zooillogix | April 4, 2008Today, Zooillogix takes you deep inside Benny's colon to reveal a writhing round worm!
NOT FOR PEOPLE WITH WEAK STOMACHS
Ladies - Here's a tip. Benny is just as cute on the outside as the inside!
Thanks to Craig McClain for sharing?
zooillogix | April 3, 2008
A completely new family of fishes may have been discovered in the coral beds of Indonesia. Dive company owners, Buck and Fitrie Randolph of Maluku Divers spotted the fish in January but waited to photograph additional specimens before contacting the experts. Interviewed by Seattle PI, University of Washington ichthyologist Ted Pietsch, who specializes in anglerfish, said it was unlike anything he had ever seen, sputtering "I'm still thrilled. It's an incredible thing. It's remarkable."
The pink-and-tan striped frogfish cannot be identified by any fish experts so far. While Pietsch is…
bleimanb | April 2, 2008New research has revealed some stunning courtship rituals of octopuses including flirting, hand holding, lover guarding, and even stalking the Myspace pages of potential mates.
The studies were conducted by the University of California, Berkeley on Abdopus aculeatus a kind of octopus living in a large colony off the coast of Sulawesi, an island in Indonesia.
Do you have eight gloves in your pocket? Because I can see my hands in your pants.
"We quickly realized that Abdopus aculeatus broke all the 'rules' -- doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we'd formed based on aquarium studies…
bleimanb | April 1, 2008We received an outpouring of comments on our post about the massive rabbits being raised in Britain. Thanks to our loyal reader HP, however, we were able to find some disturbing footage of gigantic rabbits actually feeding.
Another vid below the fold...
Night of the Lepus is widely considered to the gem in Rory Calhoun's otherwise sordid body of work.
zooillogix | March 31, 2008Annette Edwards has a noble goal: to breed the world's biggest rabbit. It now appears that she has succeeded in her silly little dream of lagormorph gigantism with Amy. While most country folk are content with merely growing the world's largest pumpkin or zucchini, Annette has succeeded in creating a rabbit that could easily eat a child.
We agree, this picture is way too big.
Fully extended, Amy the rabbit is 4ft from nose to tail. Good lord. Although the inimitable news source that is the Daily Mail quotes three different weights for Amy, the heaviest is 3.5 stone or roughly, in American,…
bleimanb | March 28, 2008This week we've brought you a heartwarming tale of a couple who wove sweaters from the hair of their deceased hounds and the touching story of a giant squid who overcame incredible odds to achieve its dream of becoming plastinated and dangled above French people.
Well, thanks to one of our most loyal readers, the elusive "milkshake", we have uncovered a scoop that could be seen as the missing link between the aforementioned posts. Behold Pet Preservation a pet taxidermy service that will help you immortalize your pet through the miracles of modern science.
Direct from Pet Pres: "Some…
bleimanb | March 28, 2008Our close knitting buddy, Liesele, was kind enough to point this out. We thought we would be doing our readers who are in the market for a yak a disservice not to reprint it.
Craigslist Washington
"We have a nice Trim Yak Bull. He's four years old and has bred our 2 Yak cows twice. The calves he's produced have been robust, healthy and mild mannered. We must move him along in order to introduce a new blood line to the herd. Yak are incredibly serene, easy to maintain, need less pasture than beef, and offer endless enjoyment. Yak also calve effortlessly so have become popular in cross…
zooillogix | March 27, 2008We have brought you the outstanding time lapse photography of Mochimochi Land in the past, but these new works are breathtaking.
No-holds-barred snail on slug rumpus!
"The Great Foot Race!"
Friends below the fold
Reversible chicken and egg. If only life were so easy.
"Beware the Ninjabun...He's covert, sneaky, and hungry!"
"The world's fattest butterfly thinks it might be time for a diet. The flowers agree."
bleimanb | March 26, 2008In keeping with our nautically themed posts (perhaps a teaser for April's upcoming "Carnival of the Blue," hosted by none other than yours truly the Fabulous Flying Bleiman Brothers), we bring you this story: Scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Wood's Hole are attempting to train fish to do the stupidest thing possible, catch themselves in nets when beckoned by fishermen.
Listening to U2 makes me want to "self-exterminate," perhaps the scientists should try that?
