Source: The Guardian

On the web … Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Silk worms seem to have cornered a market. Is there any potential commercial use for spider's webs?

Dutch scientists have genetically engineered goats so that the milk they produce contains the proteins found in spider silk. The silk can then be spun from the milk (I absolutely promise I am not making this up), and woven into a fabric that can be blended with human skin to render it bulletproof. The bulletproof skin bit is still under development, but the spider-silk producing goats are real and alive.

GentDirly

In the 1960s I worked for a company making microscopes. We had staff who had worked for the Ross company making telescopes and rangefinders, and from the Vickers factory making all sorts of optical equipment. These people said that gossamer was used to make cross-hairs in the eyepieces of all their products. They also said the highlight of the apprentices' year was the annual spider hunt to collect the gossamer. They may have been pulling my leg – I'm sure your correspondents will let me know.

Simon Hurdley, Bridport, Dorset

Spiders' webs have been used in the past to seal wounds and burns – I don't know if they were any good for it, though.

derangedlemur

Source: Smithsonian Science

Bryan’s shearwater (Photo by Reginald David)

For the first time in decades, researchers have found a new bird species in the United States. Based on a specimen collected in 1963 on Midway Atoll, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, biologists have described a new species of seabird, Bryan’s shearwater (Puffinus bryani), according to differences in measurements and physical appearance compared to other species of shearwaters. Scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute analyzed the specimen’s DNA to confirm that it is an entirely new species.

“Usually we see a species split into two because we find that one of them has a very different DNA than the other, without other indicators,” said Rob Fleischer, head of SCBI’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics. “It’s very unusual to discover a new species of bird these days and especially gratifying when DNA can confirm our original hypothesis that the animal is unique. This bird is unique, both genetically and in appearance, and represents a novel, albeit very rare, species.”

Researchers have rarely discovered new species of birds since most of the world’s 9,000-plus species (including about 21 other species of shearwaters) were described before 1900. The majority of new species described since the mid-1900s have been discovered in remote tropical rain and cloud forests, primarily in South America and southeastern Asia. The Bryan’s shearwater is the first new species reported from the United States and Hawaiian Islands since the Po’ouli was described from the forests of Maui in 1974.

The Bryan’s shearwater is the smallest shearwater known to exist. It is black and white with a black or blue-gray bill and blue legs. Biologists found the species in a burrow among a colony of petrels during the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program in 1963. Peter Pyle, an ornithologist at the Institute for Bird Populations, recently examined the specimen and found that it was too small to be a little shearwater (P. assimilis) and that it had a distinct appearance.

According to Fleischer and Andreanna Welch, a former graduate student and Smithsonian predoctoral fellow at SCBI who worked on the genetic analysis, the Bryan’s shearwater differs genetically to a greater degree than found between most other species of its genus, and is distantly related to another similar-looking species, the Boyd’s shearwater (P. boydi). Based on this DNA evidence, researchers estimate that the Bryan’s shearwater separated from other species of shearwaters perhaps more than 2 million years ago. These findings have been published in a paper, A new species of Shearwater (Puffinus) recorded from Midway Atoll, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, in the current issue of The Condor.

Researchers do not know where Bryan’s shearwaters breed. According to Pyle, shearwaters and other seabirds often visit nesting burrows on remote islands only at night, and researchers have not discovered the breeding locations of many populations. Individual seabirds from colonies also often “prospect” for new breeding locations, usually far from existing colonies. Bryan’s shearwater could conceivably breed anywhere in the Pacific Ocean basin or even farther afield.

Given that Bryan’s shearwaters have remained undiscovered until now, they could be very rare and possibly even extinct.

“If we can find where this species breeds, we may have a chance to protect it and keep it from going extinct,” Welch said. “Genetic analysis allows us to investigate whether an animal represents an entirely different species, and that knowledge is important for setting conservation priorities and preventing extinction.”

Bryan’s shearwater is named after Edwin Horace Bryan Jr., who was curator of collections at the B.P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu from 1919 until 1968.

Source: Nature

Becky Crew
09 November 2012

You may remember the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) from such discoveries as the Yeti crab, the squid with elbows and my personal favourite, the pigbutt worm, and now they’re back with footage of a new species of carnivorous sponge.

