Not all animals move (such as sea sponges), but the vast majority do in some way or another. The way an animal moves – its locomotion – influences almost everything it does, not to mention how it looks and the environments it’s able to live in.
Most animals fall under three main categories: swimming, walking or flying, but there are many other marvellous modes of movement.
Some of these rarer modes, such as slithering, jumping, and gliding, may be novel enough to make you raise an eyebrow; however, the modes discussed below are so bizarre they’ll make your jaw drop.
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Weird ways animals move around
Walking on water
Also known as the ‘Jesus Christ lizard’ – named so for its ability to run on water, rather than turn it to wine – the common basilisk (Basiliscus basilicus) is a species of lizard endemic to Central and South America. While it spends most of its time climbing trees or foraging through the undergrowth, it will sprint to the nearest source of water whenever it becomes the target of a hungry opossum, white-nosed coati, or tiger heron.
By slapping the water’s surface with its enormous hind feet, a common basilisk is able to generate enough force to push water out and away from its legs, allowing it to keep most of its body above the water.
It will also unfurl scaly fringes on its toes to further increase the surface area of its feet. Smaller juveniles are typically better at performing these water-based ‘miracles’ than older basilisks, and some have been observed running as far as 20 metres without sinking!
Cartwheeling
These impressive, acrobatic displays won’t win the entoproct Loxosoma saltans or the Namib Desert spider an Olympic gold, but they may stop them from being gobbled up by would-be predators. Both these animals are known to cartwheel, the former as a means of typical, active locomotion, and the latter passively as they fling themselves down sand dunes at speeds of up to one metre per second to escape the grasps of pompilid wasps.
Loxosoma belongs to a mostly-immobile group of colonial animals, which are typically goblet-shaped and made up of a ‘crown’ of tentacles attached to a long stalk. The fact Loxosoma moves when so many of its kin don’t is interesting in itself, but it’s the way it moves that has baffled scientists.
Richard Assheton, who named the species in 1912, described their movement as “a series of gymnastic efforts, which combine the agility of the kangaroo and the deliberation of a geometer caterpillar.”
Hydraulic crawling
No, these deep-sea creepy crawlies aren’t the first sign of extraterrestrial life – they’re real-life animals. In fact, they’re one of the most abundant animals found on the ocean floor, living under extreme pressures and in complete darkness, often at depths of over 6,000 metres.
A type of sea cucumber, sea pigs – or Scotoplanes – are one of the strangest-looking animals, and their mode of movement certainly befits their bizarre appearance. To move along the ocean’s vast, virtually flat abyssal plain, sea pigs ‘walk’ on their elongated tube feet.
They don’t use muscles to operate these tube feet, though; instead, they inflate and deflate them with water, harnessing the power of hydraulics to get about. Sea pigs are also known to drift on deep-sea currents, bringing their juvenile king crab hitchhikers along for the ride.
Jet propulsion
It’s hard to pin down octopuses, particularly when trying to categorise the way they move. A lot of shallow water species will crawl on their tentacles, while many deep-sea species have fins they use for more traditional swimming.
However, all octopuses (as well as other cephalopods, such as squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses) are capable of moving via jet propulsion.
By drawing water into an internal, muscular cavity and forcefully expelling it through a flexible, narrow tube, known as a siphon, cephalopods are able to create forward thrust, propelling themselves at high speed, often away from predators or towards prey.
This mode of movement makes cephalopods the fastest marine invertebrates, and amongst them Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) are perhaps the fastest, reaching speeds over 25mph.
Sailing
Often confused for a jellyfish, a Portuguese Man O’War (Physalia physalis) is actually a siphonophore: a strange, colonial organism made up of many smaller organisms, known as zoids.
These alien-looking animals are named after the warships they resemble. They also move in the exact same way as these warships, using ‘sails’ to harness the wind and maintain a steady course through the waves.
