Ecology & Zoology

Plants also live in society

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Blog Post - Ashwani Kumar - Oct 17 2010 - 10:51pm

Squid Make Excellent TV Personalities

I guess there is a new anime called Squid Girl? I guess Squid Girl's goal is to "subdue the human race and prevent them from polluting the ocean"? I can't decide whether or not this sounds like something I would make up, and if it does, ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Oct 18 2010 - 10:38am

Kipling And Leopard Spots: "Just-So" Story Or Good Biology?

Leopards have but tigers have stripes.  Why the difference?   British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, author of "The Jungle Book" and other stories, suggested the difference was because the leopard moved to an environment "full of trees and ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2010 - 12:51pm

Squid Symbionts a "Spritely Bunch"

Jessica Hilo writes in Miller-McCune, during an extensive analogy between bacteria and Mafia: Off land, the Vibrio family is a spritely bunch. They are one of few bacteria that can communicate through quorum sensing — a family summit, if you will. Through ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Oct 20 2010 - 10:04pm

And While We're On The Subject Of Kraken...

The Museum of UnNatural History has a page about the Kraken, of course,  a pleasant romp  through the history of the mythological creature, but unfortunately it does its part to perpetrate a common misunderstanding about the giant squid: that this poor ani ...

Article - Danna Staaf - Oct 24 2010 - 7:02pm

The Never-Ending Story Of New Creatures

Papua New Guinea is a treasure trove of new species- 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects, just from expeditions to PNG's Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges. I really liked the tube-nosed fruit bat (Genus Nyctimene) ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Sep 13 2011 - 9:25am

Daily Mail Squid Hype Totally Legit

For once! Check it out: the colossal squid gets pride of place as the first entry in the Daily Mail's "Monster mutant animals" photo gallery. This species is believed to be the largest in the squid family in terms of mass and its limbs are e ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Oct 26 2010 - 12:16am

Good-bye Paul

And thus passes one of the more charismatic cephalopods of our times... The mollusc, named Paul, 'predicted' the outcome of all Germany's matches in South Africa, and Spain's win in the final, by picking a mussel out of a box displaying ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Oct 27 2010 - 9:13pm

Do Sperm Whales Use Sonar To Stun Giant Squid?

In 1983, two scientists, one from California and one from Denmark, co-authored a research paper titled "Can odontocetes debilitate prey with sound?" Odontocete is a fancy term for toothed whales (the group that includes sperm whales, orcas, and ...

Article - Danna Staaf - Oct 29 2010 - 3:37pm

Did Dolphins Develop Sonar Just to Catch Squid?

So I've been reading a bunch about whales and dolphins eating squid. Tomorrow there will be an exciting post about whether sperm whales really do stun giant squid with sonic blasts, but for now, here is a tantalizing thought about the evolution of ech ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Oct 28 2010 - 11:57pm