Category: marine and aquatic life

Spot the Tulip Tree Beauty and marvel at a stunning jellyfish from #Okeanos

April 24, 2016 • 3:06 pm

by Matthew Cobb

First, a traditional ‘spot the’ quiz:

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

In the past we’ve highlighted the live feed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Okeanos Explorer mission in the Pacific. This involves remote operated vehicles (ROV), complete with hi-res video equipment mooching around on the ocean bottom. On board the ship are a geologist and a marine biologist, and in a conference call are assorted land-based scientists from around the world (mainly the USA) who help to ID stuff.

The result is an amazing, informative and captivating voyage on an unknown planet – most dives produce something astounding. You can find the full back catalogue here. Right now they are preparing for another dive, which you can watch here. [Update – there’s no dive today because of repairs. Tune in again tomorrow!]

The current mission is to the Marianas Trench, and the dives take place a bit too late for poor little me – the ROV generally touches bottom (the other night it was 5000 metres down!) shortly before midnight *UK time* (it’s much more palatable for those in the US, Australasia or Japan), by which time I am beginning to doze off. So I wake up to stunning images in my Tw*tter feed, using the #Okeanos hashtag. This morning was amazing, as they came across this fantastic jellyfish at 3740 m down.

Do yourself a favour – press play and turn it onto full screen. The vid only lasts 2:30 mins, but you will be seriously amazed. Listen to the enthusiasm in the voices of the scientists (the first voice you can hear is @DivaAmon I think), and also the ROV pilot and navigator.

To paraphrase Miranda: O Brave new world, that has such wonders in ‘t!

Here’s a picture of where it’s all happening on the ship (pilot and navigator in front row, scientists behind):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgwuDAFUoAAzofJ.jpg

And here’s a picture of the ship and the team:

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/ex1605/logs/apr20/media/eductour1-home.jpg

 

Explore an alien world – now!

February 28, 2016 • 1:56 pm

by Matthew Cobb

If you click here you will be taken to the live feed of the NOAA Ocean Explorer Okeanos exploration of the deep sea off Hawaii. This is conducted by a remote-operated vehicle, with a video camera and lights, with the operators on the ship way above. There are geologists and marine biologists on line to discuss the things they can see. This is really like being on Mars, except there are animals! Right now they are 1.4 km down – they just came across a 1 metre-long eel!

Yesterday they were 4.3 km down and came across this unknown octopus that got everyone very excited!  Really, click and watch – this is fantastically exciting stuff.

 

A day at the Aquarium, part 2

December 30, 2015 • 12:15 pm

by Greg Mayer

Having emphazised the cartilaginous inhabitants of the  Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium yesterday, let’s go to a distant part of the phylogenetic tree today: manatees. There are three species of manatees (Trichechus), all in the tropical Atlantic or Atlantic drainages; this is either the West Indian (T. manatus) or West African (T. senegalensis) species.

A manatee
A manatee

The manatees were feeding on aquatic plants. Note that this one is using it’s right forelimb to manipulate the food.

A manatee feeding, using its right 'hand'.
A manatee feeding, using its right ‘hand’.

Their skin texture was interesting; I’m not sure what the white structures all over the skin are (hair?).

Closeup of a manatee's head while feeding
Closeup of a manatee’s head while feeding

And, in this very interesting view, we see a manatee supporting itself off the bottom with its right forelimb. We can clearly see its ‘fingernails’. (They are true nails– but it sort of doesn’t have fingers.)

Manatee supporting itself on its right forelimb. Note the nails and the flexure in the limb.
Manatee supporting itself on its right forelimb. Note the nails and the flexure in the limb.

In the picture above, we can also see the limb is flexed. The most distal curve, nearest the nails, is the joint between the phalanges and metacarpals; this is an extension. A bit above this, there is a slight flexion of the wrist joint. The elbow joint is considerably higher, near the body, with a slight flexion. This shows that, though paddle shaped, the limb is not stiff, but retains considerable mobility distal to the shoulder joint, allowing the manatee to use the limb in balancing and propulsion on the bottom, and, as seen three pictures above, as an aid in feeding. The diagram below shows the manatee’s limb skeleton, which shows the familiar “one bone, two bones, many bones” pattern of tetrapods and their immediate lobed fin ancestors.

