Extinction threat for world's most miserable animal - the blobfish

No wonder he looks like the world's most miserable fish... this unattractive creature, the inedible blobfish, is in danger of being wiped out. 

Sea-ing is believing: The extremely ugly blobfish - picture from Caters News

These sad-looking creatures, which grow up to lengths of 12 inches, live at depths of 900m.

They spend most of their time gently floating around waiting for food to pass in front of them, which sounds like quite a nice life to us!

Because they live so far from the sea surface they're not often seen by humans.

However, increasing levels of deep-sea fishing in Australia and Tasmania for crab and lobster mean that the sulky sea-dwellers are being dragged up with other catches in increasing numbers.

These gelatinous masses may not be much to look at, but the world would be a less interesting place without them, probably, so let's hope the Australian's don't kill them off.

A sheep gave birth to a dead lamb with a human-like face. The calf was born in a village not far from the city of Izmir, Turkey.

Erhan Elibol, a vet, performed Cesarean section on the animal to take the calf out, but was horrified to see that the features of the calf’s snout bore a striking resemblance to a human face.

“I’ve seen mutations with cows and sheep before. I’ve seen a one-eyed calf, a two-headed calf, a five-legged calf. But when I saw this youngster I could not believe my eyes. His mother could not deliver him so I had to help the animal,” the 29-year-old veterinary said.

The lamb’s head had human features on – the eyes, the nose and the mouth – only the ears were those of a sheep.

Veterinaries said that the rare mutation most likely occurred as a result of improper nutrition since the fodder for the lamb’s mother was abundant with vitamin A, CNNTurk.com reports.

In Zimbabwe, a goat gave birth to a similar youngster in September 2009. The mutant baby born with a human-like head stayed alive for several hours until the frightened village residents killed him.

The governor of the province where the ugly goat was born said that the little goat was the fruit of unnatural relationship between the female goat and a man.

"This incident is very shocking. It is my first time to see such an evil thing. It is really embarrassing," he reportedly said. "The head belongs to a man while the body is that of a goat. This is evident that an adult human being was responsible. Evil powers caused this person to lose self control. We often hear cases of human beings who commit bestiality but this is the first time for such an act to produce a product with human features," he added.

The mutant creature was hairless. Local residents said that even dogs were afraid to approach the bizarre animal.

The locals burnt the body of the little goat, and biologists had no chance to study the rare mutation.

Ekaterina Bogdanova
Komsomolskaya Pravda

Snail with vanishing spots

The flamingo tongue snail Cyphoma gibbosum appears to have a shell decorated with bright spots (top of image). Amazingly though, the spots aren't actually part of the shell, but rather the animal's flesh! When the animal retracts into its stark white shell, so do the spots (bottom of image). The Cyphoma gibbosum is the star of the latest CreatureCast video from Dr. Casey Dunn's laboratory at Brown University. RISD animator Chris Vamos, who was also a student in Dr. Dunn's invertebrate zoology course, created the video. Watch it after the jump!

Octopus snatches coconut and runs

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News

Octopus snatches coconut and runs

An octopus and its coconut-carrying antics have surprised scientists.

Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.

One of the researchers, Dr Julian Finn from Australia's Museum Victoria, told BBC News: "I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time."

He added: "I could tell it was going to do something, but I didn't expect this - I didn't expect it would pick up the shell and run away with it."

Quick getaway

The veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) were filmed between 1999 and 2008 off the coasts of Northern Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia. The bizarre behaviour was spotted on four occasions.

The octopuses use the coconuts as a shelter

The eight-armed beasts used halved coconuts that had been discarded by humans and had eventually settled in the ocean.

Dr Mark Norman, head of science at Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and one of the authors of the paper, said: "It is amazing watching them excavate one of these shells. They probe their arms down to loosen the mud, then they rotate them out."

After turning the shells so the open side faces upwards, the octopuses blow jets of mud out of the bowl before extending their arms around the shell - or if they have two halves, stacking them first, one inside the other - before stiffening their legs and tip-toeing away.

Dr Norman said: "I think it is amazing that those arms of pure muscle get turned into rigid rods so that they can run along a bit like a high-speed spider.

"It comes down to amazing dexterity and co-ordination of eight arms and several hundred suckers."

Home, sweet home

The octopuses were filmed moving up to 20m with the shells.

And their awkward gait, which the scientists describe as "stilt-walking", is surprisingly speedy, possibly because the creatures are left vulnerable to attack from predators while they scuttle away with their prized coconuts.

The veined octopus is a meaty feast for predators

The octopuses eventually use the shells as a protective shelter. If they just have one half, they simply turn it over and hide underneath. But if they are lucky enough to have retrieved two halves, they assemble them back into the original closed coconut form and sneak inside.

The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.

Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.

"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."

The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed.

Surprisingly smart

Tool use was once thought to be an exclusively human skill, but this behaviour has now been observed in a growing list of primates, mammals and birds.

They do things which, normally, you'd only expect vertebrates to do Tom Tregenza, University of Exeter

The researchers say their study suggests that these coconut-grabbing octopuses should now be added to these ranks.

Professor Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Exeter, UK, and another author of the paper, said: "A tool is something an animal carries around and then uses on a particular occasion for a particular purpose.

