Pink Slugs, Woolly Rats and Penguins: 7 Animals That Call Volcanoes Home

Would you want to live on a volcano? For a surprising amount of animals, the answer would be yes - and some of them are rather weird. Let's take a look at...

• The Galapagos Penguin
• The Mount Kaputar Pink Slug
• The Volcano Rabbit
• The Scaleless Blackfish
• The Pompeii Worm
• The Bosavi Woolly Rat
• The Lesser Flamingo

The Galapagos Penguin

Penguins are birds well suited to the colder (or even polar) regions of the southern hemisphere... which makes the Galapagos penguin something of an outlier. Not only do these birds live on the equator, they've found a way to turn the local volcanic activity to their advantage!

While the cool ocean currents can help keep the islands milder than you might expect, the penguins still need tricks to keep themselves alive. The adults pant like dogs, have bare patches of skin to help lose heat and can take a dip if all else fails... but the chicks can't take that option. Instead, they take shelter in the lava tubes created by volcanic activity, which have made small natural cave systems just beneath the archipelago's surface!

The Mount Kaputar Pink Slug

Slugs are usually drab colors - gray, brown, occasionally yellow... and then there's the giant, screaming hot pink slugs of the Mount Kaputar.

These vivid slugs live atop of the extinct volcano, in a damp patch of forest around 1,500m above sea level. It's not really clear why they're the color they are, but it may be thanks to a comparative lack or predators in the area. Of course, that doesn't offer any guarantee of safety from natural disasters - the slugs were nearly wiped out in 2019 by an outbreak of bushfires.

The pink slug isn't the only strange mollusk on the mountain. It's joined by the red triangle slug (they literally have the outline of a red triangle on their back) and the hairy snail (which really does have hairs on its shell.) There's also a carnivorous snail that specializes in eating the vegetarian snails of the mountain!

The Volcano Rabbit

Rabbits are common rodents with a tendency to overrun areas given the chance (just look at what happened to Australia) but a small population in Central Mexico seems to have picked a precarious existence. The volcano rabbit is found only on the slopes of four volcanoes - and there's only around 7,000 of the creatures left in the wild.

These little (they only weigh around a pound) rodents subsist on tough, mountain grass the grows in clumps on the volcanic slopes. As well as being lunch, the grass helps hide the diminutive rabbits from predators such as weasels, bobcats and birds of prey.

As if the creature didn't have enough to worry about already, one of their homes is Popocatépetl... which is an active volcano. Others live on Iztaccíhuatl, which is dormant at least. I guess volcanic ash-fed grass must be absolutely delicious!

The Scaleless Blackfish

Given that many volcanoes are beneath the sea (in fact, some sources claim that their numbers should be measured in millions) it seems right to include a horror found living near a recently discovered volcano cluster off the coast of Sydney, Australia.

The scaleless blackfish (or scaleless black dragonfish) really does look like something from the Alien franchise. A shining, tapered black body not unlike that of an eel is capped off with an oversized head complete with curved fangs.

There is one upside - these fish are not very large at all, with most specimens a bit smaller than a human finger. The largest examples reach around 26cm in length, but the specimens found off Sydney were quite a bit smaller than that - it seems that they were juveniles, using the range of extinct volcanoes as a nursery!

The Pompeii Worm

Staying underwater, submerged volcanoes are often surrounded by hydrothermal vents - places where seawater seeps through the crust and comes into contact with extremely hot rock or magma. The now-heated water rising back up often carries rich loads of sediments and minerals, which can build up "chimneys" as the liquid sheds its contents.

The minerals can be an incredible resource for animals, if they can survive the conditions. Enter the Pompeii worm - a creature that lives on the side of these vents, sitting in boiling water and surviving thanks to a insulating coat of bacteria that it cultivates with mucus. The bacteria break down minerals for energy... and also act as a food source for the worm.

The worm lives inside a thin tube with the base touching the hot vent. It pokes its head and gills out into the cooler water away from the vent to grab oxygen, then dips back inside so its bacteria can stew in the nutrient rich vent fluids. This in-out motion also helps circulate water in the tube, helping keep the temperature tolerable for the worm.

The Bosavi Woolly Rat

The crater of Papua New Guinea's Mount Bosavi is over two miles wide and surrounded by steep cliffs nearly half a mile high - which means that few terrestrial animals are able to get in or out.

Sadly for fans of Jurassic Park, this isolated lost world doesn't appear to be the home of surviving dinosaurs... but it does have a unique population of massive true rats. Clocking in at 3.5 pounds and over 30 inches from nose to tail-tip, the Bosavi woolly rat looks like a scaled up version of the rats you can see in any human city... albeit with thick, scraggly fur!

Perhaps as a result of little human contact, the rats seemed pretty friendly towards the researchers investigating them... which is just as well really, as being bitten by one would probably be pretty nasty!

The Lesser Flamingo

Flamingos in general can put up with some pretty unpleasant waters, but the lesser flamingo is in a league of its own. Most are found in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, contending with hypersaline and caustic waters caused by volcanic activity (such as Lake Natron, which can cause chemical burns to human skin) alongside blooms of the insidiously deadly cyanobacteria... that they gobble up without any ill-effects.

What might be less obvious is their heat tolerance. Extremely tough scaled skin on their legs prevents burns while wading, and the birds are capable of drinking scalding hot water. Why do they need to do that, you might ask? Well, the only freshwater available in their preferred habitats comes from geysers and hot springs - though in fairness they can make do with salt water, filtering sodium from their blood and "spitting" it from glands near their eyes!

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• Spears, Snipers and Deadly Sand Pits: Animals That Arm Themselves

Sources and Further Info:

• 7 surprising facts about the Galapagos penguin
• Galapagos Penguins Go Swimming | South Pacific | BBC Earth
• The giant pink slugs of Mount Kaputar
• Giant pink slug eats fungi
• Volcano rabbit
• Fishes only a mother could love! Terrifying-looking species spotted lurking near just-discovered volcano off Sydney coast
• Pompeii worm
• New species of giant rat discovered in crater of volcano in Papua New Guinea
• Giant Rat discovered - Lost Land of the Volcano - BBC
• Africa’s most toxic lakes are a paradise for fearless flamingos
• The Lesser Flamingo