These Asian amur sea stars (Asterias amurensis) were found ~5,000 miles from home on the Oregon coast. Image provided by Oregon State University
March 11, 2011, 2:46 PM, 45 miles east of Tōhoku, Japan. Fifteen miles beneath the waves, a magnitude-9 megathrust earthquake strikes. The Pacific and Eurasian tectonic plates suddenly shift, shaking the surrounding crust for six minutes and creating a tidal wave almost 40 meters high, which races towards the coast of Japan. In the hours that follow, it claims at least 15,894 lives, with thousands more unaccounted for. More than a million buildings are damaged or destroyed, causing nearly $200 billion in damages.
The remnants of those buildings and all sorts of debris liberated by the moving waters have since spread the tsunami’s legacy far beyond the site of impact. As a new study in the journal Science explains, thanks to objects set adrift by the tsunami’s waves, more than two hundred and eighty species have been found on the wrong side of the ocean.
While there’s no I in TEAM, each penguin benefits from hunting together. Photo credit Sergey Uryadnikov
They say that many hands make light work. Well, for African penguins, many beaks make for bountiful hunts, according to a new study in Royal Society Open Science. The results suggest that dwindling populations may have greater consequences than previously realized.
African penguins (Spheniscus demersus), or “jackass” penguins after their donkey-like calls, are currently endangered. Found only on the southern tip of Africa, populations of these flightless birds have dropped from an estimated 4 to 5 million in 1800 to a mere 50,000 or so animals today. Their situation is considered so dire that, if the penguins do not begin to rebound soon, it’s predicted they’ll go extinct in about a decade. Continue reading “Birds of a Feather Hunt Better Together”
These tough bats can tussle with the deadliest scorpions in North America and win. Photo by Connor Long
Pallid bats (Antrozous pallidus) are quirky little creatures, the sole species in their genus. Their long ears, which can equal half their body length, make them look quintessentially batty, but unlike most of their night hunting relatives, they prefer to tackle ground-dwelling dinners—a strategy called “gleaning.” Pallid bats glean as much as half their body weight in prey every night, and their diet includes a wide range of crunchy little critters, including crickets, praying mantis, and beetles.
It is their taste for scorpions, though, that is particularly intriguing, and piqued the curiosity of scientists. It was unknown whether the bats have a trick for catching scorpions that keeps them from being stung, or whether they are resistant to the animals’ agonizing toxins. In a new PlosONE paper, researchers show it’s the latter: the bats’ laissez-faire attitude towards venom stems from an invulnerability to scorpion neurotoxins due to alterations in the voltage-gated sodium channels that the toxins target. Continue reading “Tiny Bat Shrugs Off Stings From Deadly Scorpion”
A black mamba’s sinister smile. Photo by James Arup
As a species, there is perhaps no topic that fascinates us more than mortality, especially our own. So unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of science fiction based on the idea of scientifically circumventing our mortal coils, most of which seems rather fantastical. But bringing the dead back to life isn’t as impossible as it might appear. While we’re still a long ways away from Dr. Frankenstein, recent developments in understanding how proteins and genes evolve has allowed scientists to raise dead proteins from the grave. In a new paper in Scientific Reports, a team of French scientists uses this cutting edge tech to resurrect extinct three-finger venom toxins and compare how they work to modern forms. Continue reading “Scientists Turn Back Time, Find a Way to Study Ancient Venom Toxins”
Sharks are pretty incredible animals. They’ve lived on this planet for more than 400 million years, and in that time, come to dominate the oceans they inhabit. That kind of survival when so many other lineages have gone extinct requires serious resilience. Now, a lemon shark off Florida has shown off just how tough these animals can be: he survived for at least 435 days with a hole in his body created as he shoved a swallowed fishing implement out of him through his flesh. Continue reading “Shark Survives Over A Year With A Hole Between Its Stomach And The Sea”
New study suggests African wild dogs may be doomed by climate change. Photo by Mathias Appel
Things aren’t looking good for Africa’s iconic wildlife. Already, many species are threatened by human activities and habitat loss. Even species once thought to be resilient, like giraffes, are suddenly struggling. Just earlier this week, scientists reported that aardvarks, one of sub-saharan Africa’s most successful and adorable insect-eaters and essential ecosystem engineers—face severe declines and even extinction as rising temperatures and declining rainfall dry out the continent. Now, a new paper in the Journal of Animal Ecologyadds African wild dogs to the growing list of species that may be eradicated by our changing climate.
A common triplefin, one of the fish species that may dominate temperate habitats in the near, acidic future. Photo c/o Wikimedia
Scientists predict that in the next twenty years, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will rise from the roughly 404 ppm it is now to over 450 ppm—and as a result, ecosystems worldwide will change. Many impacts will be particularly felt in our planet’s oceans. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, more of the gas dissolves into our seas, causing a chemical chain reaction which makes the water more acidic. Acidification can act independently or synergistically with rising temperatures, impacting different species in different ways. In a desperate rush to conserve species, scientists are racing against the clock to understand how marine habitats and the species that live in them will be affected by acidification and identify the best ways to retain our marine biodiversity going forward.
