Discoblog » The Ocean & All Its (Endangered) Wonders

Hearty Penguin Steaks: the Old-School Explorers’ Salve for Scurvy

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:12:34 +0000

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 ...

The Icy Brinicle of Death (or at Least of Coolness)

Douglas Main — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:53:47 +0000

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]

Shrimp-Like Animals Spin Super-Sticky, Super-Strong Underwater Silk

Douglas Main — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:28:51 +0000

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.

In a study published this month in the journal Naturwissenschaften, researchers from the Oxford Silk Group found that the silk is extremely sticky and can cement underwater, like the glue used by barnacles to stick to virtually anything. But it’s also strong and flexible, with a solid fiber core like that seen in spider silk. Also like many spiders, the creatures process and excrete the material from ducts in their legs, which they then use to spin it and fashion themselves a home.

The material is first made in a gland similar to that of barnacles. The researchers think the similarities to spiders, both in the strength/flexibility of the fiber and spinning process with the legs, evolved independently, since C. bonellii are more closely related to barnacles than ...

Study: Killer Whales Migrate Thousands of Miles to…Exfoliate?

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:50:33 +0000

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.

These trips didn’t happen at any particular time of year, nor did they seem to involve mating or following traveling prey, and those ...

Big-Hearted Maker-Folk Rush to the Aid of Homeless Hermit Crabs

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:42:00 +0000

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. Wild crabs “are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find,” runs the manifesto-cum-blog post kicking off the project. “This is not acceptable.” 3D printing aficionados are instructed to post their designs for crab shells here. The Makerbot people will see what designs and materials their pet hermit crabs are most drawn to.

The idea, apparently, is to make shells that can be provided to captive crabs, not to fill the oceans with 3D-printed kipple in an attempt to alleviate the woes of their wild brethren (that, actually, was the quasi-serious goal of the last project we heard about that used ...

Scientist Definitively Proves Existence of Hyper-Intelligent Mythical Octopus

Douglas Main — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:16:42 +0000

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.

Ahem. Let’s be clear: there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a creature. It doesn’t even pass the most basic tests of common sense: where is the proof? There is none. But the coverage of the story would lead you to believe otherwise. Paleontologist-writer Brian Switek nails this point in his excellent write up from yesterday:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Esteemed scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan reminded us of ...

The Punishment Must Fit the Crime—Even for Hermaphroditic, Mucus-Eating Fish

Joseph Castro — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:33:31 +0000

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.

A new study has found that the severity of the punishment scales with the misdeed. ...

Grunts of the Two-Bladdered, Three-Spined Toadfish Are More Like Birdsong Than You’d Think

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:27:32 +0000

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!).

These qualities, called nonlinearities, are harmonics and dissonances that are overlaid on the linear qualities—rising and falling pitch, for instance—of a call, like elaborate icing on an otherwise plain cake. Birds are the virtuosos of nonlinear calls, using their double-piped throats to create complex songs that no wimpy human larynx can replicate, but the cries of distressed human babies have nonlinearities, as do the calls of many

Catchiest Mating Songs Spread Through Whale Populations Like Top 40 Hits

Veronique Greenwood — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:55:22 +0000

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?

This MJ-style spread of songs is cultural transmission on a massive scale, a scale that hasn’t been seen beyond humans before. Over the course of 11 years, researchers saw (or rather, heard) these songs ripple across six whale populations and thousands of miles of ocean. One song even turned up in the Atlantic. There are several possibilities as to how, points out Wired Science: “The songs could be carried by ...

Aflockalypse: The Media Goes on Apocalyptic Overdrive

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:14:18 +0000

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 ...

Shark Attack in Egypt? Must Be the Work of Israeli Agents

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:27:15 +0000

A recent smattering of shark attacks in the shallow waters of the Egyptian resort city Sharm el-Sheikh has visitors in a state of JAWS-like panic. The sharks (now known to be individuals of at least two different species) attacked five times over six days, killing a German tourist and severely injuring four others.

