An Emperor penguin being skinned on board the Endurance.

Imagine you’re in Antarctica. It’s cold. You’re cold. Your joints ache, old wounds are reopening to ooze pus, and your teeth loosen, threatening to fall out one or two at a time. What do you feel like eating? How about ”a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce?”

If this sounds delicious, then your stomach serves you well. That’s how famous polar explorer Frederick Cook described the taste of penguin meat, and that is how you cure yourself of scurvy in Antarctica when fresh vegetables are nowhere to be found. Fresh meat—lightly cooked or raw—contains vitamin C, whose deficiency causes scurvy and the delightful symptoms described above.

Unfortunately for turn-of-the-century Antarctic explorers, most expedition leaders were not as enlightened as Cook and many a man succumbed to scurvy. Unfortunately for Antarctica’s penguins, they were also easy prey for the men who did eat them. “Long lines of curious penguins marched across the ice and right into camp, which almost always meant death as dog food, human food, or fuel for the boiler. A stew of penguin heart and liver became a crew favorite,” describes Jason C. Anthony in a paper on Antarctic cuisine in the Heroic Age in Endeavour.

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What’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold, you say? With all due respect to André 3000, this frigid brine is even cooler. This icicle is caused by sinking brine, which becomes concentrated with salt at the surface. It’s super-salinity both allows it to become colder than ice, and sink, as it’s denser than sea water. This salty spout freezes the water around it, forming a sinister (and amazing) “brinicle.” Poor starfish. It was filmed by BBC filmmakers under the ice at Little Razorback Island, near Antarctica’s Ross Archipelago.

[Via BBC]

Scientists have discovered a new type of silk that combines the legendary stickiness of barnacles with the strength of spider silk (which is strong as steel and five times less dense). But the new material doesn’t come from a lab—it’s made by the small shrimp-like animal Crassicorophium bonellii. These crafty amphipods spin the silk using their legs like spiders to fashion mud-coated tubes in which they live.

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Before: scuzzy yellow (top); and after: pearly white! (bottom)

Killer whales are best known for their picturesque profiles and predilection for seal flesh, but they also like to travel, a recent study confirms. And these aren’t your basic joyrides through ice flows. These are 6,200-mile excursions to the tropics, where scientists speculate they engage in a pursuit familiar to anyone who’s headed to a Bermuda spa in February: getting rid of that wintry dead skin.

To get detailed information about whales’ movements, a group of scientists equipped whales with tags that would record swim velocity and current location. At first they just noodled around the Antarctic hunting, a behavior the scientists could identify from the bursts of speed they put on as they went after prey. But then, each in their own time, they started to rocket northwards, moving nonstop until they reached the balmy waters hear Uruguay and southern Brazil, nearly 6,000 miles away. Then, just as suddenly, they whipped around and came back. One whale made the trip in just 42 days.

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So you finally got that 3D printer. It was pricey, but now you can fabricate anything you want! After making a few dozen hamster food dishes, a model of your own head, and as many toilet part replacements as you will ever (God willing) need, you’re feeling at loose ends. You need a cause to print for.

That cause, provided by Project Shellter at Makerbot, is wee little hermit crabs, who are, in turns out, suffering from a shell shortage. (more…)

Ichthyosaur bones: clear evidence of kraken lair

A well-known paleontologist found the lair of the heretofore-mythical kraken, proving that a hyper-intelligent giant squid hunted schoolbus-sized ichthyosauruses before breaking their necks, drowning them, and bringing them home to its pad on the bottom of the sea. After feasting on the delicious sea reptile, the kraken felt artistic and made a self-portrait, arranging their bones in a pattern resembling the suckers on its tentacle.

Unfortunately, this insane story isn’t a tale from a science-fiction novel. It was actually stated in a news release from the Geological Society of America and credulously regurgitated by many news sources covering it, taking the, uh, not entirely rock-solid claims made by Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin at face value.

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Bluestreak cleaner wrasses servicing a “client.”

Our legal system was built on the idea that different crimes warrant different punishments. Aggravated assault will snag you less jail time then, say, premeditated murder. And with no small degree of hubris, many of us believe that we’re the only animals on the planet to implement such a discerning system. But scientists have now learned that a species of fish also punish delinquents according to the severity of their crimes.

Starting life as females, bluestreak cleaner wrasse band together to clean off parasites and dead tissue from bigger fish, including sharks. At some point, the largest wrasse in a group, which typically has about 16 members, will change sex, become harem master, and reproduce with the others.

Yet while they normally feed on parasites, wrasse females actually prefer something a bit tastier: their clients’ mucus. However, a misplaced mucus nibble can annoy the client and thereby drive off the group’s food source, so males chase and bite any females caught misbehaving. Last year, scientists saw that punished females seem to fall back in line.

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In this lab image, the toadfish’s twin bladders
are visible in the middle of its body.

There’s nothing like a bizarre fish call to shake you out of your complacency about the universe. With that in mind, we bring you the bottom-feeding three-spined toadfish, which produces its foghorn hoots and guttural grunts by vibrating the muscles around its two swim bladders, the sacs of air that keep it afloat. And these aren’t just any hoots and grunts, a new study reveals—some of these cries have qualities that have been seen the animal kingdom over, from babies’ cries to frog calls to bird song, but never before seen in fish, though fish have been known to make an incredible array of sounds (really!).

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All the single ladies, all the single ladies…

Whales catch earworms, too, show scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia in a new study. Each breeding season, males start out singing a new tune, which might incorporate bits of golden oldies or be entirely fresh. These new songs are then passed from whale to whale for 4,000 miles, usually starting from the western edge of the Pacific near Australia, a veritable humpback metropolis, to French Polynesia in the east, a comparative hinterland: a possible cetacean case of cultural trends starting in the big city and propagating to the country. Another hypothesis from the Hairpin:

What if Michael Jackson was reincarnated as a whale and is now living off the coast of eastern Australia? 

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Since Monday’s news that a few thousand birds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve over Beebe, Arkansas, the world has gone a little crazy with talk of the “aflockalypse”: the mass bird deaths that have been documented worldwide.

Bird die-offs have been reported in not only Arkansas but also in Italy, Sweden, Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Die-offs of other animals, including thousands of fish in Arkansas, Florida, New Zealand and the Chesapeake Bay have also been noted, while dead crabs washed up on UK shores.

Causes ranging from UFOs, monsters (our personal favorite), fireworks, secret military testing, poison, shifting magnetic fields, and odd weather formations have been blamed for the deaths, but researchers are saying these types of die-offs are normal. It’s simply a coincidence that a few big ones happened right around the new year–and once the global media started paying attention to wildlife mortality, we saw examples everywhere.

BoingBoing quotes Smithsonian Institution bird curator Gary Graves on the Arkansas bird die-off that got the conspiracy theory ball rolling:

He doesn’t think these bird deaths are a sign of anything nefarious–or, at least, nothing more nefarious than local people taking it upon themselves to stress out a large roost of “nuisance” birds until it flies away. There’s a head count associated with that kind of thing, he says, and it’s not particularly odd to see a few thousand birds die this way. But, with roosts numbering in the millions of birds, that’s not a large percentage lost. The only thing different in this case, he says, is that the dead birds landed on lawns, rather than in the wilderness.

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