Seventeen years ago, Jean Vacelet and Nicole Boury-Esnault from the Centre of Oceanology at France’s Aix-Marseille University provided the first real evidence that a sponge could be more than, well, a sponge. They had discovered a new species of deep-sea sponge living in the unusual setting of a shallow Mediterranean sea cave, the inside of which mimicked the conditions of its usual habitat more than a kilometre below the surface. This allowed the researchers an unprecedented view of the sponge’s eating habits, and they watched as it snared its prey of small fish and crustaceans instead of absorbing bacteria and organic particles through their bodies, like most other sponge species do – including ones living in the very same cave.

Vacelet and Boury-Esnault’s sponges were of the Asbestopluma genus and belonged to the Cladorhizidae family of carnivorous demosponges – the class that contains over 90% of the world’s sponges. Since reporting their discovery in a 1995 issue of Nature, 24 new species of cladorhizid sponges, including the incredible ping-pong tree sponge (see below), have also been discovered. Yet due to the difficulty of studying their behaviour at such incredible depths, researchers have had little opportunity to describe essential aspects of their lives, particularly how they reproduce.

Which is where MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) Tiburon and Doc Ricketts, come in. Using these deep-diving vessels, a team of researchers led by Senior Research Technician Lonny Lundsten discovered a species of harp sponge called Chondrocladia lyra off the coast of California, at depths of 3316–3399m.

As Mr_Skeleton pointed out on Reddit this week, this sponge doesn’t look like it could clean anything. But it can catch prey, envelope it in membrane and digest it whole, so it certainly has other priorities. Based on footage of several individuals and two large, fragmentary specimens brought up by the ROVs, Lundsten’s team described how the vertical branches and horizontal stolons that make up the sponge’s basic harp-like structure, called a vane, are covered in barbed hooks and spines. They found that a number of crustacean prey were passively ensnared on these branches thanks to the Velcro-like hooks and then aggressively enclosed in a cavity to be dismembered into small, digestible particles, which provided direct evidence of the species’ carnivorous appetites.

C. lyra can grow up to 37cm long – impressive for a sponge – and are anchored to the sea-floor by a structure called a rhizoid, which looks like a root system. They can have 1-6 vanes, each supporting a number of equidistant vertical branches, and each of these end in swollen terminal balls. According to the researchers, these terminal balls produce condensed packets of sperm called spermatophores, which are released into the surrounding water in the hopes of fertilising other harp sponges in the area. Each C lyra sponge also has an egg development area around the mid-point of the branches, and when the spermatophores make contact, these areas swell up as the eggs are fertilised and begin to mature.

The team suggests that the structure of the harp sponge is designed to ensure that they catch the most prey possible, and also maximise their chances of catching spermatophores from other harp sponges.

“Video footage taken as the ROVs approached specimens of C. lyra provided information about the biological diversity of the areas in which the sponges live,” the researchers added in their report in the current issue of Invertebrate Biology. “Among the coexisting invertebrates were unidentified sea anemones; the soft coral Anthomastus robustus, members of several species of sea pens; and the sea cucumber Paelopadites confundens, as well as another sea cucumber in the family Elipidiidae.”

Source: National Geographic

Middle age ruts may act as natural motivators, scientist says. Chimpanzees (pictured, an elderly male) are less content in middle age, a new study says.

Photograph by Marcus Lindstrom, Getty Images

Amanda Fiegl
National Geographic News
Published November 19, 2012

Too bad chimpanzees can't buy sports cars. New research says it's not just humans who go through midlife crises: Chimps and orangutans also experience a dip in happiness around the middle of their lives.

"There may be different things going on at the surface, but underneath it all, there's something common in all three species that's leading to this," said study leader Alexander Weiss, a primate psychologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The study team asked longtime caretakers of more than 500 chimpanzees and orangutans at zoos in five countries to fill out a questionnaire about the well-being of each animal they work with, including overall mood, how much the animals seemed to enjoy social interactions, and how successful they were in achieving goals (such as obtaining a desired item or spot within their enclosure).

The survey even asked the humans to imagine themselves as the animal and rate how happy they'd be.

Happiness Curve

When Weiss's team plotted the results on a graph, they saw a familiar curve, bottoming out in the middle of the animals' lives and rising again in old age. It's the same U-shape that has shown up in several studies about age and happiness in people.

"When you look at worldwide data, you see this U-shape," said National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner, author of Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

"It's different for every country, but it's usually somewhere between age 45 and 55 that you hit the bottom of the curve, and it continues to go up with age. You see centenarians in good health reporting higher well-being than teenagers."

Social and economic hypotheses may partly explain this happiness curve in human lifetimes: Maybe it's tied to adjusting expectations, abandoning regret, or just getting more stuff as we grow older. But Weiss suspects there may be something more primal going on.

