7 Species That Got Screwed Over by Mother Nature

7 Black Vultures Loooooove Them Some Anus

It's pretty hard to disgust a vulture. Hey, if you survived on a diet of rotten corpses and used your own shit as an air-conditioning system, you'd get an iron stomach pretty quick, too. But even in the Garbage Pail Kid hierarchy of vulture grossness, somebody's got to be at the bottom of the barrel. And you don't get closer to the bottom than the anus. Just ask the black vulture.

Black vultures have weaker beaks than raptorial birds, and as a consequence they can't crack through the tough hides and solid bones of a carcass. So they have to attack the softest body parts of their victims first -- the anus and eyeballs. No, that's not the gross part. You can't handle the gross part. Just ... there's some good stuff later about exploding penises -- maybe that's more your speed. Go check that out.

No?

You really want to know? All righty. You insisted. Once the butthole buffet is depleted, the black vulture then burrows in through the devoured rectum to get at the rest of the tender innards. Think about that: Every time they get hungry, they have to dig an asshole tunnel using their mouths instead of shovels. If you really want to understand the plight of the black vulture, here's a fun little experiment: The next time you microwave a bean-and-cheese burrito, try poking a hole in one end and then shoving your whole head in there to eat it from the inside out, because the textures are probably pretty similar and -- oh goddamn it. We just ruined burritos for everybody, didn't we?

They were delicious, we know. We're so sorry.

6 The Spotted Hyena and the Phantom Penis

Spotted hyenas are different from other species in that their females run the society. For all of you misogynists out there thinking that "it takes a dong to run a nation," you are, sadly, right in this instance: Hyena chicks have dicks.

To understand how hyena society results in becocked females, you need to know three basic biological facts:

1) The more aggressive a female is, the more likely she is to pass on her genes.
2) The chemical that causes females to be more aggressive is called androgen.
3) This also happens to be the same chemical that causes male hyena embryos to become, well, male.

As a result, the female spotted hyena sports a clitoris that is 7 inches long, with a "pseudo-scrotum" and a birth canal that runs right up the middle. While this factoid may have finally won Cracked that prized hyena transsexual enthusiast demographic, it causes some pretty serious problems for the animals in question. For one thing, nabbing yourself a dick that should not be doesn't necessarily free you from the burden of childbirth: Remember what we said about the birth canal running through the near-penis? That means a 2-pound cub is, at some point, going to tear its way out of some poor hyena's girl-wang. Unsurprisingly, about 10 percent of female spotted hyenas die during childbirth -- from complications or straight-up suicide, we couldn't say.

5 Inquiring Kakapos Want to Know: What the Hell is a "Predator"?

Over millions of years, most animals have adopted some kind of defensive strategy. An enterprising species might develop camouflage, sharp teeth or spines (if it's smart, it'll just go straight for the pistol-hands). But what if there were no natural enemies whatsoever? An animal could put absolutely all of its energy into eating and reproduction! On the plus side, that's a surefire recipe for a species to thrive. On the down side, those criteria would probably result in a fat, helpless, delicious-tasting nymphomaniac. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the kakapo: the BBW of the animal kingdom.

It's the world's only flightless parrot (a less threatening pair of words has never been uttered) and weighs in at a portly 8 pounds (tubby, for a bird). The kakapo spends most of its time feeding, procreating and metaphorically basting itself in butter. This controversial decision to eschew traditional survival methods in favor of hitting up the buffet one more time made perfect sense for its native environment, New Zealand -- a country that was in the bathroom when God was handing out mammals.

For centuries, hundreds of thousands of kakapos waddled around New Zealand having unhindered sex 'n' food parties, but the good times hit a damper with the arrival of Polynesian settlers around the 14th century and ground to a halt altogether when the Europeans swung by in the 1800s. These newcomers brought with them livestock, dogs, cats, ferrets, rats and, yes, possums. The kakapos not only were unable to fly away from these new predators, but couldn't even run away. A kakapo's natural reaction to danger is to stand completely still -- not play dead, not emit a foul odor or even make a sound. They just stop moving and hope whatever's trying to kill them is too filled with pity to follow through on it. In the vicious game of cops and robbers that nature plays during every minute of every day, the kakapos are playing freeze tag.

Not surprisingly, kakapos were immediately slaughtered in ludicrous numbers. The Maoris were already making coats of their feathers and stuffing their pillows with them, and then the Europeans and their animals started devouring them like the stationary poultry-fruit that they were. Today, only about 100 kakapos remain, making it one of the world's rarest birds (and probably sometime soon, the only species to go extinct from sheer panic).

