Boing Boing » zoology

The rogue reptiles of the River Thames

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:59:27 +0000

The Fortean Times' Neil Arnold surveys the current monstrous inhabitants of the Thames and its tributaries, and the not-so-cryptozoological creatures that they might turn out to be: "There have even been reports of alligators."

An appreciation of the Sawfish, one of Earth's most threatened fish

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:44:37 +0000

"The earliest sawfishes likely arose in the shallow Tethys Sea, that ocean surrounded by the ancient continents of Godwanda and Laurasia, during the Cretaceous period at least 60 million years ago," writes Dr. M. at Deep Sea News.

These "sole survivors of an ancient bloodline" now number only seven species which roam the muddy bottoms of coastal areas, bays and estuaries.

All sawfishes can move easily between fresh and saltwater and often venture deep upstream into rivers. The sawfish lifestyle puts this both their size and saw near humans. All seven species are considered critically endangered by the IUCN. As much as we have impacted them, sawfish have also greatly influenced our culture.

And now, they're one of the most threatened species on our planet. Thanks, humans!

More: Exaltation to Extinction for Sawfishes [Deep Sea News]

Sloths!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:13:09 +0000

A handy guide to the changing body of knowledge about sloth biology and sloth behavior. Includes the surprise (discussed here before in an interview with a zoologist from the Smithsonian's National Zoo) that supposedly slow sloths that move quite quickly under certain circumstances.

Man vs. duck (or a bunch of little horses)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:21:49 +0000

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck? President Obama refused to address this pressing question. But science has the answer. (Via Tim Maly and kottke)

Oh nothing, just rare video of a polar bear mom nursing her cubs

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 23:01:03 +0000

Chris Thonis, writing to Boing Boing on behalf of explore.org, sends along this video of a mother polar bear in Churchill, Manitoba nursing her two cubs. Chris explains:

This is a behavior rarely caught on camera, and is the result of three live cams set up by explore.org, Polar Bears International, Parks Canada, and Frontiers North Adventure to capture the annual polar bear migration this year (the point being to get people to think more about how climate change is impacting the north, and inspire an annual event similar to Earth Day (or Groundhog Day).

This turtle pees through its mouth

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:37:18 +0000

Ed Yong writes about the Chinese soft-shelled turtle: "Looks like someone glued the snout of a pig onto the face of a fish, with the texture of a scrotum for good measure. But its bizarre appearance pales in comparison to an even more bizarre, and newly discovered, habit: it urinates through its mouth."

The wonder of small things

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:03:30 +0000

From a public perspective, biology in the oceans, like biology on the land, tends to favor the charismatic megafauna. Stop by your local aquarium and you'll find masses huddled around the seal pool or the shark tank. People will even attempt to interact with the octopodes. Meanwhile, smaller creatures sit on the sidelines. Crabs, starfish, and ray-like skates have some admirers at the touch tanks. But in the world of small things, they're actually quite large. The ocean is full of even tinier organisms—worms and snails, small shelled animals and even stationary colonies of life that look like rocks or lumps of sand.

The ocean is an amazing place, and Bill Grossman can tell you about the things that live there—large, small, or tiny. Grossman is specimen collector for the Marine Biological Laboratory. Essentially, he's part of a system of support staff for scientists. When researchers at MBL need sea creatures to study, it's people like Grossman who go out on the water and find them.

Back in May, I got to take a short trip aboard the R/V Gemma, MBL's specimen collection boat. The videos I brought back can teach you some amazing things about animals you thought you knew well, and introduce you to creatures you probably never noticed before.

The first video, posted above, focuses on three animals: Skate, crabs, and a strange, colony-dwelling life form known as a sand sponge.

Skates, as you'll notice, look a lot like rays—and they are closely related. The key difference between the two is actually alluded to in the video. Grossman explains that researchers at MBL are particularly interested in skates because of the eggs that they lay. These are some amazing eggs. You won't see any in the video, but they're black, crazy looking, hard packets, bracketed between two long spines. In the packet, which is semi-opaque, you can see a bright orange blob—the embryonic skates. Seriously, it's like something out of Aliens.

Rays don't produce those. In fact, they don't lay eggs at all. Baby rays are born alive, just like human babies.

The other thing I want to give you a better look at is the sand sponge. It's not actually a sponge. Nor is it, as it appears, a blob of sand stuck together. Instead, it's a colony of creatures called ascidians, or sea squirts. If I'm understanding correctly, that sandy exterior is actually part of their living tissue.

In this second video, Grossman pulls half of a bivalve shell out of the pile shells, and crabs, and urchins on the Gemma's deck. But it's not bivalves that we're learning about. Instead, that shell, abandoned by its deceased original owner, has become an ecosystem in its own right, home to a variety of worms and snails and other small creatures.

In particular, pay attention to the hydroides. These are little worms that live inside tubes made calcium carbonate. The tubes are white or red, and the worms like to build them on hard surfaces. That includes empty shells, but it's more than that. Hydroides can build their tubes on the undersides of boats. They also build inside intake pipes, meant to bring cooling water to power plants and factories. In those situations, these little worms can become big pests.

Finally, this last video is all about sand collars and starfish. What's a sand collar? It's not an animal, itself. Instead, the collar is a gelled-together mass of eggs produced by the moon snail. These animals have a beautiful, frilly name, but are actually ravenous predators. They eat clams. Lots of clams. Moon snails eat clams like drunk frat boys eat buffalo wings. In fact, back in 2010, a veritable phalanx of moon snails nearly put Maine's human clam diggers out of business.