The state of panic is a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories. One Sharm el-Sheikh diver named Captain Mustafa Ismail believes that the sharks were trained to attack Egyptians by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He explained his theory to Egypt Today (as retold by Ahram Online):

When asked by the anchor how the shark entered Sharm El Sheikh waters, he burst out, “no, it’s who let them in?” Urged to elaborate, Ismail said that he recently got a call from an Israeli diver in Eilat telling him that they captured a small shark with a GPS planted in its back, implying that the sharks were monitored to attack in Egypt’s waters only. “Why would these sharks travel 4000 km and not have any ...

I’m Dreaming of an Eel-Illuminated Christmas

Eliza Strickland — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 19:28:58 +0000

When an aquarium in Japan planned their holiday displays for Christmas, they decided to harness the natural talents of one resident: the electric eel. The lights on one small Christmas tree are powered by the eel’s natural electricity, which is picked up by two aluminum panels in the tank that act as electrodes.

The eel-powered Christmas tree has been a fixture at the aquarium for the past few years, but Reuters reports that this year the aquarium broadened its alternative energy experiment by adding a dancing Santa powered by stomping human feet.

As we admire the tree, let’s also take a moment to appreciate Kazuhiko Minawa, the inventor of this marvel and a spokesman for the Enoshima Aquarium. He says in the 2008 video below: “If we could gather all the electric eels from all around the world, we would be able to light up an unimaginably large Christmas tree.” Oh Mr. Minawa, we can imagine it.

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To Find Love, the Barnacle Grows a Stretchy, Accordion-Like Penis

Eliza Strickland — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:21:12 +0000

By Mara Grunbaum

To find a mate, most animals must travel—up a tree, down a stream, across the street to the bar. But not barnacles, which spend their entire adult lives cemented firmly to rocks, boats, whales and the like. To compensate for their immobility, barnacles have evolved the longest penises relative to body size in the animal kingdom.

The appendages can reach up to ten times the length of the barnacles’ bodies to allow them to search of a partner. See a video—safe for work!—below.

According to new research published in Marine Biology, the shape of barnacles’ penises varies depending on their circumstances. Barnacles spaced far apart from each other develop stretchier organs, the better for reaching across the gaps, and barnacles exposed to rough waves grow wider ones to stand up against the tide.

Study author Matthew Hoch took advantage of the fact that barnacles grow new penises every mating season (a good thing, since the genitalia sometimes break off in the waves). In July 2005, before their reproductive tissues developed for the year, Hoch identified populations of acorn barnacles at five sites in Long Island Sound, and selectively removed barnacles so that some were densely crowded together, and others had ...

“Octopus Head War” Pits Korean Health Officials Against Fishermen

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:16:11 +0000

Charges by South Korean health officials that octopus heads contain large and unhealthy amounts of the heavy medal cadmium have sparked a war with the fishermen who profit from the $35 million-a-year trade.

Octopus heads are a popular delicacy in South Korea, revered by locals for their health benefits and their supposed role as an aphrodisiac. About 12 million octopuses are sold for eating every year, says the LA Times:

Nakji, a dish featuring baby octopuses, head and all, is a popular snack at sporting events. Another dish, sannakji (“live octopus”), features squirming tentacles dipped in a sesame oil and salt sauce. Enthusiasts have been hospitalized after a wiggling tentacle lodged in the throat.

The Seoul city government tested octopus heads for cadmium and found that the delicacy had dangerously high levels of the toxic metal, almost 15 times higher than the recommended 2 milligram per kilogram limit set by the government. Ingestion of high levels of cadmium can lead to liver and kidney poisoning, and the metal is a known carcinogen. After the findings were announced, the price of octopus fell substantially and turmoil ...

“Whale Wars” TV Show Leads to Real-Life Feud Between Activists

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:51:02 +0000

It’s not so surprising that the violent destruction of a $1.5 million boat would lead to an argument. But you would expect the argument to be between the owners of the boat and the vessel that rammed it.

