Ecology & Zoology

Yikes! It's always interesting to have a reminder that the wild ocean remains wild, and taking a boat to sea is an entirely different matter from taking a car to the store: A Coast Guard statement…

Newfoundland and Labrador (which is a single Canadian state province, in case any of my readers are as clueless as I was am) claims to have the highest concentration of preserved dead giant squid…

Results from the first study of the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) in forests show that the invasive insect can easily spread from tree-lined city streets to neighboring forests. Successful ALB…

So, it's a bit tricky to figure out exactly what this means, but it could be big news for Humboldt squid in Chile--and therefore Humboldt squid everywhere, since the ocean doesn't exactly control…

A couple of dead giant squid have turned up--almost exactly on opposite sides of the globe! Surely this is some kind of portent? Architeuthis #1 was spotted off the coast of Tenerife, in the Canary…

How many organisms live on this little planet of ours? A pretty straight-forward question. The answer, however, is much more enigmatic. Estimates range from a careful 3 million to a huge 100 million…

Miriam over at Deep-Sea News recently posted a lovely write-up on the argonaut, or paper nautilus. This reminded me that I, too, once felt the delight of finding a live argonaut in a manta tow cod…

The paper announces, in charmingly thick academese: The titanic baleen whales (Cetacea, Mysticeti) have a bizarre skull morphology, including an elastic mandibular symphysis, which permits dynamic…

On one of my recent safari’s through the internet jungle, I came across a remarkable little creature. It’s a small (maximum diameter about 4.5 millimeters) bell-shaped jellyfish, with a number of…

What is five times the tensile strength of steel and  the best currently available synthetic fibers?  If you read the title you already know.   Spider thread is a fascinating and…