sharks
laelaps | September 3, 2008
Fun with stock footage and a blue screen, from Shark Attack 3.After watching the first episode of Jurassic Fight Club I felt that the show deserved some amount of praise, but I was utterly flabbergasted by the latest episode ("Deep Sea Killers"). (You can see the full episodes yourself, for a limited time, here.)
The new episode featured the famous "mega-tooth" shark, Carcharocles megalodon, popularly called "Megalodon." During the entirety of the episode I don't think the genus name of the shark is ever mentioned; it is always referred to as "Megalodon" (and once as "Meg"). As was mentioned…
edyong | August 5, 2008Thanks to Hollywood, the jaws of the great white shark may be the most famous in the animal kingdom. But despite its presence in film posters, the great white's toothy mouth has received very little experimental attention. Now, Stephen Wroe from the University of New South Wales has put the great white's skull through a digital crash-test, to work out just how powerful its bite was.
A medium-sized great white, 2.5m in length and weighing in at 240kg, could bite with a force of 0.3 tonnes. But the largest individuals can exert a massive 1.8 tonnes with their jaws, giving them one of the most…
laelaps | July 21, 2008Anyone who has spent time watching Discovery Channel's "Shark Week" knows how frightening sharks can be when biting into their prey. Their jaws are not attached their their skull, allowing the jaws to come forwards and out in the process of biting (the lower jaw often coming up first to impale prey before the upper teeth crash down to do their dirty work). I have never seen any bite quite as grotesquely impressive as that of the goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni), though;
edyong | March 11, 2008
Some of us have enough trouble finding the food we want among the ordered aisles of a supermarket. Now imagine that the supermarket itself is in the middle of a vast, featureless wasteland and is constantly on the move, and you begin to appreciate the challenges faced by animals in the open ocean.
Thriving habitats like coral reefs may present the photogenic face of the sea, but most of the world's oceans are wide expanses of emptiness. In these aquatic deserts, all life faces the same challenge: how to find enough food. Now, a couple of interesting studies have shed new light on the…
laelaps | February 29, 2008Whenever there's a documentary about shark attacks on the Discovery Channel or a popular press article involving the supposed "alarming rise" in shark attacks, the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) is usually mentioned. This project is primarily concerned with data-gathering and statistics, and this focus has led to some amount of criticism from other researchers concerned with shark attacks. The director of this project is George Burgess, who was quoted as saying the following in a LiveScience article likely spurred by the recent death of an Australian tourist who was bitten while…
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2007...you probably won't like this video. But if you like sharks, you'll love this video. By way of cookie jill:
I had no idea sharks could move like that.