I stumbled across this link on the internets. Go to it. It shows how big a blue whale is life-size. It's almost unfathomable to imagine how large these creatures really are in person. The size of the eye alone is staggering, and scrolling around the whale's body just gave me an incredible sense of awe. They truly are magnificent animals.
Then hit the X on the left to exit the image. A though provoking message pops up:
Think before you close this window. This might be the last life size whale you will ever see.
WDCS international, you got my attention. Did they get yours?
(HT Oceanic Dreams)
Ah, the parasitic flatworms called trematodes. There's a lot of them, and many have very strange and impressive life cycles involving many specific hosts. Just about any of them is sci-fi worthy, but this one, in particular, is a real eye-catcher.
Meet Leucochloridium paradoxum, also known as the green-banded broodsac. Like similar flatworms, its lifecycle involves two hosts. The adults, found in the guts of birds, lay eggs which land on the ground in the bird's droppings. The unfortunate host to follow, a snail (Succinea or Oxyloma), then eats the eggs, which hatch in its digestive system…
OK - I admit. I am terrified by don't like moths as it is. But this makes me creeped out by them even more than the sucking blood bit:
Source: DailyMailWhat you're looking at was formerly known as a Honda. It's been attacked by (by my guess, hundreds of thousands of) spindle ermine moth larvae (adult on R). These voracious moths-to-be spin a silk web over their feeding areas to protect themselves from ants and wasps. Normally, a silk blanket like this would be on a tree or other plant-life where the caterpillars are feeding before they pupate, but this unlucky motorist from Rotterdam has…
When I interned at Florida Aquarium I had the pleasure of working with two screech owls. Sure, there were bigger, more impressive looking raptors that I could hold and show people, but those pint-sized versions were my favorite. It wasn't just that they were small (though that totally helped). It was that when you'd go to take them out of their cage to walk around with, they would puff up and try to act all big an menacing - which, frankly, just made them look like giant brown cotton balls.
What the birds were aiming to do was make themselves look bigger and more important. All kinds of…
...err..well, not exactly. But it is a much easier way for a 45 ton sperm whale to get a quick bite to eat. This amazing footage of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) shaking cod fishing lines 108 m deep off the coast of Sitka, Alaska, is the first ever of sperm whales feeding - albeit not on its usual prey, the massive squids of the deep sea.
Most of the time, sperm whales dive to a staggering 900 to 2600 feet (that's up to half a mile or so deep) to catch their meals. At such depths, with no light and such a wide expanse, filming feeding is nigh impossible. But we do know that eating…
3 Quarks Daily, a fantastic blog which covers everything from science to art to politics, has annouced that it will start giving out "best of the year" awards for blog posts from around the internet. The Science category starts now, with nominations being accepted until June 1st. There will then be public voting on the winners, narrowing the expansive list to 21, and then a panel of judges will further whittle them down from 21 to 6, with the top 3 winners picked by an expert and announced June 21st. The 'Top Quark' gets $1000 - so it's definitely worth being entered in!
I know a lot of you…
These little tykes were only discovered last year. They're so cute, they made The International Institute for Species Exploration's Top 10 Newly Discovered Species for 2008.
Standing a whoppin' 1/2" tall, these little Satomi's Pygmy Seahorses, Hippocampus satomiae, are the smallest known species of seahorse (just edging under the previusly smallest Hippocampus denise by about 2 mm). With its tail stretched out straight, one of these seahorses would only measure about 1/2 the width of a penny. The previously unknown specimens were found off the coast of Indonesia and were named after the…
I'm sure most of you are aware that today is a truly special holiday. It's a day where we can honor those who have come before and done a great service to us - one single remembrance of those who have fallen before their time and the contributions they've made to us all.
Of course, I'm referring to Towel Day.
I presume you all have carried a towel with pride today. If you haven't, you are missing out. As the Hitchhiker's guide explains:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around…
Sometimes, it's truly incredible how much of an impact people can have on their environment. The International Coastal Cleanup, for example, was able to remove 6.8 million pounds of trash from the world's ocean and river ecosystems last year alone.
But most of the time, what we do is horrifying. Just look at "A World of Change," a collection of images of how our Earth has changed as viewed from space over the last ten years put together by the Earth Observatory for their 10th anniversary.
