Low
The overwhelming majority of life on Earth. Harmless to humans, and frequently far more interesting for it.
Atlantic Cod
A big bottom predator that lost an immune pathway jawed vertebrates normally keep.
Atlantic Flying Fish
The Atlantic glider that swims at up to about 30 km/h, then leaps out and glides as far as 12 meters.
Atlantic Hagfish
The jawless North Atlantic scavenger whose slime glands unravel a coiled fiber bundle into a thread a hundred times longer in a fraction of a second.
Atlantic Halibut
The world's largest flatfish, and a fish that moves one of its eyes across its head.
Atlantic Horseshoe Crab
A blue-blooded cousin of spiders and scorpions, with ten eyes and blood that clots when it meets certain bacteria.
Atlantic Mudskipper
A West African fish that blinks on land and hunts crabs and insects on the mud.
Atlantic Puffin
A bright-billed seabird that flies underwater on its wings and sometimes carries a dozen small fish home in its bill.
Atlantic Salmon
Hatches in a river, grows up in the ocean, and finds its way home by the chemistry of its birth stream.
Australasian Ghost Shark
The deep-sea chimaera described from New Zealand seamounts with glowing tapetum eyes and tooth-crushing plates.
Australian Lungfish
An air-breathing fish with a single lung, a body that still resembles fossils over 100 million years old, and a genome known to be the largest of any animal.
Axolotl
The smiling cyber-amphibian that keeps its larval gills as an adult and can regrow whole legs and parts of its own brain and heart.
Aye-Aye
Nocturnal lemur with huge ears, ever-growing incisors, and a skeletal-looking middle finger that finds grubs by tapping.
Bactrian Camel
Two humps of stored fat, a shaggy winter coat, and a body that survives temperatures from minus 29°C to 49°C.
Ball Python
A generally calm python that wraps itself into a tight ball when threatened and can go weeks to months between meals.
Banana Slug
A forest slug that may grow 20 cm long or more, coated in slime that numbs the mouth and tongue if swallowed.
Banded Archerfish
The mangrove sniper that builds a water rifle from its own tongue and turns a single shot into a self-amplifying bullet of water.
Barn Owl
A heart-faced hunter that is completely silent on the wing and, in tests, found prey in total darkness by sound alone with an error of under one degree.
Barramundi
A fish that mostly matures as a male and switches to female as it grows, on its way to a maximum length of 200 cm.
Barreleye Fish
The deep-sea fish with a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head and light-sensitive tubular eyes that rotate inside it.
Basking Shark
The second-largest fish on Earth, filtering up to 2,000 tons of seawater an hour through its gills to scoop up zooplankton.
Beadlet Anemone
A red blob on the rocks that picks fights with its neighbors using stinging blue spots.
Bearded Vulture
One of the few vertebrates that lives mostly on bone, which it breaks open by dropping it from the sky and digests in a stomach whose pH could be below 1.
Bed Bug
The flat, blood-drinking insect that mates by piercing the female's abdomen and can go months between meals.
Beluga Sturgeon
A giant sturgeon that mostly hunts open-water fish and now survives largely through hatcheries.