Forelimb skeleton of the West Indian manatee, from
Forelimb skeleton of the West Indian manatee, Fig. 379 from Henry Alleyne Nicholson, 1880, A Manual of Zoology, Blackwood (http://chestofbooks.com/animals/Manual-Of-Zoology/index.html).

I’ve been fascinated by manatees and their relatives (the mammalian order Sirenia) ever since reading years ago about Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), a giant sirenian of the cold North Pacific, which was discovered by scientists in 1741 and extinct by 1768. (There have been some intriguing late sight records, but none have panned out). Then, in graduate school at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, I walked underneath the following Steller’s sea cow skeleton almost every day (it hung in a different hall back then; it’s now in the main mammal hall). Note that this specimen lacks the distal parts of its forelimbs.

Steller's seacow at the MCZ, by
Steller’s seacow at the MCZ, by mhmcfee (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tankgrrl/4665058027/in/album-72157624069183829/).

The evolution of sirenians from terrestrial ancestors is fairly well documented in the fossil record, much of the work being done by Daryl Domning of Howard University. The story is not as widely known as that of whales, and I don’t know of any single sirenian evolution website, but you could start learning the story here and here.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

July 22, 2015 • 3:28 pm

by Grania

No Republicans or ultra-Conservative Christian groups are going to be worried terribly much about this case though. However it seems that at least one other mammalian species is “redefining traditional relationships”.

There’s an interesting article by Colin Barras  in New Scientist on mixed-species dolphin groups in the Bahamas. Although interaction between dolphin species is not unknown (Jerry’s written about this before), apparently this level of interaction is “unprecedented“.

Atlantic bottlenose (Tursiops truncatus) and spotted (Stenella frontalis) dolphins play, forage, babysit, fight common foes and even engage in cross-species sex.

The research is being done at the Wild Dolphin Project and you can read or download the  publication by Denise Herzing and Cindy Elliser on the subject here.

It’s not always harmony and cooperation though. Barras notes:

Bottlenose males are about twice as long as spotted males and sometimes exploit this to force their way into groups of spotted dolphins and mate with females. Elliser and Herzing found that male spotted dolphins can fend them off, but only by cooperating in very large groups (Marine Mammal Science, doi.org/583).

Image: David Fleetham/Naturepl.com

First you were all like “whoa”, and we were like “whoa”, and you were like “whoa…”

July 4, 2015 • 11:00 am

by Grania

Here’s a  cool video of a sea turtle with a GoPro mounted on its shell swimming on the Great Barrier reef. It’s part of a new conservation project on The Great Barrier Reef by WWF Australia.

The video description says:

To find out more about the level of pollution affecting turtles within the Great Barrier Reef, WWF is working on innovative project in Queensland with the support of our partners Banrock Station Wines Environmental Trust, James Cook University, The University of Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, State and Commonwealth government agencies, Indigenous rangers and local community groups.

As part of that project, the opportunity arose to very carefully fit a small GoPro camera to a turtle, to better understand the post-release behaviour of tagged green turtles. The result is this amazing video.

It’s very relaxing and beautiful to watch. Or you can pretend you are Nemo’s dad.

A bizarre deep-sea siphonophore

April 17, 2015 • 10:00 am

I originally made a typo in the title, calling this a “deep-see” creature, but in fact that’s what it is! The video and info comes from IFL Science!, and shows a bizarre deep-sea species of siphonophore.

Siphonophores are in fact one form of what we normally called “jellyfish,” a group that actually comprises diverse creatures in the phylum Cnidaria.  This form falls into the class Hydrozoa along with hydroids and colonial “jellyfish” like the Portuguese “Man O’ War” (Physalia physalis). Like the Man O’ War, this beast, spotted by a remote vehicle operating in the depths, is not really what we usually consider a “jellyfish,” as it’s colonial: the “individual” is really a colony of diverse and specialized individual cells (“zooids“) that have become integrated into a miniature cooperating society. Creatures like this stretch the notion of what biologists consider an “individual.”

At any rate, this siphonophore (if that’s what it is; I doubt they captured it), is certainly a species new to science. And, as I always say, the deep sea is so remote, and individuals so sparsely distributed, that there are certainly tons of bizarre species down there that we don’t know a thing about.

