https://www.wired.com/2013/04/animal-superpowers/

Cuttlefish (Sepiida) There's nothing to see here. Nope. In reality, the yellow thing in the photo above is a cuttlefish doing its best to impersonate an aquarium plant. Shapeshifting masters of camouflage, cuttlefish can rapidly blend in with the scenery to avoid predators. They can disguise themselves to look like just about anything aquatic, assuming a vast array of postures and colors -- the latter being the result of pigment-containing sacs in their skin. A cuttlefish can control the size of the sac, called a chromatophore, and change color accordingly. The end result is a spooky feat of invisibility that's much more successful than James Bond's car. Image: Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory

https://www.wired.com/2013/04/animal-superpowers/

Lyrebird (Menura) The Australian lyrebird loves to sing songs to woo its mates. The male’s courtship display includes beautiful tunes that each individual creates, mixed in with a bunch of stolen sounds from its environment. Because they have the most complexly-muscled vocal chords of any songbird, lyrebirds can reproduce an insane variety of sounds both natural and artificial, including chainsaws, car engines, barking dogs, and human voices. If you ever get bitten by a radioactive lyrebird, you can probably expect a Top 40 pop career while moonlighting as a masked vigilante fighting crime with the power of voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos/Wikimedia Video: BBCWorldwide/Youtube

https://www.wired.com/2013/04/animal-superpowers/

Tardigrade, aka Water Bear (Tardigrada) These tiny, adorable creatures grow to be only a millimeter long but may be the hardiest organism on the planet (or perhaps any planet). Tardigrades are virtually indestructible[pdf]. They are polyextremophiles, meaning they thrive in multiple kinds of extreme environments. Among the things they are known to survive: Freezing temperatures as low as -200 C (-328 F), scorching temperatures up to 150 C (302 F), outer space, no food or water for over a century (or only a decade if you are a spoilsport scientist), ionizing radiation up to 570,000 roentgens (a dose of just 500 roentgens would kill you), solar radiation, gamma radiation, ultraviolet radiation, high salinity and lack of oxygen. How can a creature so tough be so cute and cuddly looking at the same time? It hardly seems fair. Image: NASA

https://www.wired.com/2013/04/animal-superpowers/

Pit vipers (several species, including Cryptelytrops albolabris, above) Pit vipers, as well as some pythons and boas, can sense the body heat of their prey from several feet away. Small pit organs on the snakes' faces detect infrared radiation, allowing them to create a thermal profile of, say, a nearby mouse. Nerves connect the pit organs to the brain's somatosensory system, which processes the sense of touch, suggesting that the snakes literally feel the heat. In 2010, scientists identified the heat-sensing receptor molecule. The human version of this receptor is thought to be responsible for the mild burn that comes with swigging carbonated drinks, as well as the stronger burn of wasabi. Image: Thomas Brown/Flickr (viper)/David Julius lab, via Nature (mouse)