Weirdest Animals Ever Caught On Camera

The chicken that survived decapitation

You’re probably familiar with the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” The phrase refers, of course, to how chickens’ bodies will briefly run around on their own after their heads are cut off, but this is very temporary. Before too long, the chicken collapses, just as dead and unmoving as any of us would be if we had lost our own heads.

What if a chicken could live longer? Like, 18 months longer? That’s allegedly what happened with a creature known as “Mike the Headless Chicken.” He made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for living longer than any other decapitated chicken. How did he survive, though? In short, his brain stem was still intact, and he didn’t die from blood loss.

Just like that, we had a chicken that managed to survive a year and a half after its own decapitation!

Orcas attacking the rich

Some of the animals on this list are like Mike the Headless Chicken: one of a kind. But the next phenomenon we’re going to describe has been happening with surprising (and some would say alarming) regularity. At one point, men were piloting their yacht in a race through the Strait of Gibraltar, and they were understandably focused on beating the other competitors. Soon, though, they had to focus on survival once a group of orcas began attacking their boat!

And we’re not talking about a mild attack: though the humans ultimately survived, these violent orcas managed to cause so much damage to the yacht that it sank to the bottom of the ocean. Interestingly, this was not an isolated phenomenon, and there have been reports of other orcas attacking other yachts.

Some see this as an alarming case of man versus nature. Others (especially those who shared funny memes about it online) saw this as a case of the orcas interpreting the phrase “eat the rich” a little too literally.

20,000 bees stalked a car

Ever wonder why bees stick around their hive so much? It’s not because that’s their home…at least, not exactly. It’s because the hive is the queen bee’s home and all the worker bees instinctively serve her. Sure, they’ll go out to get food for her, but at the end of the day, bees are going to go wherever their queen goes. Which begs the question: what happens when the queen goes somewhere else entirely?

One poor driver discovered the answer the hard way when a queen bee decided to hole up inside his car. It’s not quite clear what she was looking for inside this automobile, but all of her worker bees decided to follow her. That led to the stunning spectacle of 20,000 bees swarming on a single car as it drove around for about two days!

If you’re worried about what happened to the bees, this story has a happy ending. Eventually, a trained beekeeper was able to rescue them all, safely ending their unpredictable little adventure.

The elephant who learned to paint

We all know that elephants are very smart. But have you ever considered that they might be smart enough to learn certain human activities? In Thailand, certain elephants have been trained to paint like humans do. And we’re not talking, like, fingerpainting: they create vivid images of subjects like other elephants.

In some cases, the artistic elephants even sign their names, just like a proud human artist would do. Understandably, some animal rights activists are concerned about exactly how they were trained to do so, especially because this isn’t exactly a typical elephant skill. We can’t speak to that, but we can’t deny that the artistic results are quite breathtaking.

The gorilla who loves smartphones

To this day, evolution is a hot topic. One of the reasons for this is that some people refuse to believe that humans evolved from apes, especially because the two species seem so different. But when you see a gorilla acting exactly like a human, you might just change your mind!

That’s what happened when a young man at the Louisville Zoo decided to show a gorilla pictures on his smartphone. He showed the animal various images, including pictures of other gorillas. Incredibly, the gorilla actually communicated when he wanted the man to show him another image.

It’s a really sweet moment, honestly. But we can only hope the gorilla doesn’t learn how to doomscroll himself to sleep like the rest of us!