Invertebrates
clock | March 14, 2007If (like me) you have a special fondness for crayfish, then this post by Burning Silo is a Must Read of the day!
grrlscientist | February 14, 2007
The film captured the squid, Taningia danae, in action: 1 The squid swims towards the bait; 2 It spreads its arms wide; 3 It swims around the bait, twisting its body; 4 It grabs the bait with its eight arms.
Japanese scientists have discovered that large deep-sea squids produce flashes of bioluminescent light on their tentacles as they attack their prey. These light flashes are thought to disorient their prey, making it easier for the squid to grab their potential victim with their eight tentacles.
Writing in a Royal Society journal, the paper's authors say that squid are far from the…
grrlscientist | January 31, 2007Is it just because it's my birdday or has there been an unusual number of blog carnivals posted on this day? Anyway, there is another blog carnival, the 17th edition of the Circus of the Spineless that is now available for your reading pleasure.
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tags: blog carnival, invertebrates
clock | January 29, 2007I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I've seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world's fisheries stocks.
I also prefer freshwater fish - I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe.
But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the…
grrlscientist | January 29, 2007
tags: spiders, jumping spiders, arachnids, vision research
Female ornate jumping spider, Cosmophasis umbratica.
Some of you know that I am afraid of spiders, but in spite of this phobia, I am nonetheless fascinated by jumping spiders because they have interesting behaviors and a superb visual system. In addition to having excellent vision, it turns out that jumping spiders are particularly sensitive to green and ultraviolet light, according to a new study that was published this past week. Using a variety of light conditions, researchers revealed that these animals evolved their…
grrlscientist | January 28, 2007
Bluebottle jellyfish, Physalia utriculus
Also known as the Portuguese Man O' War.
It is not a true jellyfish.
It appears that jellyfish numbers are increasing in various oceans of the world. This includes a recent increase in giant Nomura's jellyfish in Japan, rafts of jellyfish that swamped Mediterranean shores last summer and now, record numbers of bluebottle jellies on the beaches of Australia -- all of which suggest that their growing numbers are due to warming ocean waters as well as overfishing.
"[Their] numbers are closely tied with environmental changes, and last year was…
clock | December 9, 2006PZ probably already knows about this, but I found this discovery of super-reflective skin cells in squid, cuttlefish and octopus quite amazing!
Hanlon's team discovered that the bottom layer of octopus skin, made up of cells called leucophores, is composed of a translucent, colourless, reflecting protein. "Protein reflectors are very odd in the animal kingdom," says Hanlon, who is a zoologist. What's even more odd is just how reflective these proteins are -- they reflect all wavelengths of light that hit at any angle. "This is beautiful broadband reflection," Hanlon told the Materials…
grrlscientist | November 24, 2006tags: Cinerocaris magnifica, Nymphatelina gravida, ostracod, arthropoda, crustacean, fossil, zoology, biology
Recently, geologists made a stunning discovery: hard boiled eggs that are over 425 million years old! The scientists, who are from the USA and the UK, discovered a female from a new ostracod species, Nymphatelina gravida -- a minute relative of the shrimp -- complete with a brood of approximately 20 eggs and 2 possible juveniles inside her body. Other parts of her soft anatomy were also preserved, including legs and eyes.
"Ostracods are common, pin-head sized crustaceans known from…
clock | October 4, 2006For easy-to-understand quick look at the evolution of vision I have to refer you to these two posts by PZ Myers, this post of mine, and these two posts by Carl Zimmer.
Now, armed with all that knowledge, you will curely appreciate the importance of this new study:
Compound Eyes, Evolutionary Ties:
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the presence of a key protein in the compound eyes of the fruit fly (which glow at center due to a fluorescent protein) allows the formation of distinct light gathering units in each of its 800 unit eyes, an evolutionary…
clock | October 2, 2006
From January 20, 2006, on the need to check the model-derived findings in non-model organisms.
There are pros and cons to the prevalent use of just a dozen or so species as standard laboratory models. On one hand, when a large chunk of the scientific community focuses its energies on a single animal, techniques get standardized, suppliers produce affordable equipment and reagents, experiments are more likely to get replicated by other labs, it is much easier to get funding, and the result is speedy increase in knowledge.
On the other hand, there are drawbacks. One is narrow focus which can…
clock | September 25, 2006You are going to love the latest Circus of the Spineless, now up on Deep Sea News!
clock | September 13, 2006One of the coolest parasites ever (from February 04, 2006):
I am quite surprised that Carl Zimmer, in research for his book Parasite Rex, did not encounter the fascinating case of the Ampulex compressa (Emerald Cockroach Wasp) and its prey/host the American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana, see also comments on Aetiology and Ocellated).
In 1999, I went to Oxford, UK, to the inaugural Gordon Conference in Neuroethology and one of the many exciting speakers I was looking forward to seeing was Fred Libersat. The talk was half-hot half-cold. To be precise, the first half was hot and the second…
clock | September 12, 2006Baby bugs team up for sex scam
The moment they're born, beetles of one species join forces for a curious drill.
The larvae hatch out of their eggs and together, as a group, climb to the tip of the plant. There, they secrete a sex pheromone that attracts a male of a bee who tries to couplate with the ball of larvae. They jump on him. He flies away carrying the little buggers.
When he finds a female to mate with, the larvae jump ship and go away hithhiking on her. When she goes back to her nest they disembark, eat the nectar she collected and her eggs before their final metamorphosis.…
clock | August 31, 2006Circus of the Spineless #12 is up on Sunbeam from Cucumbers. I can't believe it's already been a year since this fine carnival started!
clock | August 26, 2006Bumble Bees Can Estimate Time Intervals:
In a finding that broadens our understanding of time perception in the animal kingdom, researchers have discovered that an insect pollinator, the bumble bee, can estimate the duration of time intervals. Although many insects show daily and annual rhythms of behavior, the more sophisticated ability to estimate the duration of shorter time intervals had previously been known only in humans and other vertebrates.
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Bees and other insects make a variety of decisions that appear to require the ability to estimate elapsed…
clock | August 17, 2006Snuck into the very end of this, otherwise very interesting article on neurobiology of cephalopods and moths, is this little passage:
As for flies, Tublitz outlined a tantalizing question, as yet unanswered, that has continued to take flight out of his lab for the last decade. Scientists for years, he said, have held "one hard rule" about what constitutes a neuron -- that a neuron cell always arises from the ectoderm of a developing embryo. However, a discovery in Drosophila -- fruit flies -- has softened that assumption.
Cells arising from the mesoderm rest in a layer on top of the fruit fly…
clock | July 28, 2006As always, animal porn is under the fold:
You have probably heard that a female praying mantis eats her mate's head during the mating process. You may imagine the process to go something like this:
Actually, there are many species of praying mantises and in most of them sexual cannibalism is quite rare. It occurs much more often in the laboratory than out in the field. Apparently, the lights and sounds of a laboratory are stressful to the female so she acts aggressively in response.
The praying mantises are very aggressive predators and they can eat quite a lot of food, preferring soft-…
grrlscientist | June 29, 2006
Wild specimen of the butterfly species, Heliconius heurippa.
Researchers recently demonstrated that this species is a naturally-occurring
hybrid between H. cydno and H. melpomene.
Image: Christian Salcedo / University of Florida, Gainesville.
Speciation typically occurs after one lineage splits into two separate and isolated breeding populations. But it is has been hypothesized that two "parental" species with overlapping ranges could hybridize, thereby giving rise to one new but reproductively isolated "daughter species" in the same area. However, this phenomenon has rarely been observed…