Organisms
pharyngula | March 25, 2007This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn't bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing abilities of animals very well. There were a few things that irritated me, though (I admit it, I criticize everything).
The biggest problem? It's a show for people with short attention spans. We got brief vignettes of a few minutes—you'd just be getting into the pumas and alpacas in Patagonia, and zip, we…
pharyngula | March 23, 2007Here's a picture to make you feel relatively fortunate, from the April 2007 issue of Natural History:
Naked mole rats are odd little mammals in which only the queen of the colony gets to breed. The point of this picture is that even when not near the end of their term of pregnancy, they are recognizably distinct from other rats in the colony — they tend to be much longer. The reason is that the hormones during pregnancy, and probably also the physical stresses on their body, induces the lumbar vertebrae to actually grow longer. Humans, fortunately, do not grow a couple of inches vertically…
pharyngula | March 23, 2007Grimpoteuthis sp.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 21, 2007
Here's a story of a strange large squid carcass hauled up from the Atlantic deep—researchers expect it was between 16 and 24 feet long when alive and intact, but the specimen was a bit gelatinous and damaged and nibbled upon. It's been tentatively identified as Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, which has previously only been found in the Pacific.
Although muscular squid zip around to catch food, squid with gelatinous bodies typically float in deep, dark waters and let prey find them, Young says. Pacific A. acanthoderma have glowing, prey-alluring pads at the end of their tentacles. Sucker-laden…
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Some people do…and those people might enjoy Gary Kaiser's The Inner Bird, a site that is promoting his book of the same name, and also contains interesting tidbits of information about comparative anatomy and avian evolution.
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Here's a clever (I think) observation in the efforts to eradicate malaria: the mosquitos that transmit malaria are also infected with the disease-causing parasite, so maybe if we cure malaria in mosquitos, it will end one intermediate step in the transmission chain. It sounds like a crazy idea, but recent experiments suggest that it might just work. It's got the advantage of allowing the use of transgenic techniques on the mosquito population, where you don't have to worry about patient's rights or whether a few of your experimental subjects will die during the procedure, and you can just let…
pharyngula | March 16, 2007
The latest Nature reveals a new primitive mammal fossil collected in the Mesozoic strata of the Yan mountains of China. It's small and unprepossessing, but it has at least two noteworthy novelties, and first among them is that it represents another step in the transition from the reptilian to the mammalian jaw and ear.
Here's the beautiful little beast; as you can see, it's very small, and we need to look very closely at some details of its morphology to see what's special about it.
(click for larger image)Main part of the holotype (Nanjing University-Paleontology NJU-P06001A). b, Skeletal…
pharyngula | March 16, 2007Idiosepius notoides
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 15, 2007Sphyrocephala beccarii
Here is a spectacularly pretty and weird animal: stalk-eyed flies of the family Diopsidae. There are about 160 species in this group that exhibit this extreme morphology, with the eyes and the antennae displaced laterally on stalks. They often (but not always) are sexually dimorphic, with males having more exaggerated stalks—the longer stalks also make them clumsy in flight, so this is a pattern with considerable cost, and is thought to be the product of sexual selection. The Sphyrocephala to the right is not even an extreme example. Read on to see some genuinely…
pharyngula | March 11, 2007
I was reminded of one of the more comical, but persistent misconceptions by creationists in a thread on Internet Infidels, on The Coelacanth. Try doing a google search for “coelacanth creation" and be amazed at the volume of ignorance pumped out on this subject. I've also run across a more recent example of the misrepresentation of the coelacanth that I'll mention later … this poor fish has a long history of abuse by creationists, though, so here's a brief rundown of wacky creationist interpretations.
Crystal Clear Creation: Unlock the secrets of nature, wildlife, the world, from a…
pharyngula | March 11, 2007Sepiadarium austrinum
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 8, 2007Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it.
Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. "It really didn't put up much of a fight," he says. "Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea."
As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about…
pharyngula | March 5, 2007
The last time I hosted the Circus of the Spineless, I just did a series of photos—invertebrates are wonderfully photogenic. Here we go again, with another collection of gorgeous images of crunchy, squishy, slimy, tentacled, multi-legged, no-legged creatures.
Arthropods
SEF sent me this nice image of an Adalia imago, but no link—and also says there is a whole life history in photos. I'll update this if they're put online!
Here's a photoessay on the Black Swallowtail butterfly.
Dragonflies in March? This photo is from last summer.
This is a nest of Jewel bugs, with a closeup here.
How do…
pharyngula | March 5, 2007A reader sent me a link to this myspace page (don't quail in horror just yet!) called Bark, Hide and Horn—it's by some folkies, and includes some songs. Love songs about mating molluscs and ants and various invertebrates! It's very romantic. Listen if you've long had a lingering suspicion that you were born into the wrong phylum, or if just appreciate love no matter what the species involved are.
Consider it some theme music for the Circus of the Spineless, which will be appearing right here later today.
pharyngula | March 2, 2007(click for larger image)Reconstruction of O. reburrus by M. Collins. The precise arrangement of the anteriormost region remains somewhat conjectural.
Halkieriids are Cambrian animals that looked like slugs in scale mail; often when they died their scales, called sclerites, dissociated and scattered, and their sclerites represent a significant component of the small shelly fauna of the early Cambrian. They typically had their front and back ends capped with shells that resembled those we see in bivalve brachiopods. Wiwaxiids were also sluglike, but sported very prominent, long sclerites, and…
pharyngula | March 2, 2007Sepia latimanus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | February 26, 2007What's happening in the Antarctic? Researchers are looking at seabed changes that result from global warming.
The researchers catalogued about 1,000 species in an area of the Antarctic seabed where warming temperatures are believed to have caused the collapse of overlying ice shelves, affecting the marine life below.
"This is virgin geography," said expedition member Gauthier Chapelle. "If we don't find out what this area is like now following the collapse of the ice shelf, and what species are there, we won't have any basis to know in 20 years' time what has changed and how global warming…
pharyngula | February 23, 2007You all remember Violet, the jar-opening octopus, I'm sure—well, Violet is also quite the fierce predator. I would suggest that keeping a pet octopus is not a wise decision if you happen to be an arthropod.
pharyngula | February 23, 2007Nautilus pompilius
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | February 22, 2007
Speaking of hugging your squid today, A colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, has been caught — it's about 10 meters long and weighs about 450 kg. The place to go for all the information is TONMO, of course; I'll just share some of the pretty pictures with you.
Sad to say, this beautiful beast is currently residing in the freezer hold of a New Zealand fishing boat, but at least it's on its way to being studied by scientists rather than chopped up as calamari (every single news article seems to be mentioning that the calamari rings would be the size of tractor tires—they don't…