Some sharks have a nasty habit of taking bites out of each other, but in an aquarium in New Zealand one aggressive shark ended up doing its tank-mate a favor when it tore out a piece of the second shark’s belly. Visitors at Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World watched in shock as four baby sharks popped out of the gaping wound. The visitors ran to notify the aquarium staff, who quickly removed the babies.
[Aquarium staff member Fiona] Davies said the unusual delivery had probably saved the baby sharks’ lives.
Staff did not know the mother was pregnant and, had she given birth naturally, most likely at night, the babies would have been eaten by adult sharks and stingrays before staff could rescue them.
When the mom was removed from the communal tank to get her wound stitched up, vets found four more babies inside her. All are reportedly doing well, despite the spontaneous C-section.
Hundreds of poor Hindu villagers in eastern India have refused to hand over a rare turtle to authorities, saying it is an incarnation of God, officials said on Tuesday. Villagers chanting hymns and carrying garlands, bowls of rice and fruits are pouring in from remote villages to a temple in Kendrapara, a coastal district in eastern Orissa state.
Police have been trying to take the animal from the villagers since it’s actually illegal to harbor this rare turtle. (Note: That’s not a picture of the turtle to the left. The exact species isn’t clear from news reports.) The villagers are saying the turtle has holy symbols on its shell and is really an incarnation of Lord Jagannath, a popular Hindu deity.
Let us all pray to Jagannath that this doesn’t devolve into an Elian Gonzalez-type situation, with Indian authorities barging in to grab a confused reptile…
See that fish in the video below– that’s a slingjaw wrasse. Looks kind of boring, right? Well as you’ve probably guessed from the headline (or from the name slingjaw), it’s not. Just watch the video.
Its mouth shoots out like that of the monster in the Ridley Scott film Alien, slinging forward up to half the fish’s body length and engulfing the victim in moments.
The odd beast, found in shallow reef and lagoon waters, feeds mainly on small fish, shrimp and crabs.
The secret of the slingjaw wrasse’s remarkable mouth projection: Unlike most bony fishes, its lower jaw is not firmly attached to its skull, allowing the entire mouth to shoot outward. The foot-long fish isn’t really a threat to humans, but you might want to watch your fingers just in case.
To see if a whale’s libido is going full-throttle, grab a pair of nylons and head to the ocean, reports the New Scientist:
For the first time, testosterone and progesterone—two key hormones that signal whether whales are pregnant, lactating or in the mood to mate—have been extracted from whales’ lung mucus, captured in nylon stockings dangled from a pole over their blowholes as they surface to breathe.
This method could allow scientists to study whales without having to slaughter them, and could be used to simply give them a pregnancy test to try to learn why some species aren’t breeding, say the authors of the study.
Humans aren’t the only ones who enjoy a game of soccer (or football, depending on where you’re from). A new video has surfaced showing dolphins “kicking” around a ball—only the ball, in this case, is a jellyfish.
A team of marine biologists were astonished to see a dolphin swim under a jellyfish and with a quick flick of its tail shoot it out of the water. The bottlenose dolphins were caught on video performing the strange activity off the Welsh coastline. One dolphin was able to flip the jellyfish six feet up in the air.
There’s a mysterious black goo floating off the Alaskan coast, and no one is quite sure what it is. A helicopter flying over the area spotted a strand of the dark stuff, which is easily visible on the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, and followed it for 15 miles.
“[The goo is] certainly biological,” [Terry] Hasenauer [of the Coast Guard] said. “It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter…. It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”
“It’s pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it,” [an official with the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department] said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose – just bones and feathers – to the borough’s wildlife department.”
It’s hard enough for us humans to fight for a mate. But for the now-extinct mussel-like creatures known as ostracods, which lived on Earth about 100 million years ago, “getting in” was only part of the battle.
That’s where giant sperm comes in: Females copulated with multiple males, so it was up for the sperm themselves to duke it out inside of the female’s body. New research based on microfossils of these ancient creatures, led by Dr. Renate Matzke-Karasz in Munich, shows that a male’s sperm may have been even larger than the animal itself. And ostracods aren’t the only animals to produce mega-sperm, according to Reuters:
Giant sperm are still around today. A human sperm, for example, would have to be 40 meters long to measure up against a fruit fly’s. The insect is only a few millimeters in size but can produce 6 cm-long (2.5 inch) coiled sperm.
Scientists may have been celebrating the new administration since before Obama entered the Oval Office, but he is now an official recipient of one of the greatest honors in science: A species has been named after him. Caloplaca obamae, a newly-discovered lichen species, was found on California’s Santa Rosa Island during a 2007 survey of lichen diversity. Kerry Knudsen, lichen curator at the University of California, found and collected samples of the species during the final weeks of Obama’s campaign, so the lichen expert named the plant “to show my appreciation for the president’s support of science and science education.”
• Surfing may become a more earth-friendly sport, with boards made from at least 50 percent renewable materials reducing the use of petroleum, traditionally the primary component in surfboards.
• By discovering the gene that helps convert carbohydrate into fat in the liver, researchers may have inched closer to developing a genetic equivalent of the Atkins diet.
• In good news for endangered species, conservationists have developed a way to use 3-D imaging to track tiger populations—and then, in bad news for an already-extinct species, a celebrated paleontologist who discovered the world’s best-preserved dinosaur will now plead guilty for stealing dinosaur bones from federal land.
After observing that captive black tiger prawns tend to mate far less than their counterparts in the wild, Gay Marsden, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology, set up infrared cameras to see if she could determine a reason for the discrepancy. For two months, she watched how prawns behave in captivity and made one major discovery: Unlike prawns in the wild—or even wild-born prawns who are then moved into captivity—the ones under her surveillance were simply not into sex.
Like the shrimp industry, prawn populations are facing increasing environmental threats, and the aquaculture industry would rather breed prawns in captivity than in the wild, where they are vulnerable to disease. Wild prawns breed prolifically, but because they are often kept in high-density ponds, an entire population can be wiped out by a single virus. Captive-born prawns’ lack of interest in sex, then, poses a serious problem for business. (more…)
DiscoBlog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's edited by Eliza Strickland, and written by Brett Israel and Andrew Moseman.
Some sharks have a nasty habit of taking bites out of each other, but in an aquarium in New Zealand one aggressive shark ended up doing its tank-mate a favor when it tore out a piece of the second shark’s belly. Visitors at Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World watched in shock as four baby sharks popped out of the gaping wound. The visitors ran to notify the aquarium staff, who quickly removed the babies.
If your 
To see if a whale’s libido is going full-throttle, grab a pair of nylons and head to the ocean, reports the 
There’s a mysterious black goo floating off the Alaskan coast, and no one is quite sure what it is. A helicopter flying over the area spotted a strand of the dark stuff, which is easily visible on the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, and followed it for 15 miles.
It’s hard enough for us humans to fight for a mate. But for the now-extinct mussel-like creatures known as ostracods, which lived on Earth about 100 million years ago, “getting in” was only part of the battle.
Scientists may have been celebrating the new administration since before Obama entered the Oval Office, but he is now an official recipient of one of the greatest honors in science: A 
• An 
An Australian life scientist has been watching 
