Mara Grunbaum

"Oh, what a cute little mouse!"
"It's not a mouse! It's a marsupial called the antechinus."
"Sorry, Evolution, my mistake. Still cute, though."
"Isn't he? And he's excited, because he's almost eleven months old, and that means he finally gers to start mating."
"Aw, how sweet."
"He's going to run around getting it on with as many females as he can for the next two or three weeks."
"That's... nice."
"And he'll have sex with each of them for up to 14 hours at a stretch."
"That's... um..."
"And he'll get so exhausted from all the frantic mating that his fur will start falling off, and he'll contract gangrene."
"What? Jesus. Does he get to take a break, at least?"
"Nah, not really.. He basically keeps doing it until he gets so sick and stressed out that he dies. Suicidal reproduction, I'm calling it."
"Are you serious? He's going to mate himself to death?"
"Yeah, but he doesn't know it yet. Happy coming-of-age, little guy!"
"You're sick, you know that?"

"You know that elephant seal I made? The one with the awesome, floppy, inflatable nose?"
"Yes, Evolution, that was a pretty good nose."
"And you know how it kept getting parasites up inside it?"
"I heard that was an issue."
"I fixed it."
"You fixed it? What did you do, give the seal more productive mucus? A better immune system? Stronger nose hairs?"
"Nope! That all seemed too hard. I just made a nose-picking bird."
"A nose-picking bird."
"Works great."

The horned lizard fends off predatory coyotes by shooting three-foot streams of its own blood from its eye. Evolution, please seek psychiatric help.