Some photos of the natural world look edited the first time you see them: a cactus that is purple instead of green, a beach buried under brown froth, flames that burn electric blue, mountains striped like a layer cake. Every one of the 13 pictures below is real, and every one has an explanation, usually more interesting than the joke that made it go viral.
We have grouped them by type, from plants and animals to strange skies and landscapes, and given each one a short, fact-checked caption. You will find out why a cactus turns purple, why the world's "ugliest" fish looks nothing like that at home, how a flower fakes the smell of a dead animal, and why one famous cloud is still being misattributed to Van Gogh. A few popular claims that came with these images, like a "parasite" on the blobfish and a precise temperature for frost flowers, turned out to be shaky, so we explain what is actually known.
The header image shows the Rainbow Mountains of Zhangye in China, which also appear further down. Photo: Imaginechina, via HuffPost.
Plants that break the rules
1. The purple cactus
This is most likely the purple prickly pear, Opuntia macrocentra, native to Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas and northern Mexico. Its pads contain betacyanin, a red-violet pigment from the same family that colours beetroot. The purple shows most strongly when the plant is stressed by drought or cold, and in spring it produces yellow flowers with a red heart. Photo: Reddit user AbortionGhost.
2. The corpse flower
The titan arum, Amorphophallus titanum, comes from the rainforests of western Sumatra and produces one of the largest flowering structures on Earth, sometimes over three metres tall. A plant grown from seed usually needs five to ten years before it first flowers, and the bloom itself lasts only about 24 to 36 hours. During that time it releases sulphur compounds that smell like rotting meat and even warms itself to around 37°C to spread the scent, all to attract the carrion beetles and flesh flies that pollinate it. It is listed as Endangered in the wild. Photo: Randy Pench / AP / The Sacramento Bee.
Ice and sky
3. Frost flowers on sea ice
Frost flowers grow on thin, new sea ice when the air is calm and at least 15°C colder than the ice surface. Moisture rising from the relatively warm ice freezes onto tiny bumps, building feathery crystals a few centimetres across. A figure of "-22°C" often quoted with this photo is not a formation threshold: it is roughly the temperature below which salt starts to crystallise out, and frost flowers stop forming when the ice gets that cold. The crystals are very salty, and researchers reported in 2012 that they host lively communities of bacteria. Photo: Matthias Wietz.
4. Wavy clouds and "UFO" clouds
On the left are Kelvin-Helmholtz waves, which form when a faster layer of air slides over a slower one and curls the boundary into breaking waves, much like wind over the sea. They often vanish within minutes. You may read that they inspired Van Gogh's The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, but there is no evidence for that, even though physicists have since found turbulence-like patterns in the painting's swirls. On the right are lenticular clouds, smooth lens shapes that sit almost still over and behind mountains as moist air flows through standing waves; they are often mistaken for flying saucers, and glider pilots use the rising air on their leading edge. Photos: Peter (Flickr) and Sarah Fischer via EarthSky.
5. Mammatus and asperitas clouds
The pouch-like clouds on the left, photographed in Saskatchewan, Canada, are mammatus. They usually hang beneath the anvil of a big thunderstorm and often appear before, during or after severe weather, though they do not cause tornadoes themselves. On the right is asperitas, the rough, sea-like cloud base that the Cloud Appreciation Society campaigned to recognise from 2009. The World Meteorological Organization added it to its International Cloud Atlas in March 2017 as a supplementary feature, the first addition since 1951; this image, taken over New Zealand in 2005 by Witta Priester, was featured by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Photos: Yahoo News; Witta Priester (Flickr).
Animals that look like they were designed by committee
6. Christmas Island's red crab migration
Christmas Island is an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, and it is home to an endemic red land crab, Gecarcoidea natalis. Recent surveys put the adult population at about 43.7 million, after invasive yellow crazy ants killed an estimated 10 to 15 million. When the wet season arrives, usually in October or November, the crabs march from the forest to the coast to breed, with the timing tied to the moon; females release their eggs into the sea at high tide during the last quarter. Rangers put up barriers, underpasses and even a five-metre "crab bridge" to keep them off the roads. Photo: via Travel Tourism Blog.
