Meet Some of Nature’s Coolest Customers

Scientists have long known of insects that can survive being frozen and come back to life when thawed. Strangely, other animals do this, too, including some species of snakes, turtles, lizards, and frogs. These are unique species that have adapted to changing conditions and therefore can live in wider range of climates.  

While a scientific understanding of freeze tolerance in insects was first achieved in the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1982 that scientists discovered it also exists in vertebrates—wood frogs in particular, a far-reaching North American species that can be found from the forests of Georgia to just within the Arctic Circle in Alaska.

“It was a huge breakthrough because until that time, it was assumed that vertebrate animals could not survive freezing,” says Jon Costanzo, professor emeritus at Miami University in Ohio, who got interested in cold-temperature adaptations after stumbling across a den of wintering snakes (known as a hibernaculum) while he was a graduate student in Wisconsin.

Wood frogs can survive temperatures as low as -4 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest temperature that any freeze-tolerant species is known to withstand, he says. (A Siberian salamander was reported decades ago to have survived -22 degrees, he adds, but the report is unconfirmed.)

Read about the weird methods animals have developed to protect themselves from the damage of freezing at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: W-van)


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Two titles I would add are "Say You Love Satan" about whacked out American teens on a killing spree, and "Lords of Chaos" about the whacked out Scandanavian death metal scene.
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One of my most disturbing books (but still a fun read!) is the drive-in by Joe Lansdale. Its a sci fi book, but features the most bizarre acts of Canabalism often involving children. It was one of the few books that left me very uneasy.
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In a rare instance, I SAW American Psycho before I read it and thought the movie was a riot (especially the whole "business card" thing...I work for a commercial printer).

A third of the way through the book, I wanted to pluck out my own eyes. Not so much for the gore, as the whole obsessive portrait. Beyond horrifying.
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I had a sneak preview of Kaaron Warren's Slights, upcoming in July, and it's one of the most disturbing books I've read. I'd put it somewhere between American Psycho's and We Need to Talk Kevin. It's about a girl who accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and has a horrific near death experience where she confronts the ghosts of everyone she's ever slighted. The sense of sly menace keeps building, rending happy suburbia apart with shocking revelations, from an awful little old lady next door to the things she unearths in her obsessive excavation of her backyard that reveal disturbing clues to her past. It's brilliant, queasy-making storytelling, the kind that sticks with you, so the details might hit you again like a nasty flashback. www.angryrobotbooks.com
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Awesome, a few more books to add to my 'must buy or borrow these'. I love Burroughs, Selby and Ellis but would definately have put at least one Ryu Murakami on that list - all his books have a distinctly disturbing edge to them and are all great reads.
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I saw the 1992 movie of this with Peter Weller (Robocop) and it was the most bizarre thing I ever saw. It was somewhat entertaining, but like the book you really never had your bearings on what was happening.

Didn't this movie have a talking anus? Man, I thought I had repressed that. Crap I'm freakin' out again!!
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Suffer the Children by John Saul. At one point a 13 year old girl kills a cat with a rock and dresses it in doll clothes, then she has a tea party with it in a mineshaft and ends up swearing at it because the corpse won't respond and then beating it and finally cutting it's head off with a butcher knife in a mad rage. It made me really sad to see her abuse the animal so horribly.
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