Glaucus atlanticus (blue sea slug)
These small animals float upside down at the surface of the sea, keeping afloat by swallowing air which is stored in their stomachs.
Although known to be cannibalistic their diet is mainly made up of hydrozoans including the Portuguese Man o’ War - they even eat the stings. As well as getting nourishment from the stings, they use them for their own defence.
From the National History Museum
Also here is a video via BoingBoing of two of these slugs attacking a blue button jelly.
‘Depraved’ sex acts by penguins shocked polar explorer
From BBC News:
Dr Levick, an avid biologist, was the medical officer on Captain Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910. He was a pioneer in the study of penguins and was the first person to stay for an entire breeding season with a colony on Cape Adare.
He recorded many details of the lives of adelie penguins, but some of their activities were just too much for the Edwardian sensibilities of the good doctor.
He was shocked by what he described as the “depraved” sexual acts of “hooligan” males who were mating with dead females. So distressed was he that he recorded the “perverted” activities in Greek in his notebook.
On his return to Britain, Dr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled “the natural history of the adelie penguin”, but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times.
“It’s just full of accounts of sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex, and finishes with an account of what he considers homosexual behaviour, and it was fascinating.” said Mr Russell.
The accounts were never published and have just been discovered again recently.
The Secret Life of Plankton.
The voice over is a little cheesy, but the photography in this short video about the world of plankton is incredible.
(Source: brainmeat)
The above diagram shows the relative size of a great grey owl’s body to its feathers.
Amazing biology animations of the mechanics happening inside your cells right now. (Via TED)
(Source: spacetimecontinumm, via jfs1)
The first non-human meat farmers
Lots of ants practise a rudimentary form of agriculture. Some are gardeners, gathering leaf fragments on which they cultivate a crop of tasty fungus. Others are dairymaids, “milking” the sweet excretion known as honeydew from aphids, scale insects and other related insects.
But the Melissotarsus ants of continental Africa and Madagascar are special. If biologists’ best guess proves correct, these ants raise their insect herds for meat, not milk – the first example of meat farmers other than humans. And that’s not all. The insects they cultivate may be the best example of true domestication outside of our crop plants…
There’s No Such Thing As A Jelly Fish
“By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called “true” jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.” - Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
The Human Animal
Documentary (1hr)
A Personal View of the Human Species by Desmond Morris. This series focuses on the planet’s most advanced animal, beginning with a look at how man communicated before the evolution of language.
A great documentary. Other episodes in the series are all available on Google Video:
Episode 2: The Hunting Ape
Episode 3: The Human Zoo
Episode 4: The Biology of Love
Episode 5: The Immortal Genes
Episode 6: Beyond Survival
“Termites do not live in termite mounds, as though they are skyscrapers. Instead, the termites hang out at ground level and underground, while the mound works as an air con system, circulating and replacing hot air with cool. David Attenborough explains how this works—along with the help some of some handy computer graphics—in the video above.” - BoingBoing
(Source: bbcearth.com)
An ant mill or ‘ant death spiral’ is a phenomenon where a small group of army ants separated from the main foraging party lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will continue in this fashion until they eventually die of exhaustion. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in robots programmed to act like ants.
This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish. - Wikipedia
(via dielater)
A religion that helps demonstrate evolution in action
The Zoque people of southern Mexico greet the rainy season with a religious ritual that involves poisoning a stream that runs into the nearby Cueva del Azufre, and gathering up the bounty of cave fish that float, anesthetized, to the surface. Those fish—considered gifts from the gods of the underworld—help keep the Zoque fed until crops grown in the rainy season can be harvested.
But centuries of annual die-offs, caused by a single, locally sourced poison, have functioned as a driver of natural selection. Today, researchers found, fish that live in Cueva del Azufre—downstream from the point where the Zoque poison the water—are becoming resistant to that poison.
Fish exposed to the annual ritual indeed proved more resistant to the toxin than fish that lived elsewhere, able to swim in poisoned waters for roughly 50 percent longer. As such, the poison from the ceremony apparently has over time helped select fish that can tolerate it — fish that cannot get captured and killed by the Zoque. - LiveScience
Close up of a Pacu’s teeth in Brazil. Pacu fish, cousins to the piranha and known as “frugivores,” have human-like teeth that can crack nuts and fruits. In the Amazon regions, the biggest threat to the Pacu is commercial fishing.
(via comixcetera)
“These deep sea beauties have long extensions coming out of their fins (two from their pelvic fins, and one at the back from the caudal fin), such that they are able to “stand still” on the ocean floor. Here they can wait very patiently for prey to come wandering into their vicinity.
Presumably a great way to conserve energy, although it would be interesting to examine whether there is a reason for the stilts being a certain height (i.e. do the crustaceans that the Tripod Fish feed on, prefer to hover at a certain depth, or do currents close to the ground uplift material in a certain way?)” - BoingBoing
![Sperm Recognize “Brothers,” Team Up for Speed
In promiscuous mouse species, sperm team up with their closest kin to give themselves an edge in the dash for the egg, a new study finds.
Once inside a female, sperm cells can discern and—via structures on their heads—literally hook up with their brethren amid the crush of sperm from other males.
The cells can then draft, Lance Armstrong-style, moving faster than they could alone thanks to more “engine” power from the cluster, said study co-author Heidi Fisher, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University’s Hoekstra Laboratory.
“It’s really amazing that this single cell can do this,” Fisher said. “We used to think of sperm as packs of DNA with really fast tails. But [now we know] they’re able to make these complex organizations.”
Surprisingly, the sperm cells’ recognition skills are “incredibly refined,” Fisher added: In the experiments, sperm could pick out other sperm from the same male, even when the other sperm were from closely related mice.
Read more](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l196xdGrF11qbf5tdo1_400.jpg)
Sperm Recognize “Brothers,” Team Up for Speed
In promiscuous mouse species, sperm team up with their closest kin to give themselves an edge in the dash for the egg, a new study finds.
Once inside a female, sperm cells can discern and—via structures on their heads—literally hook up with their brethren amid the crush of sperm from other males.
The cells can then draft, Lance Armstrong-style, moving faster than they could alone thanks to more “engine” power from the cluster, said study co-author Heidi Fisher, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University’s Hoekstra Laboratory.
“It’s really amazing that this single cell can do this,” Fisher said. “We used to think of sperm as packs of DNA with really fast tails. But [now we know] they’re able to make these complex organizations.”
Surprisingly, the sperm cells’ recognition skills are “incredibly refined,” Fisher added: In the experiments, sperm could pick out other sperm from the same male, even when the other sperm were from closely related mice.