7. The blobfish
The blobfish, Psychrolutes marcidus, lives 600 to 1,200 metres deep off Australia and New Zealand, where water pressure is 60 to 120 times that at the surface. Down there its jelly-like body, slightly less dense than water, lets it hover above the seafloor and looks like a fairly ordinary fish. Hauled to the surface it sags into the famous droopy face, which is why it won a 2013 online vote run by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society and became its mascot. The yellowish object at its lip is often described as a parasite, but that has not been confirmed. Photo: Kerryn Parkinson.
8. The star-nosed mole
The star-nosed mole lives in wet, low-lying ground across north-eastern North America. Its nose is a ring of 22 fleshy rays carrying about 25,000 touch receptors called Eimer's organs, which make it one of the fastest foragers known among mammals: it can identify and swallow prey in as little as 120 milliseconds. It also swims well and can "smell" underwater by blowing bubbles onto objects and sniffing them back in. Photo: via Top List Portal.
9. The "unicorn" deer
Deer antlers grow each year from two bony bases on the skull called pedicles. An injury or developmental fault can leave an animal with a single antler growing near the middle of its head, which is how "unicorn" deer appear in the wild from time to time. Such animals usually live normal lives, and they are a reminder that the unicorn legend may owe something to real one-horned animals such as rhinos and to narwhal tusks once sold as "unicorn horn". Photo: via Animals World.
Landscapes that look photoshopped
10. The "Cappuccino Coast"
This frothy shoreline is sea foam, and the best-known episode came on 24 August 2007 at Yamba in northern New South Wales, Australia. Foam forms when breaking waves whip air into water rich in dissolved organic matter, such as proteins and fats released when algal blooms break down; these act like soap and stabilise the bubbles. Natural foam is not toxic in itself, but it can concentrate pollutants or algal toxins, and deep foam can hide hazards, so it is wise not to play in it. Photo: via Media-Saver.
11. The Rainbow Mountains of Zhangye
These striped hills are in Zhangye National Geopark in Gansu province, north-western China, a 322-square-kilometre area that became a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2019. The colours come from layers of sandstone and other mineral-rich sediments laid down over roughly 24 million years, then tilted by the same tectonic forces that raised the Himalayas and carved by wind and rain. They are real, though many online photos are heavily saturated; in person the colours are softer, especially at midday. Photo: Imaginechina, via HuffPost.
12. The "blue lava" of Ijen
Kawah Ijen is a volcano complex in East Java, Indonesia. The lava is not actually blue: the glow comes from sulphuric gases escaping from cracks at up to 600°C and igniting as they meet the air, a phenomenon locals call api biru, "blue fire". The crater also holds a highly acidic turquoise lake, and miners still carry heavy loads of sulphur out by hand. Photo: Olivier Grunewald, via National Geographic.
And one we did to ourselves
13. Cucumber or zucchini?
Not every mix-up is nature's fault. Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) and zucchini, or courgettes (Cucurbita pepo), belong to the same gourd family but to different genera, and they can look nearly identical in a shop. A cucumber usually has a waxy, sometimes bumpy skin and feels cool and watery, while a zucchini has a duller, slightly rough skin and a woody stem end; cucumbers are mostly eaten raw, zucchini usually cooked. Photo: Instagram user @beigecardigan.
Why nature keeps surprising us
Most of these images feel "wrong" because they break a rule our brains learned early: cacti are green, lava is red, clouds are fluffy, fish have faces. Look closer and every surprise has a cause, from pigments and pressure to air currents, chemistry and the slow work of geology. Viral captions tend to exaggerate or invent details, so when a photo seems unbelievable, a good habit is to find the name of the thing and look it up in a reliable reference. The real story is usually stranger.
If you enjoyed this collection, have a look at our gallery of 20 nature photos of unusual animals, plants and landscapes.
Sources: Wikipedia: Opuntia macrocentra, Amorphophallus titanum, Frost flower (sea ice), Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, The Starry Night, Lenticular cloud, Mammatus cloud, Asperitas, Christmas Island red crab, Psychrolutes marcidus, Ugly Animal Preservation Society, Star-nosed mole, Sea foam, Zhangye National Geopark, Ijen; WMO International Cloud Atlas: Asperitas; Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center: purple prickly pear; Colossal (2012): frost flowers and microbial life; NASA APOD: asperitas over New Zealand; National Geographic (2014): Kawah Ijen blue flames. Photos credited in each caption; gallery originally compiled by Diply.
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