Instead, members of the activist group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the group at the center of the Animal Planet TV show Whale Wars, are arguing amongst themselves and are making their he said/he said argument public business.

The group’s expensive and high-tech speedboat, called the Ady Gil, was damaged in a collision with a Japanese whaling ship in early January. The boat, worth $1.5 million, was used to chase down and harass whaling ships. After the crash, the Sea Shepherd crew tried to tow the boat with another vessel for over 36 hours, failing twice, before the salvage effort was given up and the boat was scuttled (deliberately sunk).

After the crash the Ady Gil’s skipper, Pete Bethune, boarded the Japanese ship to confront the captain, but the whalers detained him and Bethune ended up in Japanese court, where he was found guilty of trespassing and assault. In the ...

Vladimir Putin Conducts Whale Research via Crossbow

Joseph Calamia — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:47:54 +0000

Required for biopsying a gray whale: one speed boat, one crossbow, and one Russian prime minister. Vladimir Putin recently spent some quality time in Olga Bay, helping the V.I. Il’ichev Pacific Oceanological Institute sort out the family tree for a group of gray whales.

As Nature’s blog The Great Beyond explains, the Institute hopes to determine if the whales descended from a Californian or extinct Korean whale population, and the crossbow holds a specially-designed arrow for taking a skin sample. The bold Russian prime minister, known for his shirtless fishing, fire fighting, and bear tracking, told the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS that science can be tricky but exciting:

“I had the sporting feeling, I missed the target thrice, but hit it the fourth time.”

He explained to the AP why he wanted to be involved with the project.

“Because I like it. I love the nature.”

But the International Fund for Animal Welfare isn’t buying his declaration of love for the natural world, given ongoing seismic surveys for oil drilling taking place in another area where gray whales teach their young to feed. Reuters has a statement from the IFAW:

“As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today ...

Damselfish, Damselfish, How Does Your Garden Grow?

Joseph Calamia — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:02:58 +0000

Some damselfish have sensitive stomachs, but they certainly aren’t in distress. They can hold their own, researchers have recently determined, by diligently farming their preferred algae crops.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Stegastes nigricans–otherwise known as the “dusky farmer fish”–has a bit of a green fin, but researchers rarely see such dedication to farming chores in a marine animal. They watched as this fish yanked out less digestible types of algae from their crops and threw them aside to make room for their preferred varieties, like the delicious red Polysiphonia.

As reported by Discovery News, researchers at Ehime University looked at 320 territories of 18 damselfish species from coral reefs from Thailand to the Great Barrier Reef. Though the fish in different locales preferred different regional algae flavors, they all exhibited a drive to cultivate. Hata and colleagues also raised similar crops themselves without the fish. They were no match for the fish farmers, and their crops soon overflowed with unwanted algae weeds.

They published their findings online today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. Researchers believe that the relationship is beneficial to the algae too and call it “cultivation mutualism.” Besides raising their own plots of land, the fish also ...

Should Dolphins and Whales Have “Human Rights”?

Joseph Calamia — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:50:51 +0000

From the heroic Flipper to the charismatic Willy, dolphins and whales have made some splashy supporting actors. And since they often seem almost as smart and interesting as their human costars, perhaps it’s not surprising that a new movement is afoot to grant these animals “human rights.”

Research on everything from whale communication to “trans-species psychology” hints that the glowing portrayals of these fictional animal friends have some basis in reality. If cetaceans—marine mammals including whales, dolphins, and porpoises—can act like humans, even using tools and recognizing themselves in a mirror, shouldn’t they have the same basic rights as people?

That’s what attendees of a meeting organized by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) said yesterday, where a multidisciplinary panel agreed on a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.”

“We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and well being,” says the Declaration, meant in part to stop current whaling practices.

Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in California, told Reuters:

“Whaling is ethically unacceptable…. They have a sense of self ...

