As if cow burps weren’t enough to worry about as the earth’s atmosphere heats up, scientists have now discovered that aquatic animal belches might be another source of greenhouse gas emissions.
When nitrate is present in water, worms, mussels, freshwater snails and other underwater creatures emit nitrous oxide as a by-product of digestion. The animals obtain their food from soil, which contains bacteria that survive “surprisingly well” in the gut and are thought to convert nitrate in the water into nitrous oxide gas.
While nitrous oxide is known for its use as dentists’ laughing gas, it’s also 310 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Earthworms also emit the gas because of soil rich in both nitrogen and the microbes that convert it, but the new study illustrates that marine mammals may be pumping it out as well.
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Seemingly straight out of a science-fiction movie, a fish with tubular eyes and a see-through head discovered off the coast of California.
Researchers in Monterey Bay have released pictures of the first Macropinna microstoma to be found with its “soft transparent dome” intact. The six-inch “barreleye” fish lives more than 2,000 feet below sea level and spends most of its time motionless, but has eyes that can rotate within its head, allowing it to see whatever is directly above it.
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Humans might be the only species that actually choose to go under the knife to have their sex changed. But sometimes gender switches are a semi-regular occurrence in other species. In Colorado, fish are changing sex at rapid rates, reportedly due to the estrogen dribbling into Boulder’s Wastewater that’s concentrated enough to turn males into females.
Now, we can add sea coral to the list of organisms that are changing sex as a response to environmental factors: Israeli scientists report that Japanese corals change their sex to survive the pressures of climate change.
Zoologist Yossi Loya from Tel Aviv University discovered that female mushroom coral becomes male when the ocean floor gets too hot. Even a shift in a few degrees in temperature can be detrimental to coral, causing it to bleach and even die. In order to cope with the added stress of climate change, female corals adapt by changing their gender.
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• My, what a beautiful umbilicus you have! Survey says innies are hot, outies are not.
• Another week, another plan to exhume a dead astronomer. This time it’s Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe so historians can find out whether he was poisoned by a hired assassin.
• All in the family: Three completely different looking fish—known as tapetails, whalefish, and bignoses—turn out to be the young, female, and male of the same species.
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It’s official: the only thing certain in this world is taxes. That’s because death, for a tiny sea creature, is not inevitable. Turritopsis nutricul, a jellyfish-like hydrazoan, is the only animal known to be potentially immortal.
Once it reaches sexual maturity, Turritopsis looks like a tiny, transparent, many-tentacled parachute (only about 5mm in diameter) that floats freely in warm ocean waters. But when times get tough, Turritopsis can turn into a blob, anchor itself to a surface, and undergo a sort of reverse methamorphosis back to its youthful form as a stalk-like polyp. That’s like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. Scientists, who first described this phenomenon [pdf] in the 1990s, believe Turritopsis can repeat its life cycle indefinitely.
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A newly-discovered species of catfish can use its fins for more than swimming. From the top side, Lithogenes wahari looks like any other catfish, except with some extra body armor. But flip it over and you’ll see a giant sucking mouth and a pair of fleshy pelvic fins, which it uses to grasp and shimmy up slippery rocks in fast-flowing rivers.
Scientists first laid eyes on the strange fish 20 years ago in Venezuela. But the only specimen they had was in such bad condition that it “looked like it had been run over by a truck,” recalls researcher Scott Schaefer. It took years before the team was able to locate more of the species, which they found in abundance in a tributary of the Orinoco river. Capturing L. wahari was easy: the researchers easily picked 84 specimens off of rocks.
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• Asexuals, unite! Just don’t start recruiting too many to your cause.
• Endangered oceans, rejoice: You have a secret weapon. And it’s fish poop.
• And it’s a good thing, since the best option we humans have come up with for saving all aquatic life is re-naming fish “sea kittens.”
• Facebook graduates from a civil litigation tool to a crime-fighting tool.
• This latest eco-trend actually makes some sense: cat hair clothing and accessories.
• Today in animal intelligence: Just how smart are bees, anyway?
Humans aren’t the only species that use pearly whites to judge the fitness of a mate: Apparently teeth are also important to a certain species of whales. The beaked whales have earned the reputation as the most bizarre whales in the ocean, spending the majority of their lives foraging for food and living in seclusion. For years, scientists have wondered why these strange whales have tusks, especially since it hinders their bite.
It turns out these seeming-unnecessary teeth are important for mating—a discovery that marks the first time scientists have found a secondary sexual characteristic (like antlers) that shaped evolution in a marine mammal.
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• Ever wanted to scratch-n-sniff Michael Phelps? The current issue of People features a special “Sexy Scents” section with “scratch-n-sniff” photos of hunky men and their preferred odors. (Is it chlorine?)
• One of the two orb weaver spiders on the International Space Station escaped, briefly. Now it’s back and weaving webs of confusion in zero-gravity.
• Amateur astronomers are keeping an eye on the tool bag that was lost during a recent space walk. They say it’s about as bright as the planet Neptune.
• Keystroke like a pro with free Gmail keyboard shortcut stickers! Just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to them via old-fashioned snailmail.
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In yet another example of design inspired by nature, scientists at MIT have developed a heavy-duty (but tiny) anchor that burrows into the seabed, just like a clam. Dubbed the RoboClam (not to be confused with the RoboSnail, RoboTuna, or RoboLobster), the device is no bigger than a Swiss army knife but ten times stronger than traditional metal anchors. Researchers say it could be used to anchor anything from small submarines to large off-shore oil platforms.
RoboClam’s model was the razor clam (Ensis directus), an oblong mollusk about seven inches long by one inch wide that can dig to a depth of 70 centimeters at more than one centimeter per hour. Clammers call it the Ferrari of bivalves. Researchers set the razor clam digging in a plexiglass tank [video!] and observed how it used vibrations of its long muscular tongue to make a seemingly impenetrable layer of sand into liquid-like quicksand. Opening and closing its shell helps the clam propel itself downward.
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