Llamaslikesciencetoo - This Is My Side Blog About Science

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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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

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.

Continue reading.

What’s Next for the World’s Most Trafficked Mammal?

Earlier this week, a U.S. agency announced that it will consider giving greater protection to pangolins.

What’s a pangolin, you might ask?

Pangolins are creatures found in Asia and Africa that have a pinecone-esque appearance. They’re about the size of house cats, are covered in scales, and have very long tongues for slurping up ants and termites.

These pest controllers are a hot commodity on the black market, poached for nearly all their body parts. Their meat is considered a delicacy in Asia. Their scales, made of keratin (the main ingredient in fingernails), are fashioned into jewelry or used as traditional medicine, even though they don’t have any curative value. Even their blood, a supposed aphrodisiac, is dried and used in potions.

Considered the most trafficked mammals in the world, tens of thousands of pangolins are believed to be poached annually—bad news for an animal whose females reproduce only once a year.

That’s why in July 2015, conservation groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list seven pangolin species under the Endangered Species Act, a law that seeks to conserve endangered or threatened species throughout their range (an eighth species, the Temnick’s ground pangolin, found in southern and eastern Africa, is already protected under the act).

And on March 15, the agency said the organizations made a good enough case that it’s now  willing to invite the public to weigh in on the proposal for 60 days.

No one knows exactly how many pangolins remain in the wild, but researchers are pretty sure the animals’ numbers are shrinking. Two of the four Asian species, the Sunda and the Chinese pangolins, are considered to face a high risk of extinction and the other two are “endangered,” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of wildlife. With the depletion of the Asian pangolins, smugglers have targeted their cousins in Africa, which are faring better but are nonetheless described as “vulnerable.”

U.S. Involvement

If the seven species gain protection under the U.S. law, it would be illegal for people to import the animals or their parts into the country—unless they’re being brought in to promote conservation. Same thing for sales across state lines. 

Keep Reading

“I’m on Lord Howe Island, a tiny speck of land 300 miles off the east coast of Australia. Humans beings only got here a little over 200 years ago, and it seems the birds that nest here are still quite curious to see what’s going on.“ (Life of Birds 1998)

This is it. This is my favourite Attenborough moment.

Sharks are fucking metal!

Video: Ocean Ramsey Swims With A Whale Shark

See The Amazing Video Here!!

by TINA HESMAN SAEY

SAN DIEGO — Cell biologists are taking clues from marching ants, flocking birds and other animals to learn how groups of cells move through the body.

Such studies are yielding insights about cell movement during development as well as the spread of cancer. Learning about cells’ social interactions may give researchers new ways to peer pressure cells into good behavior.

Cell biologists have traditionally studied individual cells or how groups of physically connected cells move. It’s only in the past few years that researchers have begun to regard cells as individuals with collective behavior. Taking cues from the linked movements of animals helps researchers “understand how cells, which everybody assumed had minds of their own, could possibly move as a group,” says Brian Stramer, a cell biologist at King’s College London.

Developmental biologist Roberto Mayor and colleagues have collected evidence that the migration of some important developmental cells is akin to the movement of swarming locusts. Mayor, of University College London, described the mass migration of neural crest cells December 13 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Neural crest cells are developmentally flexible cells in embryos that help form the bones and cartilage of the face, some nerves and brain cells, smooth muscle and other tissues. Some scientists have proposed that changes in early movements of these cells may lead to juvenile physical features in domesticated animals (SN: 8/23/14, p. 7).

Like locusts that cringe away from nipping neighbors, neural crest cells repel each other thanks to a process known as “contact inhibition of locomotion,” Mayor and colleagues found. Avoidance can increase the ability of cells to move in groups; cells that move astray and bump into a neighbor change course and move in the right direction again. A large crowd governed only by avoidance tactics, though, tends to break into smaller cliques, the researchers discovered in computer simulations. Cells are not just repelled by each other; they are also often attracted to other cells. That attraction causes cells to play follow-the-leader. On its own, attraction produces a group of cells that don’t get very far, computer simulations showed. A balance between avoidance and attraction produces the most efficient mass migrations, the simulations suggest.

(excerpt - click the link for the complete article)