This Picture Looks Just Like Another Dead Fish Washed Up On Shore - Until You Realize That It’s Actually

The Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is a member of the “sleeper shark” family. It moves very slowly around the deep ocean.

They grow to enormous sizes – in some cases more than 5 metres (16 feet) long – and live in very cold waters in the far north Atlantic, sometimes at the surface but often as deep as 1,800 metres (1.1 miles). They cruise along at 0.74 metres per second, or about three-quarters of a mile an hour.

It was already known that they can live for more than 200 years, but new research has shown that is literally only half the story.

When the oldest shark researchers studied was born (the Greenland shark gives birth to live young, not eggs), the Pilgrims had only recently settled in Massachusetts. Europe’s Thirty-Year War was in its infancy. James I sat on the throne of England. It lived through the English Civil War, the Great Plague and Fire of London, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, both world wars, and the entire nine-season run of Seinfeld.

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SPERM WHALE EVOLVED TO RAMMING

Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick was inspired by historical instances in which large sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus L.) sank 19th century whaling ships by ramming them with their foreheads. The immense forehead of sperm whales is possibly the largest, and one of the strangest, anatomical structures in the animal kingdom. It contains two large oil-filled compartments, known as the “spermaceti organ” and “junk,” that constitute up to one-quarter of body mass and extend one-third of the total length of the whale 

Now an international team of researchers used structural engineering principles to test how the head of the sperm whale might be able to resist strong ramming impacts. Using computer simulations and working from published data on sperm-whale tissue and skeletal structure, scientists modeled impacts of varying types, and from a range of directions,what they found is the whale’s junk proved to play a vital role, with tissue partitions distributing much of the stress from ramming impacts and thereby preventing the skull from fracturing.

Although male sperm whales may not fight frequently, we know that aggressive ramming behaviour is a common characteristic in the group of mammals from which whales are derived – the even-toed ungulates, the artiodactyls. 

Illustration: Schematic representation of sperm whale head structure, courtesy of Ali Nabavizadeh. 

Reference: Panagiotopoulou et al. 2016. Architecture of the sperm whale forehead facilitates ramming combat Peerj

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BILL BILL BILL BILL

For the first time, a giant 20″ red leech was filmed slurping down a blue earthworm which was 27″ in length. The footage was captured by BBC filmmakers for the series ‘Wonders of the Monsoon.’

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Red-lined bubble snail (Bullina lineata)

The red-lined bubble snail, is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusc in the family Bullinidae. This snail has a milky-white mantle with iridescent blue edges. There are small black eyes on the head between the head shield processes. The shell has a white background with horizontally spiraling red brown bands which are crossed by vertical bands in the same color. The length is 15 to 25 mm. This species occurs in the sublittoral zone of the Indo-Pacific from Japan to Australia and New Zealand.

photo credits: seaslugsofhawaii, Sylke Rohrlach, Richard Ling

A video recording the exciting moment when a diver looking for Megalodon teeth, finds a massive, 6 ¼", fossil tooth off the coast of the Carolinas.

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Just some lesser known facts about octopuses you guys might like.

me, on a date: so what's your opinion on sharks?

them: oh my god they are such cold, heartless MONSTERS and-

me, shoving breadsticks in my purse: sorry but i have to go home, right now, immediately.