Look at this thing!:

And the facts from IFLS!:

Recently, a team from the Nautilus Live expedition piloting a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) happened upon one of the most fascinating-looking lifeforms in the world: a rare, purple siphonophore roving through the ocean’s depths. Even the experienced deep sea explorers, well-acquainted with the marine animals, had a hard time accepting that what they were seeing was really real.

Amazingly, although this appears to be a single jellyfish-like animal, it is in fact a roving colony made up of thousands of individual organisms, called zooids, each contributing to the whole. However, more than just its otherworldly shape, this specimen’s purple coloring is said to be rather unusual as well.

Deep Sea News writer R.R. Helm calls it a “shocking shade”, remarking that this footage truly stands out.

h/t: Ant

Report that monster prehistoric shark, once thought extinct, has been caught alive

September 24, 2014 • 10:46 am

NOTE: THE REPORT OF A CAPTURED MEGALODON IS A HOAX (see the reader’s comment #7, which reveals the site as a fake one.  That’s what I get for not checking further. I’d ditch the post, but I’ll leave it up because you can still read about Megalodon, a truly awesome creature.  My apologies.

__________________

I don’t think this is real at all, but on the chance it might be, and the recurrent reports that the ancient shark Megalodon (taxonomic status uncertain) is still alive, here’s a report from the World News Daily, with pictures, saying that one was caught off the coast of Pakistan. The report says that it was 15 tons of beast, by far the largest shark ever caught, and twice the size of a big Great White shark. The report:

The giant creature first thought to be a great white shark was rapidly declared by experts to be an unknown species of shark as it’s great weight and size were unheard of. Analysis of the teeth suggest the shark to be a parent of the Megalodon, an extinct species of shark that lived approximately 28 to 1.5 million years ago, during the Cenozoic Era.

The sea creature that measures an incredible 10.4 meters and weighs an astounding 15.6 tons is the largest living shark ever caught to date, great white sharks reaching an impressive 7 tons at full growth, a size that is no match for this giant prehistoric shark that can reach an imposing 20 meters in length and possibly weight up to 30 tons, depending on estimates.

The specimen was revealed not to be fully grown and is estimated to be 2 or 3 years old and already twice the size of a full grown white shark, which takes 5 years to reach its full growth.

The photos in the article, with their captions:

shark-prehistotric-460x252

shark-pakistan
More than 20 local fishermen were needed to hull the giant beast onto the shore before authorities later brought heavy machinery in.

Here’s a tooth, but it’s not even clear from the article whether this was taken from the shark’s jaw or is fossilized. The caption (and appearance) suggest the former, and if it’s real this is certainly not a shark we know:

shark-tooth
The giant sea creature had a total of 276 teeth in its jaws, spanning 5 rows with it’s biggest tooth measuring an incredible 15 cm.

Megalodon was thought to have gone extinct around 1.5 million years ago, so it is possible that a few are still lurking in the depths. After all, the coelocanth was captured alive in 1938 after we thought it had been extinct for over sixty million years. It would be nice to think it’s still there.

Megalodon was huge and fearsome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about its size

In the 1990s, marine biologists such as Patrick J. Schembri and Staphon Papson opined that C. megalodon may have approached a maximum of around 24 to 25 metres (79 to 82 ft) in total length, however Gottfried and colleagues proposed that C. megalodon could likely approach a maximum of only 20.3 metres (67 ft) in total length. Currently, most experts acknowledge that C.megalodon reached a total length of more than 16 metres (52 ft).

And a comparison to other creatures. Megalodon (with one of its disputed names) is gray and red, the great white, puny by comparison, is green, and the whale shark, a filter-feeding, non-dangerous shark that is the largest living nonmammalian creature, is in violet.

842px-Megalodon_scale.svg

 

Fossil Megalodon are know mainly from their teeth and vertebrae; reconstructions, such as the jaw below, are extrapolations from these. But the teeth (below, with two teeth from Great White sharks) are undeniably indicative of a monster shark. I believe the scale is in centimeters, so the tooth is about 13.5 cm long, or about 5 inches long, matching the tooth above.

1280px-Megalodon_tooth_with_great_white_sharks_teeth-3-2

This is a famous (and of course speculative) reconstruction of a Megalodon jaw, produced by zoologist Bashford Dean in 1909:

Carcharodon_megalodon

 

So do you think this report is true? Did they catch a living fossil? I’m betting no, but weigh in below.

h/t: Stephen Barnard