"We're saying, take a step back and look at the big picture: Is there any evidence that there's an evolutionary basis underlying this?" said Weiss, whose study was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Knowing that a similar phenomenon exists in human and nonhuman primates opens up the realm of possible explanations."

Strike While The Iron Is Hot

Although the stereotype of a midlife crisis is generally negative—feelings of depression or discontentment with one's life and where it's headed—Weiss believes such ennui may have an evolutionary upside.

By the middle of one's life, humans and apes often have access to more resources than when they were younger, which could make it easier to achieve goals. Feelings of discontentment may be nature's way of motivating us to "strike while the iron is hot," said Weiss.

"It may feel lousy, but your brain could be tricking you into improving your circumstances and situation, signaling you to get up and really start pushing while you're absolutely at your prime," he said. "And I think that's a really powerful and positive message."

Coping With Midlife Ruts

Knowing that a midlife dip in happiness is a natural—and temporary—part of life could make it easier for humans to cope with the experience, Weiss said. It could also help caretakers improve captive apes' quality of life, by identifying ages at which the animals might benefit from extra attention or enrichment.

"I don't think this totally subsumes other explanations for age-related changes in happiness, but it adds another layer," Weiss said.

Weiss has previously studied the correlation between personality and happiness in both chimpanzees and humans, and plans to look next at the impact of factors like sex and social groupings.

"I hope this raises awareness of all that we can learn by looking at our closest living animal relatives."

Source: Conservation

Anybody enjoying the porch at night has probably watched moths bouncing off a lamp. The moths may be a mere annoyance for people, but biologists worry that this “flight to light” behavior has dire consequences for moths and their predators. Now, new research looks into how variations in light spectra produced by different bulbs affect their attractiveness to moths.

“The use of street lighting, security lighting and other urban light sources negatively affected many animal and plant species, and it is considered to be one of the major threats to moth populations,” write five Dutch researchers in Biological Conservation. Many moth species are attracted to light, and some scientists say the moths may be mistaking artificial illumination for moonlight. Since bouncing into bulbs is often fatal for the insects, the researchers wanted to find out which light colors attracted the
most moths.

The team tested six different types of bulbs—including four custom-made lamps, standard white fluorescent bulbs, and actinic lamps typically used in photography and aquariums. Over several nights, the researchers set up moth traps in a nature preserve in the Netherlands and then analyzed the size, weight, and eye size of the moths that succumbed to the flight-to-light instinct.

They found that moths are most attracted to shorter light wavelengths—those near the ultraviolet and violet portions of the light spectrum. The team also found that “artificial light dominated by smaller wavelengths attracted relatively larger moth species and a higher abundance of these larger species.” The findings suggest that areas with more artificial light may have fewer large moths, which in turn could affect the species that prey on the night-fliers. A bird called the European nightjar, for example, feeds mostly on larger moths, so artificial light could be affecting their population by killing off larger moths.

The findings highlight the need for community officials to select streetlamps that attract fewer moths, the researchers suggest. In particular, using “lamps with larger wavelengths to effectively reduce the negative effect of light pollution” could stem the effects of this fatal attraction.

– Matthew Dieter

Van Langevelde, F. et al. 2011. Effect of spectral composition of artificial light on the attraction of moths. Biological Conservation doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2011.06.004.

Image: ©Sjm1123/Dreamstime.com

Source: Scientific American

Credit: VA Institute of Marine Science (VIMS)
By Becky Crew | March 21, 2013

There’s nothing like the thought of a delicious piece of meat with human teeth wrapped in prison stripes to put you to a gentle, dreamless sleep.

Despite the way it looks, the sheepshead fish (Archosargus probatocephalus) has at least one thing going for it. While other members of the Sparidae family are trying out various forms of hermaphroditism, including changing from female to male (protogyny), doing the opposite (protandry), or being unisexual (gonochorists), the sheepshead is just sitting at home watching cartoons and leaving its genitals where they are. So that’s something.

Sheepshead incisors. Credit: Glen J. Kuban

Another good thing about this huge creep is that, unlike one of its relatives, the Salema porgy (Sarpa salpa), you won’t risk having a terrible trip when you eat one.  Apparently they taste great! The Salema porgy, also of the Sparidae family and nicknamed the dreamfish, was reportedly used for recreational hallucinogenic purposes in the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and has played a role in traditional Polynesian ceremonies. Along with a handful of other fish, the flesh of the Salema porgy can sometimes inflict ichthyosarcotoxism on those who eat it, which is a very rare form of poisoning caused by the toxins of a tiny species of marine plankton called Gambierdiscus toxicus. This poisoning from contaminated fish flesh prompts intense hallucinations and terrifying nightmares that can last for several days.

