Saturday, September 21, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
8 Quirky Species Discovered in Lava-Tube Caves
by Laura Poppick
Eight new arthropod species and a new hibernating site for Townsend’s big-eared bats have been discovered in New Mexico lava-tube caves, adding to the limited ecologic understanding of this unique habitat type.
Lava-tube caves form when underground offshoots of lava flows spill downslope but cool around the edges, emptying hollow, arterylike cavities that can span many miles long. More than 200 such caves extend beneath El Malpais National Monument in western New Mexico and sometimes support ecosystems distinct from more commonly known limestone caves, which can develop different shapes and air current patterns…
(read more: LiveScience)
Blob sculpin (Psychrolutes phrictus)
Read more about that research here at MBARI.
boyan slat's ocean clean up plan
Previously the idea of cleaning up the world’s oceans with their vast accumulations of disposed plastic material was considered an impossibility. Now a 19-year-old inventor says he and his foundation has a way to clean up the world’s oceans, and not only does he say we can do it, but that we can do it in five years time and produce a profit from it.
Now a 19-year-old inventor by the name of Boyan Slat says we can remove nearly 20 billion tons of plastic waste with his concept he calls an ocean cleanup array. It is made from a massive series of floating booms and processing platforms that gradually suck in the floating plastic like a giant funnel.
Now a 19-year-old inventor by the name of Boyan Slat says we can remove nearly 20 billion tons of plastic waste with his concept he calls an ocean cleanup array. It is made from a massive series of floating booms and processing platforms that gradually suck in the floating plastic like a giant funnel.
The angle with how the array is set up allows all of the plastic to go to where the platforms processing centers are floating. At the platform processing area it would separate the naturally occurring life such as plankton an only keep the plastic materials to be recycled.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Siphonophores
Siphonophores are a class of invertebrates belonging to the phyla Cnidaria, which means they are related to corals, hydroids, and true jellyfish. Although a siphonophore appears to be a single organism, it is actually a colony composed of many individual animals. The majority of siphonophores are long and thin, consisting mostly of a clear gelatinous material, but all siphonophores are predators, and use their many tentacles to capture crustaceans and small fish.
Recently, a team of researchers including MBARI’s Steven Haddock published a paper describing two new species of siphonophores using samples collected on the Western Flyer. These species of the genus Apolemia are abundant and conspicuous in Monterey Bay.
You can read the species description here.
Platybelodon
…an extinct genus of mammals related to elephants that lived in Miocene Africa, Europe, Asia and North America. Like other gomphotheres Platybelodon sported two unusualy shovel-like teeth. Platybelodon probably used these teeth to strip-bark from trees, using its inscisors as a scythe, grasping branches with its trunk and rubbing them agianst its teeth to cut them.
really? thats the best drawing for those fossils? i think we need a new artist.
Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini)
The world’s largest octopus lives on the Pacific coasts of North America and Asia. Known as the Giant Pacific Octopus, or the North Pacific Giant Octopus, it can grow as large or larger than you in its 3-5 year lifespan - its arm-span might exceed 14 ft (4.3 m).
They typically live at depths of around 215 feet (65 m), and use their suckers to catch smaller invertebrates and fish, though they’ve been known to take larger prey such as the small shark Spiny Dogfish,Squalus acanthias.
The species is semelparous - that is, they reproduce only once and then die, much like Pacific salmon. Females lay up to 100,000 eggs, which are fertilized by the male’s spermataphore, a “package” of sperm that can be up to 3.3 ft (1 m) long. The females guard their eggs until they hatch; they stop hunting and eventually die of starvation.
Octopuses are commonly considered the most intelligent of invertebrates; captive individuals have demonstrated the ability to problem-solve, such as learning to twist the lid off a screw-top jar to get at food inside.
Quetzalcoatlus northropi
What was as tall as a giraffe, weighed a scant 550 pounds, and could fly? This is not a trick question. Around 68 million years ago, such creatures tromped and flew over what is now Texas. Paleontologists know this animal as Quetzalcoatlus northropi – a fantastically huge pterosaur that belonged to a group called azhdarchids. The biggest members of this leathery-winged lineage were the largest creatures ever to fly over our planet, and the increasing amount of information paleontologists have gleaned from their bones has repeatedly underscored a persistent riddle. How did these unusual flyers get to be so enormous?
Superlative size sparks our imagination and demands explanation. We’re constantly drawn to mysteries such as why there aren’t anygargantuan bony fish filtering krill from the seas as there had been in the Jurassic, and, of course, why the most massive land mammal of all time wasn’t even close to the prodigious size of dinosaurian titans…
(read more: Laelaps blog - National Geo)
greater sage grouse
The Bureau of Land Management - California and Bureau of Land Management - Nevada, along with the U.S. Forest Service are writing a draft Environmental Impact Statement to evaluate existing and potential measures to protect Greater Sage-grouse that is scheduled to be released next month.
odobenocetops
…an extinct genus of small whales that lived during the Pliocene epoch. Odobenocetops had a very flexible neck and a broad snout, like modern walruses. This suggests that it was a bottom feeder, and fed mostly on molluscs, sucking them out of their shells with a powerful tongue. Like the semi-related narwhal Odobenocetops had two large tusks (the only male specimen has one large tusk and one small tusk, it is speculated that this is true for all males but this is not confirmed) their exact function is unknown but it is thought that they might have been used as a sensory organ, like in narwhals.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Saturday, September 7, 2013
mighty tanaka
Mighty Tanaka has posted some great shots of the new Nychos mural in Brooklyn. Every neighborhood needs its own exploded whale, y’know? Check the Mighty Tanaka Tumblr or Instagram for more pics.
Deep In The Pacific, Scientists Discover Biggest Volcano On Earth
The world's largest volcano has until now been lurking undiscovered in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, according to a team of scientists who identified the massive object and reported their findings in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience.
The newly revealed Tamu Massif volcano — located about 1,000 miles east of Japan and 4 miles below the ocean's surface — is about the size of New Mexico. It not only outclasses previous record holder Mauna Loa in Hawaii by about 60 times, but it's in the same league as Olympus Mons on the planet Mars, the largest known volcano in the solar system.
Nature.com reports that the mega-volcano has been inactive for millions of years, but "its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface."
The 120,000-square-mile shield volcano took a few million years to take shape when it formed about 145 million years ago at the transition between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, according to Sager.
It's not tall, but it is extremely wide — a veritable undersea behemoth compared with land-based Mauna Loa, which measures just 2,000 square miles. Tamu Massif comes close to matching the geographic size of Olympus Mons.
The volcano is part of a larger underwater feature known as the Shatsky Rise, but only in the past few years has Sager's team been able to determine that it's a single volcano. "We knew it was a big mountain, some sort of volcanic mountain, but oceanic plateaus are very large features hidden beneath the ocean and it's very hard to study them," Sager says.
"The main thing was the imaging we were able to do a few years ago, but without sort of the ground truth provided by samples that we drilled out of this thing, we wouldn't have had nearly as compelling a result," he tells NPR.
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