Pandas, Teeth and Bloody Fungi

Hi, Welcome (back) to weirdbeautiful. The image above is a panda cub in Wolong Nature Reserve, China, photographed by Sheila Lau. It fits with today's beautiful link of the day today is this picture of panda-handlers in Sichuan province, South West China dressed in Panda-suits as the prepare a 6-month-old-cub for release into a more naturalistic environment than the one he has previously inhabited.
-http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3423228/Researchers-dress-as-panda-parents-to-help-cub-get-used-to-its-own-species.html
The costumes are to prevent imprinting. The Sun posted a similar article back in December about China's Hetaoping Research and Conservation Centre here.



Weird link-of-the-day, is this photoessay on cracked.com with the promising title "10 Creepy plants that shouldn't exist". Perhaps the most disturbing of the list (and there is quite some competition for this accolade), is the "Bleeding Tooth Fungus", Hydnellum peckii- the life-form (for want of a better description)shown in the picture above. Ok, so fungi are not plants- they are actually more closely related to animals- but the article deserves a little room for poetic (scientific?) license, as it is so satisfyingly weird. The Bleeding Tooth Fungus is found on the floor of conifer forests; only the young "fruiting bodies" (toadstools) produce the bright red pigment- older fruiting bodies are a duller brown colour and incapable of oozing this characteristic red chemical.

One of the other plants in the "10 creepy plants..." list is the Chinese "Bat Plant", Tacca charentieri, which is a relative of the yam (more details [here]). Actually, I have seeds for both the black and the white-flowered varieties of the Chinese Bat plant- they are two of a selection of oddities obtained from jungleseeds.com. No doubt there are other suppliers.

The bleeding tooth fungus picture above is a wikipedia image attributed to B.Baldassari and to "Bernypisa" (image licence details [here]).
Thanks to Nurit for the "10 creepy plants..." link.