This Fish Has Seen the Enemy, and It Is Him

Allison Bond — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:52:03 +0000

Male cichlid fish apparently don’t like what they see in the mirror–in fact, they dislike their own reflections even more than enemy fish, according to new research published in Biology Letters.

Wired writes:

“[The] fish readily attack other males as well as mirror images of themselves, posturing and lunging with the same aggression… the reflection-fighting males show heightened activity in [the amygdala,] a part of the brain associated with fear and other negative reactions in vertebrates, [Stanford University researchers] have found. Tangling with a real male doesn’t stir up that response.”

The researchers emphasized that the study doesn’t mean fish recognize themselves in the mirror. And although the fishes’ reactions to their reflections are negative, they are not necessarily “fearful” in the human sense of the word. Still, the research could change the way studies are constructed, in which mirrors are used to investigate psychological phenomena separate from self-recognition.

“Researchers may want to show a fish or other creature another of the same size and species, for example. If animals are sensing that something is off about the mirror, “I think mirrors need to be used with caution,” [lead author Julie K.] Desjardin says.”

Image: ...

A Novel Geoengineering Idea: Increase the Ocean’s Quotient of Whale Poop

Smriti Rao — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:26:47 +0000

The fight against global warming has a brand new weapon: whale poop.

Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division have found that whale poop contains huge amounts of iron and when it is released into the waters, the iron-rich feces become food for phytoplankton. Phytoplankton absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, the algae is in turn eaten by Antarctic krill, and baleen whales eat the krill. Through this neat cycle, globe-warming CO2 is kept sequestered in the ocean.

Scientists have long known that iron is necessary to sustain phytoplankton growth in the oceans, which is why one geoengineering scheme calls for adding soluble iron to ocean waters to encourage the growth of carbon-trapping algae blooms. While environmentalists have fretted over the possible consequences of meddling with ocean chemistry that way, this new study on whale poop suggests an all-natural way to get the same carbon-trapping effect: Increase the number of whales in the ocean.

When Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division analyzed the feces of baleen whales, he found an astounding amount of iron in it. New Scientist reports:

Nicol’s team analyzed 27 samples of faeces from four species ...

How Antarctica’s Scientists Chill Out: With a Rugby Match on the Ice

Eliza Strickland — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:10:52 +0000
NEXT>

At the foot of an active volcano 900 miles from the South Pole, Tom Leard leads a fearless band of men and women over a battlefield of frozen sea, beneath a relentless sun. Ash billows out from the peak behind them as they approach their enemies, who stand staggered across the barren stretch of ice, clad in black from head to toe.

“Don’t let them in your heads,” Leard tells his motley crew of carpenters, engineers, and service workers. “We’re the underdogs, but if we support each other, we can win.”

Here, on a January day in Antarctica’s frozen McMurdo Sound, Leard and company have come for the latest installment of a decades-long tradition: A rugby match, played between the American and New Zealand research bases, on a field of sea ice 10 feet thick.

Just a few miles away, scientists lead some of the world’s most exotic research projects, taking advantage of the extreme conditions on Earth’s coldest, driest and iciest continent. After a long week studying cold-adapted bacteria or the diving physiology of elephant seals, the scientists and staff take Sunday off to relax. But this is ...

Eyeless Urchins “See” the Sea With Their Spines

Eliza Strickland — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:15:52 +0000

By Mara Grunbaum

Oh, you. You think you’re pretty fancy, don’t you, with your matching pair of eyeballs, your precious optic nerve, your oh-so-sophisticated visual cortex. You think you’re so evolved.

The sea urchins are not impressed.

Though the round, spiny marine creatures have no actual visual organs, they do have light-sensitive proteins that help them “see” well enough to move around, find shelter and avoid predators (well, at least the slow ones). Biologists now think that a sea urchin’s entire body functions as one big compound eye, where photosensitive tissue inside the exoskeleton picks up light that’s filtered by the radiating spines. And the denser an urchin’s spines, the sharper its perception of its surroundings, a new study suggests. So who’s fancy now?

