Some photographs stop you because you cannot immediately tell what you are looking at. A ball of white fluff that turns out to be a mineral, a lemon that is half lime, a line of caterpillars marching nose to tail, a rainbow pouring out of a single cloud. The 17 pictures below were shared by ordinary people on Reddit, Imgur, Pikabu, Twitter and Facebook, and each one shows something most of us will rarely see in person.
Rarity, though, is a slippery word. A few of these sights are genuinely uncommon, such as a golden tiger or a field of snow rollers. Others are perfectly normal in the right place, like a skate's egg case on a beach or a processionary caterpillar in Australia, but look astonishing to anyone who has never met them. For each picture we explain what it actually shows, how it happens and, where a popular claim does not hold up, what the evidence says instead.
The photos are grouped by theme: animals, minerals and plants, weather and light, and the odd things people make or carry.
Unusual animals and the traces they leave
A golden tiger
Golden or "golden tabby" tigers are not a separate subspecies but ordinary tigers carrying two copies of a recessive gene, probably the so-called wideband gene, which reduces black pigment and leaves a pale gold coat with faint stripes. The captive animals appear to trace back to a white tiger named Bhim, and many have been bred deliberately for their looks. The figure of "only 30 in the world" that travels with this photo has no census behind it, so it is best read as a guess rather than a fact.
Caterpillars travelling in single file
This long procession is typical of the bag-shelter moth, Ochrogaster lunifer, found across mainland Australia. Each caterpillar keeps touch with the tail hairs of the one in front and follows a silk trail scented with pheromones, so lines of a hundred or more can form when they leave the nest to feed or to burrow. Look but do not touch: older caterpillars carry microscopic barbed hairs that cause painful skin rashes and eye inflammation, and they are linked to miscarriages in pregnant mares.
A flying fish on deck
A sailor found this fish on the boat at night, took one photo and returned it to the sea. Flying fish belong to the family Exocoetidae, with around 64 species, and use their enlarged pectoral fins as wings. A typical glide covers about 50 metres, but by catching updrafts off waves they can travel up to 400 metres at speeds above 70 km/h, mostly to escape tuna, marlin and other predators below. Boat lights at night attract them, which is why they so often end up on deck.
A skate's egg case, not a "ramp" egg
Older English versions of this caption called it the egg of a "ramp", a machine translation of the Russian word skat, which means a skate or ray. What you see is an egg case, often nicknamed a mermaid's purse: a tough, leathery capsule made of collagen, usually rectangular with a horn at each corner. All skates, many sharks and the chimaeras lay them, and the embryo inside can take from a few months to more than a year to hatch. Empty cases washed up on beaches are a good sign that these fish breed nearby.
Starlings over Rome
Every autumn and winter, huge flocks of starlings gather over Rome at dusk before settling to roost in the city's trees. The swirling shapes, called murmurations, form because each bird reacts to the movements of its nearest neighbours, so the whole cloud can twist and pulse in seconds. Flying in a dense group makes it far harder for hawks and falcons to pick out a single target. For Romans the spectacle comes with a downside: pavements and parked cars beneath the roosts are covered in droppings.
Minerals, plants and eggs that look wrong
Okenite "cotton balls"
These soft-looking puffs are okenite, a hydrated calcium silicate (CaSi2O5·2H2O) made of fine, radiating fibrous crystals. It usually grows inside cavities in basalt, and most collector specimens come from Maharashtra in India. It was first described in 1828 from Disko Island in Greenland and named after the German naturalist Lorenz Oken. The fibres bend but break easily, so the "fluff" should never be stroked.
A "lime-on"
Half yellow and half green with an almost straight border, this fruit was grown by the poster's friend's father. Citrus trees are often grafted, and fruit with sharply divided sectors is usually explained as a chimera or bud mutation, where tissues with slightly different genetics grow side by side. Uneven ripening can also leave one side greener than the other. Without testing the fruit, the exact cause here cannot be confirmed, but the effect is striking.
A tree growing out of its own stump
The poster described this as a baobab reborn from the remains of the old tree: a young trunk rising from the centre of a cut, fallen log. The species cannot be confirmed from the photo, but baobabs are known for regrowth. Fallen trees can keep sprouting, and many of the oldest baobabs are actually rings of several stems fused together. Other trees, from willows to eucalyptus, also send up new shoots from stumps, a process foresters call coppicing.