The bulk of the research on acidification to date has focused on reef-building corals, and rightfully so, as these reef-producing species are the foundation of some of the richest ecosystems on Earth. But reefs aren’t the only prolific habitats in the sea, and corals certainly aren’t the only species that changing water chemistry will affect. Lab-based studies have found that all kinds of organisms, including fish, are sometimes affected by acidified waters, but how these individual impacts on species translates to ecosystem-level effects is less clear. So to understand how acidification might impact fish communities, a team of scientists led by Professor Ivan Nagelkerken, a marine ecologist in the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute, turned to natural laboratories. Continue reading “Acidifying Oceans Favor Sea Vermin”
One of the world’s deadliest venomous animals—a female Anopheles gambiae—demonstrating the behavior that makes her so lethal. Photo Credit: CDC/ James Gathany
People are often surprised when I say that mosquitoes are the deadliest venomous animal in the world (the deadliest animal period, really, if we don’t count ourselves). Mosquito bites—and the venoms delivered by them—kill upwards of 750,000 people worldwide every year thanks to the lethal beasties harbored within them. Most of those are due to microscopic parasites in the genus Plasmodium, which are responsible for the diseases collectively called malaria. Malaria accounts for around 500,000 of those mosquito-caused deaths, according to the World Health Organization—only a fraction of the over 210 million cases of malaria reported every year. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of time, money, and intellectual capital being invested into finding ways to reduce those numbers. And as the vectors, mosquitoes—especially the few species that carry the most devastating diseases—are a key target.
While killing mosquitoes seems like a simple objective, it can be quite complicated in practice. Mosquitoes are hardy little buggers, and rapidly evolve resistance to pesticides. And when effective pesticides can be found, such as DDT, they tend to be a little too effective, killing a wide diversity of insects and causing ecological harm to local biodiversity. In the hope of wiping out disease-carrying mosquito populations, scientists have tried all sorts of methods, from increasing natural predators to releasing sterile male mosquitoes in swarms. But the most recent approach sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction thriller: an international team of scientists has genetically engineered a fluorescent fungus that wipes out mosquitoes using venom toxins from spiders and scorpions. Continue reading “FrankenFungus Armed With Venom Toxins Could Join The War Against Malaria”
A monocled cobra, Naja kaouthia. Photo Credit: Tontan Travel
Vishal Santra got more than he bargained for when he peered into a chicken coop in the Hooghly District of West Bengal, India in 2004. He was helping the local community with dangerous snake removals when he was called upon to wrangle an unwelcome guest in a fowl pen: a monocled cobra, Naja kaouthia. Monocled cobras, which can reach lengths of about 5 feet, are highly venomous animals, so Santra knew to avoid a quick strike. But the animal didn’t lunge—instead, from over a foot away, the serpent spat at Santra’s face, getting a small amount of venom into his eye.
This is a guest post by Jake Buehler, who just so happens to be an AAUS certified scientific diver as well as a science writer based in the Seattle area. He blogs over atSh*t You Didn’t Know About Biology, which is full of his “unrepentantly celebratory insights into life on Earth’s under-appreciated, under-acknowledged, and utterly amazing stories.”
Summer is finally here in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are long, the weather is warm, and the water is inviting. It’s also time for our annual lesson from popular culture that this refreshing invitation is a lie, and that the only thing the sea offers us is electric, blinding terror. Yes, summer inevitably means the advent of a new crop of shark-based survival horror flicks.
This summer, much like the last with “The Shallows”, movie-going audiences will be treated to another shark-centric screamfest: “47 Meters Down.” The British-American film—starring Mandy Moore and Claire Holt—opened in U.S. theaters last weekend. Recent, somewhat ubiquitous trailers for the film outline its terrifying premise: while vacationing in Mexico, a pair of sisters goes cage-diving with great white sharks, only to have the winch suspending their protective cage fail, sending them plummeting 47 meters down to the ocean floor, from where they must escape to the surface before the swarm of sharks—or their dwindling air supply—does them in. It is no doubt that just like with “The Shallows”, we will again be reminded that the persistent blood lust of horror film sharks is altogether different from what science tells us about the behavior of their real-life animal counterparts. But the film and overall premise of “47 Meters Down” commit a litany of science inaccuracy sins completely unrelated to sharks. Frankly, the movie fails spectacularly when it comes to portraying the biology and physics at play during SCUBA diving (which is kind of amazing, actually, considering how much of the film’s plot is directly rooted in the consequences of being underwater). Being a trained AAUS scientific diver, dive science is an area I know a little about, so I made the commitment to sit through “47 Meters Down” so you wouldn’t have to, all to separate the reality of how diving works from…well, whatever it is that the movie plopped out.
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