As reported by Luc de Haro and Philip Pommier from the Centre Antipoison of the Hôpital Salvator in Marseille, France, in a 2006 issue of Clinical Toxicology, a 90-year-old man ate a Salema porgy in Saint Tropez in 2002 and two hours later was hallucinating and having nightmares about people and birds screaming, which lasted a further two nights. He literally thought he was losing his mind. “Fearing that these symptoms might signal the beginning of a major mental illness, he did not tell his friends or attending physician. The manifestations abated three days after he had eaten the fish,” de Haro and Pommier report.

Prior to that, a 40-year-old man also fell victim to ichthyosarcotoxism while holidaying in the French Riviera and had hallucinations of screaming animals and giant, menacing spiders surrounding his car.  In 2009, a fisherman named Andy Giles caught one in the English Channel, which is unusual because they usually keep to warm waters of the Mediterranean and African west coast, and told the Daily Telegraph, “Now I realise what it was and the effects it can have, perhaps I should have taken it into town to sell to some clubbers!” Andy lol.

So the sheepshead fish doesn’t do any of that stuff. But it does have human teeth. Sheepshead fish are a common North American marine species that span from Cape Cod and Massachusetts through to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil. Preferring coastal habitats around rock pilings, jetties, mangroves, reefs and piers, they can grow up to around 91 cm in length and weigh up to 9.6 kg. They have five to seven distinctive black, vertical bars running down their silvery bodies, which is why the sheepshead is also called the convict fish. And true to their name, sheepshead fish are notorious for stealing bait and somehow being in cahoots with the Joker.

Credit: mentalblock_DMD; Flickr

A fully-grown adult sheepshead will have well-defined incisors sitting at the front of the jaw, and molars set in three rows in the upper jaw and two rows in the lower jaw. It has strong, heavy grinders set in the rear of the jaw too, which are particularly important for crushing the shells of its prey. As with humans, this unique combination of teeth helps the sheepshead process a wide-ranging, omnivorous diet consisting of a variety of vertebrates, invertebrates and some plant material.

Credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

When they’re young, sheepshead fish will eat marine worms, bryozoan ‘moss animals’ and pretty much anything soft-bodied they can catch in the seagrasses. Although thick, sharp teeth begin to appear when a sheepshead is just 4.5 mm long, it will have to wait until it’s about 15 mm long before all the incisors have come in and the back teeth begin to develop into adult molars. Once they reach around 50 mm in length, the sheepshead will advance to eating more robust, armoured prey such as echinoderms, barnacles, clams, crabs and oysters, using their highly specialised teeth.

During this stage, its jaw musculature is also developing, and this keeps improving right through to old age. So an old fish living around a good supply of hard-shelled prey will end up having much greater jaw crushing power than a younger fish in a less rich environment. “Evidence strongly suggested that oral jaw crushing force was an important determinant of diet in these fishes,” said L. P. Hernandez from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and P. J. Motta from the Department of Biology at the University of South Florida in a 1997 issue of the Journal of Zoology. Hernandez and Motta had been observing the oral crushing performance of sheepshead fish from birth through to adulthood. “There was a significant correlation between increased force production and increased durophagous [shell-crushing] habit. Studies such as this one speak directly to the relationship between maximum functional potential and actual patterns of resource use.”

It’s not clear why the sheepshead is called the sheepshead, but it’s been suggested that it refers to how its teeth look like sheep’s teeth. A quick Google and cursory glance over some disgusting farm teeth, and I don’t really see the comparison, but another suggestion is that the name relates to their silhouette. And there’s something to be said for a sheepshead fish that has managed to keep its silhouette looking as non-offensive as it does, because look what happened to the Asian sheepshead of the Labridae family.

Here’s a video of some very American men with a live sheepshead:

Source: The Slater Museum of Natural History

The Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) that came down to Washington this winter, which I have written about before, finally contributed some pellets to the cause of science.

Of course, you know what owl pellets are. Birds of prey, and actually quite a few other birds, eat a lot of stuff that doesn't make it through their digestive tract. Hair and feathers are difficult to digest, as are bones and mollusk shells. So even if they are broken into smaller pieces when eaten and crushed by heavily muscled gizzards, even the smaller pieces can't pass through the hindgut very well. Rather than sharp-pointed bones coming up one by one, they are coated in hair or feathers and barfed, urped, hurled, vomited and/or regurgitated back into the environment.

