SONG: “Not Even Dancing Works.” [Download]
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Zoologger: Dancing in time makes crabs sexual failures“, New Scientist, 4 December 2014, as used in the post “Dancing to the beat makes fiddler crab sexual… failures.”
ABSTRACT: Are songs about dancing dumb? I dunno. Hard to […]
New Scientist pulls back the curtain on how electric eels “remote control” their prey, freezing them right next to their hungry mouths:
The experiments that untangled these mechanisms were devised and run by Kenneth Catania at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In a natural environment, Catania watched an eel hunting and measured its electric discharges. […]
Nature breaks the news to behaviorists – and this is more important than it might seem – that fish don’t really think mirrors are uninvited strangers:
“There’s been a very long history of using a mirror as it’s just so handy,” says Robert Elwood, an animal-behaviour researcher at Queen’s University in Belfast, UK. Using […]
It’s taken quite a while, but AP can finally report that blue whales off the coast of California have finally reached pre-whaling-industry levels:
Researchers previously assumed that the pre-whaling population was higher than that. However, the study using historical data to estimate the number of whales caught between 1905 and 1971 — when whaling […]
This is the heart (and brain and pretty much anything that’s not an arm) of a brittle star, as sketched for Echinodermata, a study of the sea urchins, sand dollars, sea stars and close relatives collected by the Michael Sars Deep Sea Expedition in the North Atlantic in 1910. It was published by […]
This is from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in the Biodiversity Library.
I bet there’s all *kinds* of things in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. Doesn’t that mean, like, their junk drawer?
Can you even imagine? Full of anglerfish… and stranger things.
Science Daily reveals the record-breaking brooding period of the deep-sea octopus:
In May 2007, during one of these surveys, the researchers discovered a female octopus clinging to a rocky ledge just above the floor of the canyon, about 4,600 feet below the ocean surface. The octopus, a species known as Graneledone boreopacifica, had not been […]
A Holocentrus hastatum, or Sargocentron hastatus, or red soldier fish. They have big spines, you see.
This one comes from A Natural History of Fish, by Georges Cuvier and M. Valenciennes, which I found on wapiti8’s Flickr account.
You want to learn about the hidden history of the ocean? Look within, Nature says… within the earwax of a mighty blue whale:
The team, led by Sascha Usenko, a environmental scientist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, extracted an earplug from a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) killed in a collision with a ship […]
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