5 Bizarre Animal Chain Reactions Our Daily Lives Are Causing

5 Massive Spontaneous Pig Shit Explosions

The expression "happy as a pig in shit" is a bit of a misnomer. Pigs probably aren't any happier rolling around in their own excreta than we are, or at least most of us. In the wild, pigs move around and graze like any other animal, and a poop in the woods here and there is par for the course. It's only when we started farming them, keeping large numbers of pigs in a small space, that their dung started piling up. And exploding.

You read that correctly. See, pig poop is useful stuff for farmers. They let it collect in manure pits for an entire year so they can spread that yummy juice all over the fields come fall. And it should just stay there, getting bigger and bigger but sitting safe, 'til the shit harvest comes. But sometimes something a little extra happens. From deep within the shit bank, for reasons that remain unclear, comes the Mysterious Foam.

It's gray. It's bubbly. It piles up several feet thick. It pulsates like something alive. Worst of all, scientists still don't know what it is, just that it's filled with weird bacteria that have no right to be there. It contains poisonous gases like hydrogen sulfide. Most notably, it's extremely rich in methane, which, as anyone who has been drunk enough at a party to try to light a fart knows, is super flammable. So what happens when a spark lands on the foam?

Pigsplosion. The foam and all the shit blow up. Blue fire tears across the foam, melting plastic and metal. The blast rips apart the pit and the barn. Shit, foam, flame, and hog flesh meld together, and the pigs die by the thousand.

These hog shitfernos are a new phenomenon, and no one's quite sure why they've started now. They could have something to do with the pigs' diet, mash left over from making ethanol fuel. We might have created the conditions necessary for the crazy new bacteria to thrive. But once you've blown up your pigs, there's not much point in wondering why it happened. You just scrape up the crisp pork and put it on toast. Bacon's bacon.

4 Noise from Ships Makes Squid Explode

Something strange has been happening to the giant squid population over the past decade -- they have been washing up on the shore having apparently exploded from the inside. This sounds like the prologue to a Roland Emmerich global disaster movie, but scientists in the real world searched for an explanation that didn't involve aliens or space radiation or magnetic field reversals.

Namely, it was suspected that human sonar might have something to do with the squidpocalypse. Generally, sonar is considered to be harmless to ocean life because our low-frequency, low-amplitude sound bursts shouldn't be loud enough to bother anything in Triton's kingdom. But after discovering that all the dead squid had exploded ears, the scientists decided to put the sonar to the test, dragging out squid from the wild and subjecting to them to careful blasts of sound waves.

The squid got hurt, all right -- after thoroughly sciencing the dead bodies, the researchers found that the squid were killing themselves in response to the sound, like a desperate parent suffering through endless choruses of "It's a Small World." Their cells showed damage, and the damage was from chemicals that the squid released in response to the sonar.

It began, reasonably enough, in the parts of the squid that sense the sound waves, receptors called statocysts. Little hairs that were supposed to be doing their job snapped off and floated away. Then the squid's own neurotransmitters would make its nerves start swelling up, and those nerves would explode. Finally, the squid would wind up blowing giant holes in its head and welcoming death's sweet kiss.

And all this comes from that most innocuous of human operations -- scanning the ocean so that scientists can survey it. Then again, we should have expected something murderous when we named the invention responsible the seismic gun.

3 Flying Animals Mistake Parking Lots for Water and Crash into Them

On the timeline of evolution, perfectly flat surfaces have been around for only a quarter of a second. The only thing in nature that's flat and shiny is the surface of a lake, and as far as birds, bats, and insects know, it still is.

Unfortunately, thanks to humans, our world is now littered with parking lots, wooden decks, and solar panels that to various flying animals look just like an enticing pool of liquid refreshment on a cool day. Bats, for example, use echolocation to identify objects by their shape, so they are accidentally bashing their faces into hard surfaces all the time. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute tested this recently, which was fairly dickish in retrospect.

They set up a series of smooth and textured plates made of wood, plastic, and metal and released some bats to see if the animals would try to drink them. Sure enough, many of the bats torpedoed face-first into the smooth surfaces, expecting a mouthful of hydration but receiving a face full of painful disappointment, sometimes making more than 100 confused attempts on the same solid plate.