In all of these little tidbits, there's a key lesson you ought to learn: Amazing things are happening, all the time, at a scale that we don't always pay attention to. If your interest in animals begins and ends with creatures larger than the average Collie dog, you're going to miss out. Here's a challenge for what's left of the Summer. Get down on your hands and knees, and spend some time inspecting all of the life forms that are smaller than a breadbox.

For more information on specimen collection, read this interview with Ed Enos. He's Bill Grossman's boss, and superintendent of MBL's Aquatic Resources Department.

IMAGES:
• Egg case from a skate &mash; Wikipedia user Xtylee, via CC
• Sand sponge — MBL Marine Organism Database

What's inside an elephant?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:05:53 +0000

Sometimes, I get so jealous of British television. Apparently, there's a whole series over there called Inside Nature's Giants. It's basically a zoology dissection show, where scientists break down large, exotic animals in ways that help teach viewers about evolution, biology, and the science of animal locomotion.

John Hutchinson is an American zoologist who works as a professor of evolutionary biomechanics in the UK. He's one of the scientists who works behind the scenes on Inside Nature's Giants. He also blogs at What's in John's Freezer?. It's a great title and it gets right to the point: Hutchinson has a job that is centered around the frozen carcasses of all manner of strange (and usually rather large) creatures. His research is all about the evolution and mechanics of motion. He studies living animals, both through dissection and 3D modeling, and he tries to use that data to better understand how extinct animals—including dinosaurs—might have moved around.

It's fascinating stuff. And the photos are nigh-on mind blowing. Right now, at John Hutchinson's blog, you can see a collection of shots from dissections and CT scans done for Inside Nature's Giants—including the dissection of an elephant.

Because I know that some of you are delicate and it is almost lunchtime, I've opted to not post my favorite photo from that dissection on the main page. But you should check it out below the cut.

This photo is astounding. Partly, because it's biology at a scale that I'd not really thought much about before. I know elephants are huge. But until I looked at this image, it had not occurred to me just how equally huge their intestines would have to be.

Second, is it just me, or do these elephant intestines look, weirdly, like some kind of deconstructed modernist couch?

See the rest of the photos, as well as some CT scans of tigers and crocodiles, at the What's in John's Freezer? blog.

Learn more about John Hutchinson's research. If you scroll down on this page, you'll find links to websites about some of his past projects. Topics include: "Tyrannosaurus was not a fast runner" and "Do elephants have six toes?"

Via Brian Switek

Relative size of great grey owl's body to feathers

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:00:02 +0000

Here's a diagram that shows the relative size of a great grey owl's body to its feathers. It's hosted on Wikimedia commons, labelled "Cross sectioned taxidermied Great Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa, showing the extent of the body plumage, Zoological Museum, Copenhagen."

File:Strix nebulosa plumage.jpg (via Beth Pratt)

X-Ray of a scorpion fish

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:45:36 +0000

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a new exhibit up dedicated to x-ray portraiture of fish. All the shots were taken by Sandra Raredon, a museum specialist in the Division of Fishes (which is kind of a wonderful title, yes?)

I dig this because, on verbal description, this sounds rather dull. X-rays of fishes. Great. But when you actually see the images you remember two very important facts: First, fishes have tons of little, teeny bones packed into a relatively small body; Second, fishes come in a wide variety of frequently crazy shapes. That all adds up to fish x-rays being way more interesting than you might initially guess.

Take the scorpionfish. In real life, this family tends to look a bit like a bunch of Muppet trolls—runaway cast members from "Labyrinth" or something. In x-ray, you can see past the wild colors and stubbly, camouflage skin to spot the spines these fish use for delivering a numbing, toxic poison.

Check out all the fish x-rays at the Encyclopedia of Life.

Do big cats purr?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:07:11 +0000

U xpect adorabulness. U gets it. But kittehs also gives u edukashun n' sientific nuance.

That's all the LOLcat speak I can muster in one go. Seriously, watch this video from Big Cat Rescue. It's fascinating. And, you should know, at the end, they link you to a slightly less educational feature about ocelots and lynx chasing laser pointers. Just sayin'.

Video Link

Via Icanhascheezburger

Thanks, Andrew Balfour!

Loggerhead turtles have internal GPS

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:05:09 +0000

New Scientist has a great set of stories about the extraordinary senses of animals, including the fact that creatures like sea turtles can sense the Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation.

Young loggerhead turtles, for example, read the Earth's magnetic field to adjust the direction in which they swim. They seem to hatch with a set of directions, which, with the help of their magnetic sense, ensures that they always stay in warm waters during their first migration around the rim of the North Atlantic. Over time they build a more detailed magnetic map by learning to recognise variations in the strength and direction of the field lines, which are angled more steeply towards the poles and flatter at the magnetic equator.

What isn't known, however, is how they sense magnetism. Part of the problem is that magnetic fields can pass through biological tissues without being altered, so the sensors could, in theory, be located in any part of the body. What's more, the detection might not need specialised structures at all, but may instead be based on a series of chemical reactions.

Even so, many researchers think that magnetic receptors probably exist in the head of turtles and perhaps other animals. These might be based on crystals of magnetite, which align with the Earth's magnetic field and could pull on some kind of stretch receptor or hair-like cell as it changes polarity. The mineral has already been found in some bacteria, and in the noses of fish like salmon and rainbow trout, which also seem to track the Earth's magnetic field as they migrate.

Via Nicola Twilley
Image: Loggerhead Turtle, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from coda's photostream