Bacteria Use Their Own Pumps To Collect Magnesium

The Mud Dragons of Calvert Island, BC

Shedding light on these mysterious marine creatures.

by Josh Silberg

Spiky headed dragons roam the ocean floor from the poles to the tropics. But these are not winged beasts from the pages of science fiction. These strange creatures are Kinorynchs, aka “mud dragons“, and they are very real.

Roughly the size of a grain of salt, mud dragons are often overlooked, but a team from the Hakai Institute and the University of British Columbia (UBC) hopes to give them the spotlight they deserve.

“Canada has very few reports on these animals. The first step is to know what is there,” says Dr. Maria Herranz, a Hakai post-doctoral scholar and resident mud dragon expert at UBC…

(read more and see video: Hakai)

images by Marria Harranz

Video: Ocean Ramsey Swims With A Whale Shark

See The Amazing Video Here!!

First U.S. Climate Refugees Forced to Leave Their Vanishing Island Home

Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana is vanishing into the sea and its residents must relocate. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $48 million to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe who lives on this sinking island 80 miles southwest of New Orleans so that they may reestablish community further north. 

Their home — or what was once a 22,000-acre island — has been reduced to a 320-acre strip where only 25 houses remain. 

This makes members of the Louisiana tribe the first official climate refugees in the United States as rising sea levels have swallowed 98% of their land. 

Find out more in this Huffington Post piece. 

(Map via Google Maps. Sinking house photo by Karen Apricot via Flickr.) 

Photograph of a pregnant uterus (womb) from a New Forest pony, approximately five months into the pregnancy. The developing pony (fetus) is outside the uterus but remains attached by its membranes and umbilical cord. The bent back legs of the fetus are sticking out from the membranes (top right-hand side). The uterus has been cut open to reveal its vast blood supply, which is visible on the inner surface. This historical specimen is from a cull animal that happened to be pregnant at the time. It is preserved in formalin in a Perspex container and was photographed in the Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College in London. (Credit: Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College / Wellcome Images)

Ancient ‘otter bear’ may have popped clams off rocks like a bottle opener

By Sid Perkins

A creature that roamed the coasts of the Pacific Northwest about 20 million years ago may have had a feeding style like no other mammal, a new study suggests.

Kolponomos is known only from two bearlike skulls, jawbones, and some toe bones found a few decades ago, so scientists aren’t sure where it fits on the carnivore family tree or even what it really looked like (one artist’s idea is seen above).

Rather than having cheek teeth that could shear meat, as many carnivores do, Kolponomos’s molars were similar to the flattened, low-crowned teeth that otters use to crush their shelled prey—yet the creature lived long before anything similar to modern-day otters evolved.

Now, a new analysis using the same sort of computer software that engineers employ to analyze bridges and aircraft parts suggests that Kolponomos may have collected its shelly prey in a unique way…

(read more: Science Magazine/AAAS)

illustration by Roman Uchytel

Meet the orchid mantis.

Orchid mantises—particularly juveniles—seem aptly named. They’re predominantly white with pink or yellow accents, similar to some orchids and other flowers, and their four hind legs are lobed, like petals. But if you search for an exact floral counterpart, as behavioral ecologist James O’Hanlon did, you probably won’t find one. “I spent forever looking for a flower that they look just like,” he says, to no avail.

As it turns out, rather than mimicking one floral species, the insect instead may embody a “generic or an average type of flower” in order to attract bees and other pollinating insects as prey.

What’s more, as far as O’Hanlon can tell, it’s the only animal on record that “takes on the guise of a whole flower blossom” as a predatory strategy. 

Learn more here.

The name “hippopotamus” comes from a Greek word meaning “water horse” or “river horse.” But hippos are not related to horses at all—in fact, their closest living relatives may be pigs or whales and dolphins! (photo: Peter Csanadi)

Baby parrots look like dinosaurs (Source: http://ift.tt/21GVxRO)

How do you feel about Velvet Worms?

i LOVE velvet worms alright they look like someone had a bunch of caterpillars and snakes lying around, just overflowing all over the place and thought HOW am i gonna make these take up less space wait lets just Smash Em Together

so velvet worms ! not actually worms at all, but their own separate phylum related to tardigrades, and they tend to stay pretty small, with the longest ones getting maybe 8 inches or so

the Official name for em is onychophora, which means “claw bearer” and makes a lot more sense when you find out that at the end of all those little stubs ( called lobopods ! ) is a pair of tiny retractable claws

theyre ALSO notable for birthing live young, breathing through their skin, AND for spraying long thin streams of mucus from almost a foot away at anything that bothers them through slime glands located under their skin

the mucus isnt just for defense though ! velvet worms are actually predatory animals, and the the slime is used a lot in hunting - when sprayed, it crosses over the unfortunate bug like a sticky net, quickly hardening into tiny death traps that the velvet worm can then consume at its own leisure 

while generally solitary, they also sometimes form little social communities with other velvet worms, with groups inhabiting rotting logs, doing things like hunting together and defending their nest from outsider worms

they dont seem super intimidating mainly because we’re not a half an inch tall

but to a cricket, this is the face of Terror

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