivalent of stapling your nuts to an ex-girlfriend, on the premise that “she might need them later.”
Spirit Animal Of: Every needy boyfriend who ever “accidentally” left something at your apartment so he could drop by to pick it up.
Additional Powers: Bioluminescent head-lures, extreme resistance to undersea water pressure, camouflage.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: An abundant supply of morning after pills.
The Power: Every fucking thing
How It Works: The Octopus may very well be the biggest threat to national security since brown people. They’re the most intelligent invertebrate in the world, can detach their arms, spray ink, move in perfect cadence with underwater currents, squeeze through any space larger than a quarter, and change color to blend in with their surroundings. Due to the inordinate number of superhuman powers they were granted, current biological studies assert that they may, in fact, be God.
Spirit Animal Of: Mr. Fantastic, Captain Marvel (the shitty one), Dr. Zoidberg
Additional Powers: Not that they need any, but researchers now believe that some octopi are capable of walking on land on two legs, while disguising themselves as a coconut. So the next time you’re going to make piña coladas, blend first and ask questions later.
Our Only Defense, Should They Rise Against Us: If the octopi are attacking, there’s really not a whole lot we can do. The best plan would be to nuke the Earth to hell and start over. There’s a good chance the radioactive mutants spawned in the apocalypse won’t be as powerful or weird looking, anyway.
译文:
8种超能力动物
这已经不是秘密了：动物打算杀死我们。当我们花费数千亿美元对付海外恐怖势力时，动物恐怖分子们正在抓紧时间，发展远超过人类的强大而奇异的能力。鹰磨利了爪子，巨型鱿鱼锻炼触手，海豚晃动阴茎（= =理解不能）。而一只知道你死期的特别猫是小队的头领。而这也仅是这些披着毛皮的家伙阴谋的冰山一角。
所以，为公众服务，我们决定就世界上能力最强的动物做个概括。据我们所知，它们都不在濒临灭绝物种名单上。但在像本文这样贩卖恐惧的文章和某些宽大的枪火管制法律的帮助下，我们可以使它们成为濒危物种。如果我们不这么做的话，就轮到我们人类住在保护区里，每日阅读黄色书刊来刺激交配行为了，就像大自然的输家，熊猫那样。
第八名，壁虎
能力：爬墙术
工作原理：除了用英国口音诈取汽车保险费外，壁虎们像爬墙机一样轻松地在墙壁上飞跑。但这里讨论的不单是这些蛇形爬虫的英姿。壁虎脚掌上每平方毫米有14000根刚毛，每一根的尖端有约500根被称做“spatulae”的细小纤维，小到比可见光的波长还要小。利用这些肉眼看不见的超细纤维，壁虎可以引发范德瓦尔斯交互作用，把自己粘在除了特氟伦外的几乎所有表面上。它们的抓力如此强劲，如果一次性使出所有抓力，一只成年壁虎可以提起290磅的重物。很重要的一点是，我们绝大部分勇敢的警察同志们体重都在290磅以下，这使得他们将成为四处晃荡的壁虎帮的主要袭击目标。
同类代表：蜘蛛侠、苍蝇人和Dan Osmond。
其他能力：可以舔到自己的眼球，受到威胁时喷出排泄物
如果它们与我们为敌的话，唯一的防御措施：用最新的特氟伦紧身衣把我们的战士武装起来。
第七名：Bombardier Beetle（某非洲甲虫，难道是放屁虫？= =）
能力：能量爆炸
工作原理：有许多物种能够从体内释放墨汁、臭味化学物或排泄物。仅是这样的话，只需担心弄脏的衣服、洗个番茄汁澡或被文明社会嫌弃。但Bombardier Beetle这种甲虫利用化学反应，每次可最多喷出70次发热、爆炸性的液体，这将排出体内物式的袭击威胁度刷新了。简单地说，它的排泄物像胶化汽油。我想不用解释它对我们的文明和厕纸制造业会造成何种威胁了。
