Washington Post reveals the natural substance that beats spider silk for toughness, and diamonds for hardness – and it’s limpet teeth:
In a study set to come out this month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, British researchers announced that the teeth of shelled, aquatic creatures called limpets are the strongest biological […]
Science Daily introduces us to a brand new sea creature, bright red and fantastically delicate, dubbed the ruby seadragon:
Using DNA and anatomical research tools, Scripps graduate student Josefin Stiller and marine biologists Nerida Wilson of the Western Australia Museum (WAM) and Greg Rouse of Scripps Oceanography found evidence for the new species while […]
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 […]
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