The Diversity of "Jellyfish"

I'm dusting off some old draft posts that I'd meant to put up earlier. This video "There's no such thing as a jellyfish" is a great primer on the critters. Plus its food for thought on a whole mess of topics, like life sciences, marine biology, and even astrobiology.

Also, it's breathtakingly gorgeous video!

Video of Mysterious Undersea Creature Baffles Scientists

Pink Tentacle posits it might be a Ningen of Japanese urban legend--a blubbery, underwater humanoid! Apparently Ningen live in the icy waters of the Antarctic. This one was sighted southwest of Tokyo in the Sagami Bay.

Lots of weird sealife, but the guest of honor makes its creepy appearance begins after 1:20. Ningen on Wikipedia. 

/props to Boing Boing

Zombie Ants Controlled by Fungal Overlord!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Huh? This story is too weird for me to even attempt to summarize, so I'll just go straight to the MSNBC highlight:

In a bizarre parasitic death sentence, a fungus turns carpenter ants into the walking dead and gets them to die in a spot that's perfect for the fungus to grow and reproduce.

...and...

Once infected by the fungus, an ant is compelled to climb down from the canopy to the low leaves, where it clamps down with its mandibles just before it dies.

"The fungus accurately manipulates the infected ants into dying where the parasite prefers to be, by making the ants travel a long way during the last hours of their lives," said study leader David P. Hughes of Harvard University.

Yeah, just plain weird, right? Anyway, to learn more about the evil fungus and it's insectoid automatons, read on...

Now if only we could get the fungus to get rid of these bugs, I'd feel safer!

Newly Discovered "Megapiranha" May Be Evolutionary Step Between Nice Fish, Evil-er Ones

A newly discovered fossil of a previously unknown species of piranha, dubbed "megapiranha" (scary!) is being examined as the step between modern piranhas and a related, much larger species called pacu. The megapiranha is 3-foot in length (again, scary!) and holds clues in the formation of its teeth. From MSNBC:

Present-day piranhas have a single row of triangular teeth, like the blade on a saw, explained the researchers. Pacu have two rows of square teeth, presumably for crushing fruits and seeds.

"In modern piranhas, the teeth are arranged in a single file," said Wasila Dahdul, a visiting scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. "But in the relatives of piranhas — which tend to be herbivorous fishes — the teeth are in two rows."

The new fossil shows an intermediate pattern: teeth in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the two rows in pacu were compressed to form a single row in piranhas. "It almost looks like the teeth are migrating from the second row into the first row," said John Lundberg, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a co-author of a study of the jawbone.

Read more...

Chinese Cat Grows Wings!

This would definitely fall under an X-File type of story--a cat in China has apparently grown "wing-like" appendages due to a genetic malformation. From MSNBC:

While some think the bony limbs may be a mutation of some kind — or even a Siamese twin growing inside the cat — others speculate it's a genetic change perhaps caused by chemicals ingested by the kitty's mother while she was pregnant.

Did the mention of a twin inside the cat make you gag a little bit? You're not alone. Even more disturbing is the fact that this is nothing new. Click this pic from Sodahead for more weirdness:

No word on how much Red Bull these cats may have ingested.

Read more...

Props: Photos borrowed from MSNBC and Sodahead.

Missing Link (to Lemurs?) Found!

Well, it appears the true missing link has been discovered--in Germany of all places. This is a surprise to be sure since most pre-homosapien fossils are found in North or East Africa. No matter, the real surprise is perhaps that we're more related to lemurs than we thought, which if you weren't aware, only hail from one place on Earth--Madagascar.

From National Geographic

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Ida, properly known as Darwinius masillae, has a unique anatomy. The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.

"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

Read more...

Ida has her own website too.

New Antarctic Creatures Discovered

Sea monsters, sea "squirts," and translucent octopi oh my! Yes, Antarctica truly is the final frontier on this small blue-green world. I've long wondered what lies beneath the ice that covers the forgotten continent. Well below the waves, an iridescent octopus flutters in the frigid depths:


Live Science has a nice in-depth article....

Captains Cousteau and Nemo would be proud!

"Dragons" Munch on Indonesian Fisherman

This story actually terrifies me. Lizards are weird and repulsive right? Well imagine a big one-- longer than you are tall--chasing you down and munching on you until you bleed to death. Oh, and it carries deadly venom [not bacteria]* in it's saliva...

So at the very least, you'll be hurting big time, for a long time to come....if you survive. That poor guy ended up bleeding to death when Komodo Dragons tried to make a meal of him.

Yikes.

/props to CNN.


*Updated on 5-20-09, per new findings that indicate komodo's use venom not bacteria in their saliva as previously thought.

Hobbits Discovered!

No, not the cute, cuddly, furry-footed, Elijah Wood variety. This kind:

...and that's supposedly a female. Well an artist's conception anyway. Scary, huh? I'm not sure that's even the "hobbit" they found, but it's definitely post-worthy material. It's those eyes (shudders).

Anyway, you've probably heard about this already from a few years back. But that one wasn't the real deal. This time, scientists are confident about their findings of a race of 'little people'.

FTA on MSNBC:

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern humans rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.

The finding on a remote Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory. It is a fundamentally new creature that bears more of a resemblance to fictional, barefooted hobbits than modern humans.

Yet biologically speaking, it may have been closely related to us and perhaps even shared its caves with our ancestors.

Read more...

Nat Geo has more as well...

Discover Magazine has even more...