同类代表：Me after a night of Tijuana-style Jalapeño Dogs。
其他能力：一本反进化论儿童读物的大眼睛主角
当它们与我们为敌时，唯一的防御措施：用充满X气体的箱子闷死它的食物来源。
第六名：鸭嘴兽
能力：超感定位
工作原理：清点下你的能力。如果你幸运的话，你可以伸出健全、有感觉的五指做胜利手势。如果你比较不幸，先天性畸形或后天意外会使你的手指数降到3或4根，或者你也可能在一起酒吧斗殴中把手指全切掉。但如果你是鸭嘴兽，你应该竖起6根手指，可能都是恶狠狠地从女童子军手上咬下来的。鸭嘴兽是两种单乳类动物之一（另一种是针宴鼠，看了刺猬索尼克历险记后我们都很熟悉它了），一种具有第六感的哺乳类动物。能够感觉到肌肉收缩产生的电场。这也就是说只要你动一丝肌肉，它们就能知道你在哪里。即使是又聋又瞎且失去嗅觉的鸭嘴兽也知道你的精确位置，他们的针宴鼠小朋友们正在赶来的路上，带着拆轮胎棒，愤怒，而且醉醺醺的。
同类代表：夜魔侠、侏罗纪厨房的肉食鸟Radar O’Reilly
其他能力：每只脚爪都带毒、下蛋以及对所有进化和自然法则的残酷嘲笑。
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：把它们骗进法拉第笼，使它们确信那是安全的栖息地。
第五名 蜂鸟
能力：超级速度
工作原理：蜂鸟做什么都超快。它们的新陈代谢速度是除了昆虫外最快的，心跳每秒可达1260下，每秒可以拍打翅膀70次。可以想象在学校巴士上点燃便携式火箭的恐怖速度。这个惊人的速度使蜂鸟成为唯一可以在空中悬停和向后飞行的动物。我们唯一能与它们抗衡的飞行物是直升机，而它们在空中喝花蜜的本事怎么都比不过的。如果恐怖分子决定设计并制造蜂鸟型手枪的话，我们就会处于飞速移动的子弹漩涡中了。
同类代表：这个家伙。
其他能力：比嘴巴长两倍的舌头，在食物匮乏期冬眠以及现知的连续不眠不吃飞行500公里的本事。
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：由于它们的速度，蜂鸟每天要吃掉自身体重五倍的花蜜。毁掉花朵吧，这样我们就能把这些小坏蛋送西天了。
第四名：射水鱼
能力：迅速射击
工作原理：印度和波利尼西亚的射水鱼主要以昆虫为食。但与通常情况不同，它们不会乖乖地等着虫子自己掉进水里淹死。射水鱼有一个形状奇特的下巴，可以将水射出15英尺来打下空中的虫子。它们都是高明的神枪手，通常可以修正光折射，准确地打死距离水面6英尺的虫子。如果它们只射击虫子，一切都很好。让动物们自相残杀吧，我们常说。但是在我们的孩子被这些狙击手杀死之前，我们还能让他们在波利尼西亚河流周围玩耍多久呢？
其他能力：准确度高到可以让两艘美国潜艇以它为名
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：污染世界上某些河流可能遮挡它们的视线。干吧。
第三名：圈尾猴
能力：敏捷
工作原理：普通的宠物猫已经够可怕了：爪子、邪恶的眼睛，并且由于它体内的平衡系统，不管你从多高的地方把它扔下来，你能获得的最好结果也只是断了四条腿的猫咪。让我们来看看圈尾猴，它可能正倒退着爬下一根管子。圈尾猴把猫的“敏捷”发挥到了近乎荒谬的地步，它们可以为了转向而轻松地在细枝上侧身翻，把腿旋转180度，在岩壁两边来回跳着向上爬。是的，它们不仅仅比我们灵巧的多，还衬得我们一脸蠢样。据说俄国人忙着训练圈尾猴准备2012年的体操比赛。它们的眼睛依旧邪恶强大。
同类代表：Assassin’s Creed里的Altair ，Sam Fischer和Shawn Johnson
其他能力：圈尾猴是杂食的。现在我们并不想过分惊吓任何人，但是你知道杂食的另一个意思就是“什么都吃”吗？
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：全国性的杆上涂油竞赛。
第二名：扁鲨
能力：死后繁殖（= =）
工作原理：即使是对海底进行地毯式轰炸也不足以将这些家伙永远灭绝掉（尽管是个不错的开头）。有些特别顽固的扁鲨系鱼类甚至可以在死后生育。这些种类的雄性发现雌性后，会像我们一样大献殷勤：亲吻她的皮肤，秘密地分泌一种酶分解掉自己的嘴唇和她的部分身体，然后把自己以逐渐腐坏的食物管道的形式长久地附着在她身上。管道的另一端是性腺，随时准备将宝贵的生命种子释放到她体内。这与人类认为“她可能之后会需要”而将自己的东西交给前女友的行为是一样的。
同类代表：每个“无意间”将某个东西留在公寓以便让女友捡起来扔掉的辛苦男友。
其他能力：脑袋上有个会发光的诱饵（鮟鱇= =？），对深海压力非常适应，伪装。
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：无限量供应避孕药
第一名：章鱼
能力：该死的一切
工作原理：除褐色人种外对国家安全最危险的家伙。它们是世界上最聪明的无脊椎动物，可以切断自己的触手、喷出墨汁、顺着水流节奏行动、能钻过比硬币大的任何空间并能变成与环境一致的颜色。由于这些多得过分的超人能力，现代生物研究认为它们可能，事实上是神。
同类代表：Fantastic先生，Marvel船长 (the shitty one)和Zoidberg博士。
其他能力：尽管它们不需要，但研究者相信某些章鱼可以在陆地上用两条腿行走，而外表看上去像椰子一样。所以下次你做椰香鸡尾酒，先混合，再问。
如果它们与我们为敌，唯一的防御措施：如果它们来袭，我们真的没多少能做的。最好的计划可能是用核武器把地球弄成地狱，然后从头开始。不管怎么说，运气好的话辐射的变异种不会很强大或很奇怪。