# Purple Frog vs Atlantic Wolffish vs Marine Iguana vs Hoff Crab: A Purple Water Balloon That Lives Underground, a Fish With Three Kinds of Teeth, a Lizard That Sneezes Salt and Shrinks Its Own Skeleton, and a Blind Crab Named After Hasselhoff's Chest

> Four animals from four different classes, zero good decisions between them. We rank them on cool, weird, and gross, and somebody has to win.

By someone who loves to compare irrelevant things. Daily matchup.

## Contestants

### Purple Frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis)
Taxonomy: Amphibia > Anura > Nasikabatrachidae > Nasikabatrachus > 
A bruise-colored balloon that only shows up two weeks a year and clucks for love from underground.
- WEIRD - Time above ground: ~2 weeks a year
- COOL - Lineage age: ~130 million years, older than the Alps
- GROSS - Dinner: Termites, slurped up without surfacing
Photo: David V. Raju, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nasikabatrachus_sahyadrensis_Davidraju_IMG_3613.jpg

### Atlantic Wolffish (Anarhichas lupus)
Taxonomy: Actinopterygii > Perciformes > Anarhichadidae > Anarhichas > 
An eel-bodied seawolf whose mouth crushes urchins and clams with three kinds of teeth.
- GROSS - Teeth types at once: Fangs + molars + throat teeth
- COOL - Blood antifreeze: Stays liquid at -1 C
- WEIRD - Dental plan: Grinds teeth to nubs, regrows a full set yearly
Photo: Derek Keats, CC BY 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Looking_into_the_mouth_at_the_heavy_duty_teeth_of_the_Atlantic_Wolffish,_Newfoundland_(5532423162).jpg

### Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus)
Taxonomy: Reptilia > Squamata > Iguanidae > Amblyrhynchus > 
The only lizard that dives the sea, sneezes salt onto its own head, and shrinks its skeleton in a famine.
- GROSS - Salt disposal: Sneezed into a crusty head-wig
- WEIRD - Famine mode: Shrinks up to 20% by reabsorbing bone
- COOL - Dive stats: Down to 30 m, up to an hour underwater
Photo: pamsai, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Marine_iguana_(6064104889).jpg

### Hoff Crab (Yeti Crab) (Kiwa tyleri)
Taxonomy: Malacostraca > Decapoda > Kiwaidae > Kiwa > 
A blind, ghost-white vent crab that grows bacteria on its hairy chest and then eats them.
- GROSS - Farm-to-table: Grows bacteria on its chest hair, then eats it
- WEIRD - Namesake: David Hasselhoff's hairy chest
- COOL - Crowd density: 600+ crabs per square meter at a vent
Photo: A. D. Rogers et al., CC BY 2.5 (Wikimedia Commons) - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dense_mass_of_anomuran_crab_Kiwa_around_deep-sea_hydrothermal_vent.jpg

I put four animals in a room today and none of them belong in the same sentence, let alone the same bracket. We have an amphibian shaped like a bruised balloon that only comes up for air two weeks a year. We have a fish whose face is a dental catastrophe. We have a lizard that sneezes salt and can literally get shorter. And we have a blind, hairy-chested crab that grows dinner on its own body and was named after David Hasselhoff.

This is exactly the kind of irresponsible cross-taxa cage match this blog exists for. Cool, weird, gross, winner. Let's go.

## The purple frog is a water balloon that hates the sun

The Indian purple frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis) looks like someone inflated a bruise and glued a tiny pointy-nosed head onto it. The body is robust, bloated, and dark purplish-grey, and the head is comically undersized, like the frog spent its whole budget on the torso.

Here is the weird part: it spends nearly its ENTIRE life underground. It is fossorial, which is a fancy way of saying it is a homebody with commitment issues. It only surfaces during the monsoon for about two weeks a year to mate, and it can bury itself into loose soil in roughly three to five minutes flat. The rest of the year it is down there eating termites through a specialized tongue and a tiny underside mouth, never once coming up for dinner.

It is also a genuine living fossil. Its lineage split off an estimated 130 to 180 million years ago, and its closest living relatives are frogs on the Seychelles islands, a leftover clue from when India and the Seychelles tore apart from the supercontinent Gondwana. This frog was clucking underground while dinosaurs walked overhead. And yes, it clucks: males sing for love from beneath a thin layer of soil with a harsh call people compare to a chicken.

## The Atlantic wolffish has a mouth designed by a committee that never agreed

The Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) is a slippery, eel-bodied North Atlantic bottom-dweller with a face that belongs on a warning label. Open its mouth and you get a full tour of horrors: four to six fang-like conical teeth up front (the canines it is named for), then rows of blunt crushing molars behind them, plus crushing plates on the roof of the mouth, plus extra serrated teeth in the throat. Three kinds of teeth. At once.

Why does it need a mouth like a medieval toolbox? Because it eats things that would send you to the emergency dentist: sea urchins, crabs, clams, scallops, whole hermit crabs, shells and all. It just crushes them.

