Besides animals with monstrous shapes, strange mating habits or Mother Nature’s colorful coats … there are a large portion of the species covered with a unique blue color.
Let’s find out about some of these “unique and weird” blue colored animals through the National Geographic website summary below.
1. Blue-footed booby
The scientific name for the blue-legged booby is Sula nebouxii. It is a sea bird that lives mainly on the coasts and islands of Central and South America. They can dive and swim underwater for food. The highlight of this beautiful bird is that they have bright blue legs.
The blue color of the fool’s feet is partly due to the nutrients in fresh fish. The more fish the males caught, the sharper their legs became, which made them more attractive to females. The green color of the fool’s feet becomes an identifying feature for the female to choose a mate, giving birth to generations of healthy chicks.
2. Marsh frog
Common from Asia to Europe, the Moorish frog looks like any other frog with its reddish-brown skin. During the breeding season, however, male frogs turn pale blue within days. In the photo above, you can see the contrast of the green color of the male frog with the normal color of the female frog.
Scientists have started to study this strange phenomenon. They concluded that the green color of male frogs is not a criterion for female frogs to choose pairs like the green-legged booby. However, this color is especially useful for male frogs so that they can easily distinguish male from female frogs during the breeding season, thus avoiding the case of “encountering the wrong object”.
3. Blue pelagic fish
The blue plaice has a scientific name: Achoerodus viridis, is a special species of fish from the anchovy family, living mainly on the south coast of Australia. If you see a mackerel with a vibrant blue color like this, you can almost say for sure it’s a male.
But did you know that these male fish are born female and green in color. When female fish mature, they turn brown. Finally, when it reaches a certain age, the halibut turns blue and changes sex into a male. What a rare phenomenon in nature!
4. Green lobster
Lobsters have long been renowned for their delicacy and their price. With the exception of boiled shrimp, the most common color of lobster is gray-brown. But fishermen in North America sometimes catch lobsters that are a strange blue color.
The strange blue color of lobster is the result of a rare genetic mutation, which takes around 2 million to get one. This mutation causes lobsters to synthesize more than normal protein, giving them that unique color.
We can explain the color of lobsters as follows. The gray-brown color of lobster is a mixture of red, yellow, green and blue pigments. But if there is a genetic mutation, the lobster will only have one color in the palette, blue, and the rest of the colors will not appear.
Sometimes fishermen even catch lobsters that are naturally red (not boiled), but at the rate of 1:10 million.
5. Blue slug
This uniquely colored slug hides under carpets of rotten leaves in the humid forests of southern and southeastern Vancouver Island, Canada. They are small in size, with a body length of only about 2-3 cm.
This slug is special in that if an enemy pursues it, it will cut off its tail to escape, like some lizards.
Despite its small size, this blue slug has a very important role in the ecosystem. It helps spread the spores of a beneficial fungus, which in itself helps large trees in the forest get a lot of nutrients from the soil environment. So scientists believe that this blue slug is not only beautiful but also very useful.