It's not easy to find these pellets unless you know right where the bird has been roosting. After they are produced, they get covered up by detritus, even blown around, and eventually decay into pieces. But they hold together for a while, and ornithologists have long used them to get a handle on the diet of birds such as hawks and, especially, owls. Snowy Owl pellets look like fuzzy three-inch cigars. It's been said there is nothing like a good cigar, but I personally prefer owl pellets.

Paul Bannick, well-known bird photographer and author of The Owl and the Woodpecker, recently sent me three pellets he picked up from one spot at Ocean Shores. At the museum, we soaked them in water and stirred them up until the feathers floated and the bones sank. We recovered a surprising amount of bones, arranged them by type, and identified them by comparing with our skeleton collection.

I had a pretty good idea what birds were out there, and it wasn't difficult to identify the majority of the bones as sandpiper bones. The only confusion would have been between Sanderling and Dunlin, both common birds in Grays Harbor. Sanderlings were common right where the owls were roosting, so I favored them. Sure enough, there were several lower mandibles present, and they clearly belonged to Sanderlings.

In total, at least five Sanderlings were present in these pellets, as indicated by counts of tibiae and tarsometatarsi, long, slender bones that were well represented because birds of prey tend to swallow legs of smaller birds whole. In addition to all the sandpiper bones, there were quite a number of larger bones. Many of them were broken up, but a few were intact, and two coracoids and a femur allowed identification as a Horned Grebe. Probably all the bones, including many vertebrae, were from the same bird.

I also examined single pellets from Sandy Point, near Bellingham, furnished by Isa Werny and Andrea Warner. They were mostly feathers, but one of them contained a few Horned Grebe bones, the other a few Bufflehead bones. The second pellet was found at the foot of a utility pole along with parts of a dead Bufflehead, making the identification easier. Both of these species are known Snowy Owl prey.

Snowy Owls are well known to subsist largely on water birds in the winter on our coast, and there wasn't a trace of a mammal in these five pellets. By now you may have figured out that ornithophagous = bird eating.

Dennis Paulson

Source: Ted Ed

Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, but what helps them grow to the length of a football field? Asha de Vos explains why the size of krill make them the ideal food for the blue whale—it's as if the blue whale was made to eat krill (and krill was made to be eaten by the blue whale).

Source: Discover

Nymph of a Bow-winged Grasshopper (Chorthippus biguttulus) in Hamm, Germany.

Ah, spring, when the meadows come alive with the sweet trilling of grasshopper come-ons. The bow-winged grasshopper attracts females with a very specific song—so specific, in fact, that it is the only thing that distinguishes it from related species in the field. In quiet, Alpine grasslands, this system works like a charm. But as urban development encroaches on more of the grasshopper’s habitat, city noise is getting in the way of the grasshoppers getting it on.

Scientists have already determined that some species of birds, mammals, and frogs change their mating calls in response to urban noise. In a new study in Functional Ecology, scientists report that urban-dwelling grasshoppers, as well, have responded by changing parts of their tune to a higher frequency—one more easily differentiated from traffic.To attract a female bow-winged grasshopper, the male rubs a comb-like structure on his hind leg against a vein that protrudes from his front wing. A female, if sufficiently impressed, will call back and invite him over. If these precisely tuned messages get lost in the din of nearby traffic, female grasshoppers may not hear, recognize, or properly gauge a male’s mating call. This is bad news for the survival of the species.

It makes sense, then, that grasshoppers would adapt to the surrounding noise. But they seem to do it differently that other animals do, the researchers found. Urban animals in other studies changed the volume, pitch, or timing of their calls in order to be heard in noisy environments and reverted back to their normal calls in quieter conditions. But urban grasshoppers called at a higher pitch than their rural counterparts all the time, even in a quiet lab. This means that the change is not just behavioral. It suggests that they have actually evolved to call higher as a result of selection pressure from their aural environment.

This is the first time that the mating call of an animal species has shifted this way to deal with city noise, but it is unlikely to be the last, as scientists learn more about the ways in which animals adjust to life in an increasingly urban world.

Image courtesy of Quartl via Wikimedia Commons

Source: Hypervocal

It’s known as the Namaqua Rain Frog, or Breviceps namaquensis, and it has been scientifically proven to be the cutest li’l teensiest animal on the planet. A study actually shows that watching this video more than 10 times leads to diabetes due to the extremely high content of cuteness.

It’s found mainly in the sandy shores and dry tropical regions of South Africa, or keeping me company in my shirt pocket with its cute high-pitched cries.