WHAT’S MORE ADORABLE THAN PHOTOS OF TWO EMPEROR PENGUINS? A “selfie” video taken by the penguins themselves. Admittedly, I’m hardly the first to take it up – posted March 7th, it’s been featured on television news and print media around the world and the 38-second video has had more than 400,000 views – but, really, it’s irresistible. JUST HAPPENED TO BE TURNED ON Basically, two curious emperor penguins – the noble species featured in the 2005
Read more
FINDING A FRIENDLY OCTOPUS ON YOUR PHOTO SHOOT DIVE IS A RARE JOY. Sony Corporation and Kelly Tarlton’s SEA LIFE Aquarium in Auckland, New Zealand, turned the tables. The concept: An octopus takes photos of people. The octopus is Rambo, so named because he wrecked two camera systems in the course of the training. RAMBO RULES Of course, the concept in which an octopus takes photos of people is a long-running performance art commercial for Sony’s TX30 camera,
Read more
NOT THE ONES ON YOUR DINNER TABLE (presumably). But scallops you might be eyeing during a dive may well be looking back at you, possibly contemplating an escape with a sort of jet propulsion created by clapping their shells together. And, they see through as many as 200 grain-sized, complex eyes located at the tips of tentacles extended past their shells, each resembling the structure of a reflecting telescope with a tiny concave mirror. “WHAT”
Read more
SCIENTISTS IDENTIFYING A NEW SPECIES OF PISTOL SHRIMP is interesting but not astounding, since discoveries like this continually advance our understanding of the web of life. UNLESS…The researchers name the new species after the iconic prog rock band Pink Floyd. That’s what a team of marine naturalists from the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil did with the newly identified Synalpheus pinkfloydi, which they found in Pacific waters off the coast of Panama. A
Read more
AIR-BREATHING MARINE MAMMALS LIKE WHALES AND DOLPHINS routinely dive to great depths – measured in thousands of feet – and return to the surface at high speed without experiencing the decompression sickness that we human mammals have to be extremely careful about. How can they do this, while we humans can’t? Scientists have long suspected that they limit nitrogen absorption and decrease the risk of decompression sickness by collapsing their lungs during the dives. Researchers at
Read more
– THERE ARE LOTS OF FISH IN THE SEA, the saying goes, and it turns out that most of them are bristlemouths, a fish you probably never heard of. TRILLIONS OF THEM It’s a small fish “of the middle depths that glows in the dark and can open its mouth extraordinarily wide, baring needle-like fangs – is the most numerous vertebrae on earth,” says science writer William J. Broad in a recent article in the New
Read more
WHEN MARINE BIOLOGIST DAVID SCHOLNICK WANTED TO CONDUCT RESEARCH on how changes in the oceans might affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections, he settled on a study involving shrimp and a device that became famous as “The Shrimp’s Tiny Treadmill.” The point was to study shrimp’s ability to remove bacteria from its body, since that could have an impact on bacteria that might end up in seafood. Since shrimp are active creatures
Read more