An unusually long egg
One of the poster's hens laid this elongated egg, shown next to two ordinary ones. Odd shapes are fairly common in backyard flocks, especially in young hens just starting to lay or in older birds, and they usually reflect a hiccup in the shell gland rather than illness. If misshapen eggs become frequent, it is worth asking a vet to check the flock's health and diet.
Weather and light from unusual angles
Large hail in Alabama
The poster joked that it "hailed a little bit" before lining up a row of stones bigger than golf balls. Hail grows inside thunderstorms with strong updrafts, which carry frozen droplets through layers of supercooled water until the stones are too heavy to stay aloft; cut one open and you will see onion-like layers. For scale, the largest hailstone officially measured in the US, at Vivian, South Dakota in 2010, was 20 centimetres across.
Snow rollers in New Jersey
Snow rollers are natural snowballs pushed along by the wind. They need a precise recipe: a thin top layer of damp snow close to freezing, a slippery base such as ice or powder beneath it, and wind strong enough to roll the snow without breaking it up. Their weak inner layers often blow out, leaving a hollow, doughnut-like ring, and because the conditions are so exact, many people never see them.
A rainbow seen from a plane
From above, a rainbow can appear in the rain falling from a single cloud. Rainbows form where sunlight is reflected back from raindrops at about 42 degrees from the point directly opposite the sun, so the drops that light up always lie on a circle around that point. On the ground the horizon hides the lower half, but from an aircraft you can see a fuller arc, or even a complete circle, below you.
Human oddities, art and souvenirs
"Life is an Open Book" by Brad Spencer
Brad Spencer is a sculptor who carves figures directly into brick, so they appear to step out of the wall they are made from. This piece in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina shows a figure emerging from the masonry with its face only partly freed. Unlike the natural curiosities in this list, it is a deliberate illusion: the surprise comes from seeing a rigid building material behave like a soft one.
Very long fingers
The poster had been told that their fingers were unusually long, and the hand gesture makes the length obvious. Finger proportions vary widely between people and are mostly inherited. Long fingers alone are not a health concern, although very long limbs and fingers together with other signs can be a feature of conditions such as Marfan syndrome, which a doctor can check if there is any doubt.
An unusual ability
This photo, shared on Twitter, shows a student holding out his fists in a shape most people's hands simply cannot make. Tricks like this usually depend on flexible joints, sometimes described as being "double-jointed", which in reality means ligaments that allow a wider range of movement than average. It is generally harmless, but anyone whose flexible joints cause pain or frequent dislocation should talk to a doctor.
An overloaded truck in India
A small blue truck almost disappears under a vast, overhanging load of dried straw or hay, wrapped and roped into a shape wider than the road. Loads like this are a familiar sight in rural India at harvest time, when fodder is moved from fields to farms. They are also dangerous: a high, wide load makes a vehicle unstable and blocks the driver's view, which is why many countries set legal limits on load size.
The €0 Karl Marx note
For the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth in 2018, his home town of Trier sold souvenir "banknotes" with a face value of zero euros. Trier's tourism company sold them for €3 each; the first print run of 5,000 sold out in less than a month, and more than 20,000 were expected to be printed. They carry security features like real notes but are not money. The Roman gate in the background, the Porta Nigra, is Trier's best-known landmark.
Rare, or simply new to us?
Looking back over the list, only a handful of these pictures show something truly rare: a golden tiger, a wind-rolled snowball, a full rainbow from the air. Most of the rest are common somewhere, to someone. Australians know processionary caterpillars, beachcombers know mermaid's purses, and Romans see starlings every winter.
That difference is worth keeping in mind whenever a viral photo comes with a bold caption. Ask what exactly is shown, where it was taken and who is making the claim. A little context does not spoil the surprise; it usually makes the picture more interesting, because the explanation is often stranger than the myth.
Sources: Wikipedia: Golden tiger; Wikipedia: Ochrogaster lunifer; Wikipedia: Flying fish; Wikipedia: Egg case (Chondrichthyes); Wikipedia: Okenite; Wikipedia: Adansonia digitata; Wikipedia: Hail; Wikipedia: Snow roller; Wikipedia: Rainbow; The Local Germany: Karl Marx's birth city sells zero-euro bills. Photos are credited to the people who shared them, as shown under each image; preview image credits: Lara Knowles/YouTube and Brad Spencer.
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