In the spirit of winter moles!

This weeks Random Wicked Weekly Wednesday Fact of the Week!

Awwwww yea, Time for some epic animal fun!

Now some of you might of heard of this little guy, but its time to have a good look and go in depth, lets start with this sneezingly sexy picture:

That's right, this disgusting looking verminy hole face - which makes me want to choke on my tongue is called a...

WAIT FOR IT!

Star-nosed Mole! (or Condylura cristata whatevs)

and they're pretty cool - if only because it is one of the ugliest thing's I have ever seen.

They have 22 little appendages called Eiser's organs, which contain 25,000 (a metric crap tonne) of tiny microscopic sensors, which allows the mole to chill out and feel itself around underground.

The cool thing is that these guys don't dig very deep and they often dig straight into little ponds and streams and are often seen foraging underwater... even in an iced over winter pond of cold and uncomfortableness.

(uncomfortableness is a word now.)

Something that you might not suspect of this blind excuse for an animal is that its most probably the fastest eater of all the animal kingdom! It takes on average 227 milliseconds (also known as 0.227 seconds or 227x10^-3 seconds if your that way inclined - I'm not judging.) to identify and gobble down a single food item! with the fastest recorded feeding frenzy being at a mere 120 milliseconds! It takes ~8ms for its brain to decide if something is worth eating or not - AMAZING!

I would like to see a blindfolded human gobble down a toffee pop in that time...
Heck I would like to see a fully optical functional person attempt that too...

Additionally this little badass can smell UNDERWATER - this initially seems trivial until you realise that smelling requires air and you can smell water (tasting doesn't count)
This amazing ability is achieved by blowing bubbles onto what it wants to smell and then inhaling those bubbles back through its nose and smelling the air inside the bubbles! INCREDIBLE!

I'm kinda disappointed actually - I originally wanted to have a rant about a useless ugly looking pathetic animal but I suppose I'll have to save that for next week - this critter turned out to be too Bad-Ass.