See some more great photos of the hike on Penang Island in Malaysia, from the Capturing Penang blog.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Fox – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – Backyard Wildlife: Turtle
See some more great photos of the hike on Penang Island in Malaysia, from the Capturing Penang blog.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Fox – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – Backyard Wildlife: Turtle
Snake gives ‘virgin birth’ to extraordinary babies
In all snakes, ZZ produces males and ZW produces females. Bizarrely, all the snakes in these litters were WW. This was further proof that the snakes inherited all their genetic material from their mother, as only females carry the W chromosome.
“Essentially they are half clones of their mother,” says Dr Booth. That is because the baby snakes have inherited two copies of one half of their mother’s chromosomes, including one W chromosome.
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More astonishing though, is that no vertebrate animal in which the females carry the odd sex chromosome (in this case the W chromosome) has ever been recorded naturally producing viable WW offspring via a virgin birth.
“For decades WW has been considered non-viable” says Dr Booth. In such species, all known examples of babies that are the product of parthenogenesis are male, carrying a ZZ chromosomal arrangement.
Related: No sex for all-girl fish species – Virgin Birth for Another Shark Species – Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago – World’s Smallest Snake Found in Barbados – Androgenesis
Ants really are amazing. The internet makes it easy to learn about these creatures. My Dad found them fascinating and I picked up that view. I had a flying one, flying around my house yesterday.
“Ants: The Invisible Majority” including Dr. Brian Fisher, chairman of the Department of Entomology at the Cal Academy of Sciences looking for ants in San Francisco. He created AntWeb, an online resource. The video discusses the Argentine Ant super colonies.
Related: Ants Counting Their Steps – E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria
The White House added a bee hive last year. An Excellent White House Bee Adventure
Related: Bee Colony Collapse Continues – Virus Found to be One Likely Factor in Bee Colony Collapse Disorder – President Obama Speaks on Getting Students Excited About Science and Engineering – Bye Bye Bees – The Great Sunflower Project
A three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod found 600 feet beneath the Ross Ice Shelf stars in a recent popular webcast (see below). NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice.
Stacy Kim of Moss Landing Marine Laboratory was the first biologist to see the video and immediately recognized it as a Lyssianasid amphipod. It was about 3 inches long and Stacy concluded that this meant there was quite an extensive biological community under the ice here – even 20 miles from open water.
Related: Iron-breathing Species Isolated in Antarctic for Millions of Years – Pine Island Glacier (PIG) Ice Shelf – The Brine Lake Beneath the Sea – Lake Under 2 Miles of Ice
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See more photographs of remains of albatross chicks on the Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, none of the plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the untouched stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
Related: Dead Zones in the Ocean – Vast Garbage Float in the Pacific Ocean – Sharpshinned Hawk – Biodegradable Plastic Bags and Bottles – 2,000 Species New to Science from One Island
The lyre bird, not only mimics the calls of other birds, buy also man made noises such as cameras, saws and chainsaws, in an attempt to impress potential mates. David Attenborough narrates the above clip.
Related: Friday Fun: Bird Using Bait to Fish – Leafhopper Feeding a Gecko – Backyard Wildlife: Raptor – Bdelloid Rotifers Abandoned Sex 100 Million Years Ago
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At Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet in Guadalupe Mountains National Park I found a huge city of ladybugs. They covered the bark of many bushes and trees and crawled over rocks (as seen in the photos). They were everywhere. It seems odd to me that they would have such a huge concentration since it would seem like food would then be a problem, but there they were.
Related: Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, Ohio Photos – Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – North Cascades National Park Photos – Mount Rainier National Park Photos
Photo shows Fritz the Cat – see photos Fritz took.
Scientific American has a long and interesting article on: The Evolution of House Cats
Cats are Cool 🙂
Related: Origins of the Domestic Cat – The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer – DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution – Genetic Research Suggests Cats ‘Domesticated Themselves’
The Great Sunflower Project provides a way for you to engage in the ongoing study of bees and colony collapse disorder. The study uses the annual Lemon Queen sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), that can be grown in a pot on a deck or patio or in a garden (and they will send you seeds).
How do bees make fruits and vegetables?
All flowers have pollen. Bees gather pollen to feed their babies which start as eggs and then grow into larvae. It’s the larvae that eat the pollen. Bees use the nectar for energy. When a bee goes to a flower in your garden to get nectar or pollen, they usually pick up pollen from the male part of the flower which is called an anther. When they travel to the next flower looking for food, they move some of that pollen to the female part of the next plant which is called a stigma. Most flowers need pollen to make seeds and fruits.
After landing on the female part, the stigma, the pollen grows down the stigma until it finds an unfertilized seed which is called an ovary. Inside the ovary, a cell from the pollen joins up with cells from the ovary and a seed is born! For many of our garden plants, the only way for them to start a new plant is by growing from a seed Fruits are just the parts of the plants that have the seeds. Some fruits are what we think of as fruits when we are in the grocery store like apples and oranges. Other fruits are vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers.
Related: Monarch Butterfly Migration – Solving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees – Volunteers busy as bees counting population – The Science of Gardening
Cool open access research from PLoS One, Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?
We compared sponge-carrying (sponger) females to non-sponge-carrying (non-sponger) females and show that spongers were more solitary, spent more time in deep water channel habitats, dived for longer durations, and devoted more time to foraging than non-spongers; and, even with these potential proximate costs, calving success of sponger females was not significantly different from non-spongers. We also show a clear female-bias in the ontogeny of sponging. With a solitary lifestyle, specialization, and high foraging demands, spongers used tools more than any non-human animal. We suggest that the ecological, social, and developmental mechanisms involved likely (1) help explain the high intrapopulation variation in female behaviour, (2) indicate tradeoffs (e.g., time allocation) between ecological and social factors and, (3) constrain the spread of this innovation to primarily vertical transmission.
The dolphins use the sponge to push along the ocean floor and disturb fish, that are hidden. Once the fish start swimming away the dolphin abandons the sponge and catches and eats the fish. Then the dolphin goes back and gets the sponge and continues.
Related: Do Dolphins Sleep? – Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales – Savanna Chimpanzees Hunt with Tools – Chimps Used Stone “Hammers” – open access papers