And it grinds those teeth down to nubs doing it. So every year, after spawning, it sheds the worn-out set and grows a brand new one. Meanwhile its blood is running a built-in antifreeze so it can keep working in water down to -1 C, cold enough to freeze a normal fish solid. The one soft touch: dad guards the eggs, hunkered over the nest for months.

## The marine iguana is the ocean's saltiest lizard, literally

The marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) of the Galapagos is the only lizard on Earth that forages in the sea. It dives down to graze red and green algae off submerged rocks, and big males can hit about 30 meters deep and stay under for up to an hour. That alone would be enough. It is not enough.

Because the ocean is cold and the iguana is cold-blooded, it comes out half-frozen and has to flop onto black lava rocks to bake back up to operating temperature before it can even digest. And all that seawater means it takes in way too much salt, so it fires the excess back out through special nasal glands in a hard sneeze that dries into a crusty white wig of salt caked on its own face. It is constantly sneezing salt onto its head. Nature's least dignified spray bottle.

The truly unhinged trick: during El Nino food shortages, adults can SHRINK, reducing total body length by up to 20 percent, not by losing fat but by reabsorbing their own bone, then regrowing when the algae comes back. A lizard that resizes its skeleton to match the economy. Charles Darwin, for the record, was not a fan, calling them "most disgusting, clumsy Lizards" as black as the lava they sit on. Darwin was wrong about a lot of animals' PR, and this is one of them.

## The Hoff crab farms lunch on its own chest

Finally, from Antarctic hydrothermal vents about 2,400 meters down, the yeti crab known as the Hoff crab (Kiwa tyleri). The genus was only discovered in 2005 near Easter Island and was so strange scientists built it an entire new family. These are not true crabs; they are squat lobsters, closer to hermit crabs, and they are pale, ghostly white and effectively blind, with reduced, pigment-free eyes because there is nothing to see in the deep dark.

Their whole body is coated in dense hair-like bristles called setae, and those bristles are furred with bacteria. Here is the move: the crab FARMS those bacteria, growing them on its own hair, and then eats them, scraping the crop off with comb-like mouthparts. A cousin species even waves its claws over the vent flow like it is fanning a barbecue to feed the bacteria more chemicals.

And the name. Kiwa tyleri got nicknamed the Hoff crab because of the thick mat of hair on the underside of its chest, which reminded researchers of David Hasselhoff. So it is a blind, hairy-chested, self-farming crustacean crammed by the hundreds (more than 600 per square meter) into the one narrow band of water that is warm but not scalding, because the vent fluid behind it can top 350 C and the water in front of it is nearly freezing. It lives its entire life on a two-inch thermal tightrope, grazing its own torso.

## Winner: Marine Iguana
This was brutal, because every one of these creatures is a disaster in its own genre. The Hoff crab has the best name and the grossest lunch. The wolffish has the scariest mouth. The purple frog is the most committed introvert in the animal kingdom. But the marine iguana is the only contestant that clears all three bars at once and does it with style: COOL (the only lizard that dives and forages in the sea, 30 meters down, an hour on one breath), WEIRD (it literally shrinks its own skeleton by reabsorbing bone when times are lean, then regrows it), and GROSS (it sneezes salt into a crusty wig on its own face all day long). A cold-blooded, bone-melting, salt-sneezing sea dragon that Darwin personally insulted. That is a triple-threat champion. The marine iguana takes it.

## FAQ

### Wait, a lizard can actually get shorter?
Yes, and it is not a measurement error. Research first published in Nature in 2000 documented marine iguanas reducing their total body length by up to 20 percent during El Nino food shortages, partly by reabsorbing bone, then regrowing once algae returned. It is one of the only known cases of an adult vertebrate shrinking its own skeleton and bouncing back.

### Is the Hoff crab really named after David Hasselhoff?
Yes. The species Kiwa tyleri earned the nickname because of the dense mat of hair-like setae on the underside of its body, which reminded the scientists studying it of Hasselhoff's famously hairy chest. The crab uses that same hair to grow the bacteria it eats, so the resemblance is doing double duty.

### Does the purple frog ever actually come out of the ground?
Barely. It spends nearly its whole life underground and only surfaces for roughly two weeks a year during the monsoon to breed. Even its love songs are performed from beneath a thin layer of soil. If you have seen one in person, you got very lucky and it was probably raining.

## Sources
- Purple frog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_frog
- Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis: https://amphibiaweb.org/species/6197
- Purple Frog: https://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/purple-frog/
- Atlantic wolffish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_wolffish
- Atlantic Wolffish: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/atlantic-wolffish
- Marine iguana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_iguana
- Marine iguanas shrink to survive El Nino (Wikelski and Thom, 2000): https://www.nature.com/articles/47396
- Kiwa tyleri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwa_tyleri
- Dancing for Food in the Deep Sea: Bacterial Farming by a New Species of Yeti Crab: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026243
- Discovery of the Yeti crab: https://www.mbari.org/news/discovery-of-the-yeti-crab/

Tags: Amphibia, Actinopterygii, Reptilia, Malacostraca, Anura, Squamata, Decapoda, deep-sea, galapagos, totally-random

Canonical: https://lamalo.blog/purple-frog-vs-atlantic-wolffish-vs-marine-iguana-vs-hoff-crab