4 Sea Squirts: Head of Their Class

The only thing evolution cares about is brutal efficiency. So if something isn't actively helping an animal to survive or pass on its genes, it gets tossed like a bad salad. That's why cave fish lost their eyes, snakes ditched their legs and we evolved out of our bitchin' weaponized penises.

But there are worse things to lose: Just ask a baby sea squirt. One minute it's swimming around in the plankton all "Herbie derbie doo, I'm a squirt" (OK, you tell us what sound a sea squirt makes, smart guy), and the next it's cementing itself headfirst to a rock. Since sitting in one spot and waiting for food to drift into your stomach isn't the most mentally stimulating of occupations, the brain just isn't useful any more -- or rather, it is useful, but only for one thing: Those tasty, nutritious brain cells.

Yep, part of the sea squirt's awkward teenage years involves devouring its own brain from the inside out. Keep that in mind the next time you open your mouth to bitch about acne scars or that time Jennifer made fun of your squeaky voice in front of like, practically everybody; at least she didn't tear out your frontal lobe and make you a sandwich out of it.

3 The Termite Queen Probably Has One Hell of a Mother's Day Haul

All right: Who wants to be waited on hand and foot by a legion of servants devoted to your every material need? Got those hands up? Good! Now, who wants to be buried underground, give birth every three seconds and be licked continuously by insects? Whoa! Still, uh ... still some hands up, huh? Well, all right; it takes all kinds of freaky water to float some boats. But for most of us, "insectile birthing prison" sounds like a perverse living hell dreamed up by a tag team of Japanese fetish porn writers and H.R. Geiger. That's just another day in the life of a termite queen, however.

A single queen is the mother of every termite in her colony, which frequently have populations of over a million. She spends her life confined to a cell-like chamber in the middle of the nest, where she gives birth every three seconds, for the next 15 years. Holy shit, we had no idea any insect lived that long, much less lived that long in continuous labor.

And though his plight in no way compares, do spare a thought for the termite king. While his title conjures up images of a superbug commanding a million-strong army on the path to world (or at least those beams under the back deck) domination, the king -- a normal-sized termite -- instead spends his whole life locked inside the birthing chamber as well, to perpetually bone his no-doubt eternally pain-enraged queen.

2 The Kiwi Probably Never Forgives Its Children

Most baby birds hatch as scrawny, helpless little things that need tons of parental care. But why is that? There's a significant evolutionary advantage to having your chicks born bigger and healthier. If you just lay a larger egg, your chick will have a higher chance of survival after hatching. Flawless logic, right? Evolution thought so, too, and decided to try it out on the flightless kiwi of New Zealand. Here's how that experiment went:

The spotted kiwi grows to about 10 inches high and weighs in at just under 3 pounds, yet it manages to lay an egg 5 inches long. For comparison, that's like a human being giving birth to a normal-sized second grader. A female kiwi can't even eat for two or three days before laying the egg because there's no space in her abdomen for her stomach. Not surprisingly, once the egg is laid, the mother wants little more to do with the rotten bastard and leaves the rest of the incubation up to the father. And if he complains for even one goddamn second, she'll take a hammer to his skull, swear to Christ, she'll do it -- try her.

1 Honey Bees Have Cock Missiles

After a privileged life of dining on only the finest bee spit, the time will eventually come for a virgin queen bee to move out of the hive and start her own. And thus begins one of the grandest spectacles of the insect kingdom, where thousands of male drones will compete to fertilize all the eggs she will ever lay. Truly, it is the most wondrous of all of nature's gangbangs.

Unfortunately for the males, there are a couple of complications.

First, once the queen lands, she's done with men for life. So if they're ever going to get it on, they have to do it in flight via a complicated docking maneuver wherein they employ an extended penile apparatus known as an endophallus -- basically a giant bee dong. It's kind of like Top Gun, when Maverick connects up to the tanker plane for mid-air refueling, only if he had to fight off Goose, Iceman and thousands of other pilots trying to do the same thing, too, and all with his waggling dick out in the air.

So basically, it's exactly like Top Gun.

Second, since this is all about getting his DNA passed on to the next generation, the male bee also has to stop the other fellas from getting a go afterward. Well, how the hell is he supposed to manage that? He doesn't exactly have pockets! Damn, if only he had something on him exactly the right size and shape to fit inside a female's genitalia that he could just shove in there and leave behi-- oh, dear God.

In one moment of terrifyingly profound masculinity, a male bee's first and only orgasm is so powerful that it blows his penis clean off, neatly plugging the queen.

Say what you will about the horror of the process, but when a queen honeybee gets fucked, she stays fucked.

For more animals that got the shaft, check out 6 Formerly Kickass Creatures Ruined by Evolution. Or learn about the 7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes.

And stop by LinkSTORM to discover which columnist was screwed by evolution.

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