主题：【原创】动物凶猛之“活战车” 上 -- 萨苏

The first one was discovered in 1979 by Roy Caldwell, an animal behaviourist at the University of California at Berkeley. It was a tiny ocean crustacean called Nannosquilla decemspinosa. It's related to the prawn that you chuck on your BBQ. This creature is around 25 mm long, and very skinny. In fact, they're so long and skinny, that they can't walk or crawl on land. So when the ocean waves throw them up on a beach, they curl themselves up, and do up to 40 backwards somersault rolls in a row, to get back into the water. They literally roll like a little wheel.

Now the only known land creature that will deliberately itself roll away from danger is the caterpillar of the Mother-Of-Pearl Moth, Pleurotya ruralis. This research was done by John Brackenbury at University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Most caterpillars have some sort of defence against attackers - such as a warning set of colours, irritant hairs, or chemicals that make them taste really bad. The mother-of-pearl caterpillar doesn't have any of these, so it relies on rolling away at enormous speed.

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But if you give it a really good poke, it will start off in its reverse gallop, and then, with its tail on the ground, push off from its front legs, curl itself into a ball, and roll backwards. Depending on how flat and level the ground is, a decent push will set it off into five complete revolutions, travelling at a speed of about 40 centimetres per second - about 40 times its normal speed.