But the same thing happens to insects and birds. Apparently sunlight reflecting off of standard solar panels produces a watery illusion, attracting insects in search of a quick drink or some sexy time. And because solar panels are optimal light polarizers, insects actually find them more attractive than water. The effect is so powerful that enchanted insects will buzz about the panels incessantly until they literally drop dead from exhaustion.

And then there was the case of thousands of migrating water birds plunging to their deaths after confusing a series of parking lots and other flat areas with lakes. Unable to walk very well, they were very likely searching for bodies of water in which to park their feathered asses when they found St. George, Utah, glistening with flat, broad, snowy surfaces. In the end, what should have been a relaxing splash and swim turned into a gruesome mass suicide as the flocks went crashing into the concrete. Yes, birds are kind of stupid.

2 Road Salt Is Poisoning Animals and Causing Car Accidents

In the nipple-pinching cold of winter, one of the things we can happily count on is that some brave soul in 17 layers of long underwear is going to drive out with a fuck-ton of road salt and sprinkle it on our frozen motorways. Salt destroys the layer of frost on the roads so that our morning commute doesn't turn into a demolition derby, but, unfortunately for wildlife, salt is also delicious.

As a result, it attracts salt-loving animals such as birds to roadsides, putting them at risk for sodium poisoning. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, since birds are biologically equipped to eat sodium and would normally just flush it out with fresh water. But in the winter, these sources are frozen over, so all they have to drink is more salt water. That's bad.

Even worse, the highway is usually one of those places we try to avoid attracting animals to. Their roadside gorging leaves them so drained that they often fail to avoid traffic and become target practice for oncoming automobiles. Auto collisions are so common that the various winter finches who suffer them are known as "grill birds," named after the part of your car that kills them.

Some of us may be able to tolerate scraping dinner off the front of our car for a few months a year, but what about when the animal you're hitting is big enough to scrape you off of it? Yeah, standard road salt also attracts moose and deer, which are much larger and deadlier animals to hit with a car. Unluckily for drivers, these big animals come with big statistics: According to a Canadian study, moose attracted to road salt increase auto accidents by 80 percent. And in Idaho, switching from sodium- to magnesium-based de-icers saw a more than 80 percent decrease in car accidents and, presumably, thirsty moose.

1 Pollution Is Tricking Fish into Interspecies Sex

Thanks to the chemical cocktail we've been unloading into the water supply like Captain Planet villains, various animals are finding it increasingly difficult to select mates in a way that makes any kind of sense. Female stickleback fish in the Baltic Sea, for example, have been reduced to screwing the first male they find because pollution-loving algae have reduced visibility enough to make the duds indistinguishable from the studs. But other fish have it much worse -- according to University of Minnesota researchers, a chemical found in plastics is duping some fish into interspecies loving.

Specifically, the culprit is BPA, or Bisphenol A. It's a compound found in cans, bottles, and shatter-proof containers, and it was recently banned from use in baby bottles due to a suspicion that it contributes to cancer and other nasty effects. Long known to mimic estrogen, BPA basically trolls the body's endocrine system, which is crucial for sexual development, metabolic processes, sexual functioning, growth, mood, and sex. There are also sex-related effects.

For red shiners and their blacktail counterparts, this results in sexual pandemonium. Researchers came to this conclusion after collecting samples of the two fish species, keeping them segregated for a few weeks, and exposing some of them to BPA before bringing the populations together for a meet and greet. Despite sexual habituation to their own species, the reds and blacktails became sexually confused by color and behavior changes and were more likely to hook up outside their species.

Although this sort of match-up works just fine among cartoon characters and Muppets, it's a major ecological problem, since BPA is basically everywhere and has been shown to affect animals even at low levels of exposure. As some of you may have found out the hard way, boning creatures of another species doesn't make any offspring, so the resulting decrease in biodiversity threatens environmental stability and probably leaves a whole lot of fish in need of intensive therapy.

Ryan Menezes is a writer and layout editor here at Cracked. He broke down and made a Twitter page just for his Cracked fans.

Related Reading: Did you know bat-eating spiders are everywhere? It makes a fellow feel a little less guilty about being human. Also, vampire bats have a map of your veins. So really, you'd be reckless to NOT destroy their habitat. Also, drunken baboons, in case anyone cares.