Wired takes a leap into the cephashionable world of cephalopod textiles to give a sneak peak at next season’s color-changing squid-muscle shirts:

“We have taken inspiration from nature’s designs and exploited the same methods to turn our artificial muscles into striking visual effects,” said lead author of the study Jonathan Rossiter [of the University of Bristol].

First up, Rossiter and [...]

The world’s future supply of chalk is threatened by global warming. That’s what I take away from this LiveScience report on how the souring of the ocean is weakening plankton shells:

In the new study, a trio of scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Oceanographic Research in Kiel, Germany, bred a variety of phytoplankton, called Emiliania huxleyi, to tolerate [...]

Discovery News says the 714 reported dolphin deaths are just the tip of a much larger iceberg:

NOAA declared the die-off an “Unusual Mortality Event” as per the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Although the timing of die-off largely coincides with BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath, the deaths actually started increasing about two months before the [...]

Or so the Belfast Telegraph says, with a report on scientists devising a document outlining dolphin rights:

A small group of experts in philosophy, conservation and dolphin behaviour were canvassing support for a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans”.

They believe dolphins – and their whale cousins – are sufficiently intelligent and self-aware to justify the same ethical considerations given to [...]

Nature eases no one’s mind when the revered journal explains it’s actually more efficient for some squid fly than to swim:

Squid of many species have been seen to ‘fly’ using the same jet-propulsion mechanisms that they use to swim: squirting water out of their mantles so that they rocket out of the sea and glide through the air. [...]

SONG: “Bioluminescence at the Dragon Vent.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: Squid Pro Crow.

SOURCE: Based on “Exotic creatures discovered living at deep-sea vent in Indian Ocean”, Guardian, 28 Dec 2011, as used in the post “Creatures of the Dragon Vent”.

ABSTRACT: This song was a result of a thing that I found [...]

National Geographic ruins the illusion that maybe larks and mockingbirds might be safe from shark attacks. Nope. Songbirds are being found in tiger sharks’ stomachs:

Marcus Drymon, of Dauphin Island Sea Lab, has been studying fish off the Alabama coast since 2006. During a routine sampling in 2009, he pulled a tiger shark onto the deck of his boat [...]

A medieval hunt for the “brownfish, or baleen.” Centuries before we got our light and energy by burning petroleum, we got it from whales.

This illustration comes from a series of books considered “the basis of modern zoology,” despite having mermaids and the Beast of Revelation among the squid and whale-hunters.

Guardian is taking a closer look at some of the strangest living things from one of the most peculiar places on Earth:

In the first ever expedition to explore and take samples from the “Dragon Vent” in the south-west Indian Ocean, remotely operated submarines spotted yeti crabs, sea cucumbers and snails living around the boiling column of mineral-rich [...]