Sönke Johnsen and his team at Duke University in Durham, N.C., tested the visual responses of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a large, purple Pacific urchin with an especially spiny exoskeleton. They placed individual urchins in the center of a tank with a dark target on one side, and they lit the tank from above.

In under a minute, the urchins began to move relative to the ...

Ocean Volcano Eruption!!

Brett Israel — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:16:09 +0000

Behold, the West Mata ocean volcano eruption:

Over 50 hours (!) of hi-def footage was captured of this western Pacific ocean volcano, which is 1,200 meters underwater, by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)—named Jason—from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The footage was unveiled recently at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

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Tool-Using Octopus: Coconut Shells Become Body Armor

Brett Israel — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:30:08 +0000

We should probably stop being amazed at the things octopuses can do and just accept that they’re just unfathomably cool (pun fully intended). Case in point: The veined octopus totes around coconut shells that it then hides in. Check out the footage, courtesy of Australia’s Museum Victoria:

In another video on YouTube that Ed Yong features in his post on Not Exactly Rocket Science, a coconut-clad octopus is strolling along the ocean floor on two tentacles and doing a pretty good job of disguising itself as a rolling coconut.

So what’s the big deal? Well, as Yong points out, the veined octopus uses the coconut shells as actual tools and is able to deploy them as needed. Unlike hermit crabs that live inside their body armor, the veined octopus only uses its armor when it senses danger. It’s able to seal itself inside a hollow coconut husk using its suckers to hold two halves of a shell in place.

Because it has the foresight to carry around the components of a make-shift panic room, this means the octopus is even smarter than originally believed. Scientists are now discovering that some marine invertebrates possess abilities once thought to be reserved for humans.

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Ex-Chicago Bull Buys (Via eBay) Rights to Name a Shrimp Species

Brett Israel — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:11:53 +0000

When Anna McCallum discovered a new shrimp species near Australia, instead of naming it after herself, like most selfish scientists, she put the naming rights on eBay to raise money for marine conservation.

McCallum, now a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, was shocked at the winning bidder’s identity—one of Michael Jordan’s lesser-known teammates, according to The Scientist:

The winner of the eBay auction, with a bid of AU $3,600 (US $2,900), was Luc Longley, a former NBA basketball player who won three straight championships with the dynastic Chicago Bulls team of the late 1990s. “It was a total surprise that a basketballer would be interested in this little deep-sea shrimp,” McCallum recalls.

But Longley was no stranger to supporting marine conservation in his native country, having helped halt the construction of a resort near the Ningaloo Reef, a vast coral ecosystem off the west coast of Australia. “That gave me a taste for it,” Longley says.

Longley is from Western Australia, not far from where the shrimp was discovered. But who knew the 7’2″ center was such a marine conservation buff?

In yet another act of selflessness, Longely named the new shrimp ...

Sea Section: Shark Bites Shark & 4 Babies Pop Out

Eliza Strickland — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:25:36 +0000

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.

Via the New Zealand Herald:

[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.

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Indian Villagers to Rare Turtle: Stay With Us, Mighty God

Brett Israel — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:00:06 +0000

If your God was going to drop down from the heavens for a stroll around your town, what form do you think he or she would choose? A turtle, perhaps?

According to Reuters:

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…

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Was This Fish the Inspiration for Alien?

Brett Israel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:51:20 +0000

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.

Via the Telegraph:

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.

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Video: YouTube / Wainwrightlab

Women’s Stockings Used to Measure Whales’ Sex Drive

Brett Israel — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:49:35 +0000

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.

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Image: flickr / percita

Dolphins “Play Ball” With Jellyfish (As in, Jellyfish Is the Ball)

Brett Israel — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:22:59 +0000

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.

From the Daily Mail:

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.

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Video: YouTube / countrysidecouncil