Before I show you the visuals, let me give you some background. The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest…
No matter what our cultural influences might try to tell us, what makes a man a man isn't rippling abs, bulging biceps, or a rugged personality. It isn't an unbreakable emotional wall or a thick, wiry beard. None of these make Chuck Norris or any other classic "man's man" a real man. The only thing required to be a man, as far as people are concerned, is a Y chromosome.
Human beings, barring genetic anomalies, have 23 pairs of chromosomes in their genomes. One half of each pair comes from each parent. Twenty-two of these pairs of chromosomes are the same in all people. But the last set is…
I'd be lying if I tried to claim that this whole "missing link," possible-primate-ancestor hasn't piqued my interest. So, since this blog is supposed to talk about anything and everything that does that, I would be failing you if I didn't at least briefly mention it. Even I can't completely avoid a media explosion.
Here's the thing: I'm not a paleontologist. For that matter, I'm not an expert on primate or human evolution. Sure, I might understand it a little better than the average Joe or (apparently) science journalist, but I have nowhere near the knowledge or skills to accurately condone…
Thanks, PhD Comics, for reminding us how it works.
HT to SciCurious who posted the link on her twitter feed
I'm always intrigued when artists use marine life for inspiration, but these are even better than most. The artists vision:
to investigate plankton for themselves, and relate their observations in a unique collection of work made in wood, silver and gold
The two artists, Louise Hibbert and Sarah Parker-Eaton, use nature for inspiration to create intriguing sculptures. Here's some from their Plankton series:
Now those are some nifty marine-inspired artworks. But the artists don't just recreate plankton - they also have been inspired by jellies and seed pods.
Ah, there's nothing that makes a good horror movie or sci-fi flick like the living dead. So it's no wonder that this little fly makes it on my list of sci-fi-worthy parasites. It's claim to fame is that it eats the brains of ants while turning them into living zombies for a bit before decaptating the unfortunate insects and moving onward.
Yeah, they're pretty bad ass.
These flies, from the genus Pseudacteon, are small and resemble fruit flies. They are quite different, though, in life cycle and behavior. As adults, they've earned the name "scuttle fly" because they tend to run on a surface…
... then you have no heart.
check out more pics of this guy at ZooBornsClouded leopard cubs are simply too cute for words.
I was going to try and do something non-furry to continue to explore cuteness on other branches of the tree of life, but this little guy just made my heart melt and I couldn't, in good conscience, post anything else.
HT ZoobornsThis adorable little cub is a Black Jaguar, born on April 14th in Peru. Jaguars, Panthera onca, are the third largest cat species and the only Panthera species found in the Americas. The black color is due to a dominant but rare allele, and black moms can have black or spotted babies. They live in Mexico and much of Central America, extending as far south as Argentina…
This is just frickin' neat: A 56-leaf clover. It was bred by farmer Shigeo Obara, who had previously held the Guiness World Record with an 18-leaf clover. "I never dreamed of seeing this many leaves on a clover," Shigeo told the Associated Press. Shigeo had to decal the leaves as he counted them to avoid double-counting - wow.
Though, honestly, I'm not impressed - try counting all the leaves on a 3' mangrove sapling when its 95 degrees out with no shade. Now that is a lot of leaves to count. Right, Allie? :)
HT National Geographic
Occasionally, I come across interesting new technologies that are just too...well, too something, not to post about them.
Take, for example, Lisca lingerie's newest model: The Smart Memory Bra. The special memory foam bra reshapes under the influence of heat to give a woman more cleavage when she gets warmer. The theory is, since attraction can cause a woman to rise her temperature a bit, that the bra will enhance her best assets when the time is right.
Of course, I'm not so sure I buy that. There are any number of reasons why a woman's body temp might rise, the least of which is interest in…
Some neat things you should check out:
Who knew? Monkeys Think âCoulda, Woulda, Shouldaâ, as explained by Allie of Oh For The Love of Science!
It may seem backward, but Ed of Not Exactly Rocket Science explains how we might be able to restore preadator numbers by culling their prey.
And Shark Diver from Underwater Thrills seems to think it's women's fault that men are so anxious to kill sharks for trophies. Sure, it's always a woman's fault, right?