A Portuguese Man O’War’s ‘sail’ is known as a pneumatophore. This gas-filled bladder keeps the top of the animal above the water, while the remainder of it – stinging tentacles measuring 10-30 metres – dangle below. Interestingly, the pneumatophore is equipped with a siphon that, in the event of a daring attack from diving seabirds, can expel air, allowing a Portuguese Man O’War to briefly submerge itself and escape.
Ballooning
Other animals that often put their fate in the hands of Mother Nature are spiders, particularly juveniles.
Juvenile spiders have been observed secreting a fine silk called gossamer that catches the wind, whisks them up into the air, and allows them to travel great distances at high altitude. As incredibly lightweight animals, spiders don’t need high winds to ‘balloon’; in fact, a 2018 study found that electric fields alone provide enough force to lift them into the air.
This mode of movement is arguably the most dangerous on this list, often resulting in death. Those that do survive can be transported anywhere from just a few metres to hundreds of kilometres. Some sailors have reported ballooning spiders caught in their ship’s sails while more than 1,000 miles from land.
Other invertebrates known to practice ballooning include spider mites and more than 31 species of butterflies and moths. The behaviour is thought to have appeared in the Cretaceous Period (145-66 million years ago), during the time of the dinosaurs.
Clapping
As well as having a hard shell that protects them from predators, scallops have another defensive trick up their sleeves: they can swim. Most other groups of bivalves are sessile, meaning they’re fixed in place, or only capable of crawling across the seafloor using a muscular ‘foot’.
However, scallops are considered ‘free-living’ as they’re able to swim under their own power. To do so, scallops repeatedly clap their shells together, creating forward thrust in a similar way that octopuses and other cephalopods do using their siphons.
This isn’t exactly the most graceful method of swimming, but it allows scallops to move short distances in rapid bursts and evade predators, such as starfish. It has also allowed them to become a global group and establish themselves in all of the world’s oceans.
Thrust powered gliding
The skies are typically the domain of birds, flying insects, and – on the occasion we board an aeroplane – humans. That said, there are many other animals that enter this realm, including several that, by all definitions, are sea creatures. Now, everyone’s heard of flying fish, but what about flying squid?
There are several species of squid that can ‘fly’, including the appropriately named, 50cm-long Pacific flying squid (Todarodes pacificus). Like other cephalopods, this squid uses jet propulsion to evade predators, but it goes one step further, rocketing out of the water and into the air.
It will then blast more water out of its siphon while airborne for a short burst of extra speed. Some individuals have been documented ‘flying’ more than 30 metres at speeds of up to 25mph.
Rafting
The architectural talents of ants have been well documented, but did you know they also construct structures out of their own bodies?
This practice is best observed in fire ants (Solenopsis invicta), which live in huge colonies that are capable of coming together and forming makeshift rafts whenever their nests are flooded by heavy rains. These rafts can stay afloat for several weeks until they find dry land and the colonies are able to restart.
Another animal known to assemble its own raft is the violet sea snail (Janthina janthina). This small, purple mollusc lives on the surface of the ocean, using a ‘bubble raft’ made of mucus to stay afloat.
These ‘snot parachutes’ are vital to their existence; if they collapse, the snail will sink to the ocean floor and die. Despite their tiny size (with an avergae diameter of 40mm), they are one of the main predators of free-floating hydrozoans, such as Portuguese Man O’War.
Hitchhiking
Why waste vital energy travelling from A to B when you can rely on someone else to take you there, usually free of charge? This is how many animals live, and it’s known as phoresy in biology.
The most famous hitchhikers are remoras: a group of fish who, equipped with suckers on their heads, attach themselves to the bodies of larger, ocean-cruising creatures, such as sharks, manta rays, whales, and even sea turtles.
Other examples of marine hitchhikers include octopuses, which have been observed riding sharks, and male anglerfish, which reproduce by attaching themselves to females and slowly fusing with them, eventually becoming permanent, atrophied sperm-providers.
This latter example is arguably a form of parasitism, rather than simple transportation. Many hitchhikers tread this fine line between animals innocently seeking a ride and parasites with more nefarious intentions.
Top image: a screenshot of a video of fire ants forming a raft. Credit: BBC Natural History/Getty Images