The idea is to train captured or farm raised black sea bass to associate a loud tone with feeding time.…
bleimanb | March 26, 2008France's National Museum of Natural History displayed its prize centerpiece today for an exhibit on biodiversity, a plastinated, 21+ foot-long, giant squid named Wheke. The squid was hauled in by a fisherman in New Zealand in 2001 and was plastinated in Italy by a company called VisDocta Research. The process, in which all of the squid's water, fat and other liquids are replaced with a hardening plastic filling, took two and a half years and cost approximately $100,000.
I am looking forward to plastinating Andrew's dog, Izzy, some day. Maybe for an anniversary gift?
Wheke would be so happy…
bleimanb | March 25, 2008A student at Aberdeen University in the U.K. is engaged in a groundbreaking study to see if we might be able to monitor the behavior of sharks in order to predict the weather. When Hurricane Gabrielle arrived in Florida in 2001, shark researchers noticed that young black tipped sharks (who presumably had been tagged) moved to deeper depths as the storm approached.
Lauren, seen here, recreating the effects of a high pressure front by squeezing a dogfish.
P.H.D. student Lauren Smith is using spotted dogfish and a device at the university called an "altitude chamber" to...
...simulate the…
zooillogix | March 25, 2008Our cute Raccoon Dog post (directly below this one) just took a turn for crudeness and hilarity. Thanks to the combined efforts of readers Hypatia and pough, we now know that #1 - Raccoon dogs are known in Japanese folklore to have the magical ability to expand their scrotums and #2 - we got our hands on some truly classic old woodprint images from mid 1800s Japan.
Raccoon Dogs fishing and walking on the street
Raccoon Dogs river fishing and sheltering from an evening shower.
Raccoon dogs doing something religious and depicted as the seven lucky gods (guess Buddhism is a little mellower…
zooillogix | March 25, 2008Sometimes there is no news. Sometimes we have to tell you about dog sweaters. Today we will tell you about the Raccoon Dog.
The Raccoon Dog is a member of the canid family but is not a true dog. It is called a raccoon dog because it bears a superficial resemblance to a raccoon. It is a basal genus of Canidae, meaning it branched off into it's own adorable subgroup earlier than others. It is believed that the Racoon Dog family Nyctereutes has been evolutionarily distinct for seven to ten million years.
Like most dogs, the Raccoon Dog is omnivorous, but is unique in the range of different…
bleimanb | March 24, 2008A totally normal British couple has made headlines by wearing sweaters, knitted out of the hair of their deceased pet dogs. Beth and Brian Willis have made two sweaters, one out of Kara, a Samoyed, and the other from Penny, a Swedish Lapphund.
I can't decide which one is hotter.
Says Mrs Willis in this exclusive article in the Peabody Award winning Daily Mail, "It is not actually a hair but a wool, which is why it is so good for clothes," and, "Apparently it is quite popular with lots of the people who breed long-haired dogs." You know what is even more popular? Not being a total freak.
zooillogix | March 21, 2008Researchers from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research have discovered hundreds of potentially new species. Part of the International Polar Year survey program, the critters were hauled up from the briny depths around Antarctica. Among the 30,000 once living beings now in formaldehyde are huge sea spiders, jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles, enormous sea snails and starfish. The expedition was also made into a documentary entitled DeepStar Six...
Giant Macroptychaster sea star measuring 60 cm across
Antarctic toothfish (1.81 m long, 57 kg)
CR McClain from Deep…
zooillogix | March 21, 2008Why are we posting so many videos these days you ask? I don't know!
Anyway this is both cool and somewhat off-putting/frightening but only because it is awesome.
From Slashdot:
"The US company Boston Dynamics has released an amazing new video of its quadruped robot BigDog. The highlight of the video (at 1:24) shows how the robot starts slipping on ice, almost falls several times, but finally regains its balance and continues walking. The video also shows the robot's ability to cope with different types of terrains, climb and descend steep slopes, and jump. Two years ago, the older version of…
zooillogix | March 19, 2008Cutting edge research from The State
Thanks to Pete Angelastro for reminding us about this classic awesomeness.
bleimanb | March 18, 2008A new exhibition of nature drawings, paintings and renderings has just opened at Buckingham Palace. The event focuses around four artists and a collector (Leonardo da Vinci, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby) who lived from the mid 15th century to the late 18th. As an added bonus the exhibit, Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery, was a collaboration by curators of the Royal Collection and Sir David "Superfly" Attenborough.
The subjects of the works tend to be then-newly discovered species, many from the New World…