"While the octopus carries the coconut around there is no use to it - no more use than an umbrella is to you when you have it folded up and you are carrying it about. The umbrella only becomes useful when you lift it above your head and open it up.

"And just in the same way, the coconut becomes useful to this octopus when it stops and turns it the other way up and climbs inside it."

He added that octopuses already have a reputation for being an intelligent invertebrate.

He explained: "They've been shown to be able to solve simple puzzles, there is the mimic octopus, which has a range of different species that it can mimic, and now there is this tool use.

"They do things which, normally, you'd only expect vertebrates to do."

A 29-year-man, wearing a full-body "stinger suit," was stung on the face by an Irukandji jellyfish while diving from a yacht off the coast of Australia. They can kill a person in minutes.

The jellyfish's sting can lead to "Irukandji syndrome," a set of symptoms that includes shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure... because the jellyfish leave almost no mark on their victims, scientists believe they are responsible for many deaths that were attributed as drownings or heart attacks...

Australian dives face-first into deadly peanut-sized jellyfish

Photo Irukandji-jellyfish-queensland-australia.jpg by GondwanaGirl from Wikimedia Commons released into public domain.

Who says size matters?

By Brandon Keim | 10 November 2009

Using tissue grown in a laboratory, researchers have engineered fully functional replacement penises. The organs were made for rabbits, but the technique may one day be useful for people.

"This technology has considerable potential for patients requiring penile construction," wrote researchers in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Leading the team was Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University's Institute of Regenerative Medicine. Atala is best known for developing a technique in which cells are taken from an organ and sprayed onto a frame made of collagen, the primary structural protein in animal tissue. The structure is then bathed with growth-stimulating compounds and kept in an oven that duplicates the body's temperature and chemical composition.

Given these starting conditions, natural biology does the rest. The cells divide and arrange themselves in natural, working configurations.

Atala's group has already implanted lab-grown bladders, grown from the patients' own tissue, in seven men. Bladders are just one of dozens of organs being engineered by the group, from every part of the body – but in some organs, it's been difficult to find the right starting mix of different cell types, and reconstruction has proved challenging. The penis is one such organ.

In earlier studies, the researchers grew segments of the penis's main structures, called corpus cavernosa. These lie along the shaft of the penis, and are made from a complex, sponge-like arrangement of different cell types. But when implanted in rabbits whose corpus cavernosa had been removed, the tissue failed to become erect.

This time, they used a different mix of growth factors, and grew entire corpus cavernosa, rather than pieces of them. It worked: The next penises responded normally to electrical and chemical stimuli, and – more importantly – to biological imperative. When given the chance to have sex, eight were able to ejaculate, and four became fathers.

Oddly, the procedure seemed to make the rabbits hornier than usual.

"Most control rabbits did not attempt copulation after introduction to their female partners," wrote the researchers. "All rabbits with bioengineered neocorpora attempted copulation within one minute of introduction."

Figure 3. Copulation duration in Cynopterus sphinx according to whether the female licks the male's penis (Licking) or not (No licking). Means and standard errors are shown. Vignette shows a female performing fellatio, drawn by Mei Wang. (I assure you, I am not making any of this up.)

So, why do you think blow jobs happen?

This is not a trick question.

Most of us would probably go for the, "Hey, that feels nice," theory of oral sex. But researchers Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, et. al., think there may be more to it than simple pleasure. As part of their attempt to prove a practical function for oral sex, the team conducted a study of the fellatio habits of fruit bats. The paper was published October 28 in the journal PLoS ONE. You can read the whole thing online.

The basic idea here is that there might be some benefit to blow jobs (beyond the obvious) and the fact that bats who engage in fellatio have longer sessions of sex than bats who don't could be evidence in favor of that theory. Why? Because it's showing that oral sex is correlated with a change in behavior and, the scientists theorize, there may be reasons why that behavioral change is beneficial to the animals. How beneficial? The team theorizes that oral sex could be doing everything from increasing the chances of sperm fertilizing egg, to killing bacteria on the penis and protecting both parties from sexually transmitted disease. Of course, the only thing proven is that oral sex means longer sex in fruit bats. The team concedes a need for further research...

In conclusion, we have documented fellatio in animals that may have functional significance. Of course, adaptive benefits remain unproven until tested, ideally by experimentation, but our study identifies potential avenues to explore if the null hypothesis of no benefit is to be rejected. We believe that ours is the first large scale observational study of oral sex in non-humans, and we extend the interpretation of such behaviour beyond that of 'pleasure giving' into an evolutionary context.

I'm not sure I buy that a behavior that results in a, erm, pleasurable response, really needs any other reason for existing. Although, it is worth noting that this appears to be the first time that fellatio has been documented as a regular part of adult sex outside of humans. Also, the paper contains some truly EXCELLENT quotes that need to be shared. To wit...

During copulation, the pair appeared to move forwards and backwards uninterruptedly and rhythmically.

When copulation was completed, the male licked his penis for several seconds. This self-licking occurred after all of 20 copulations, but was absent after three instances in which intromission failed to occur. Subsequently, the male often groomed himself or licked the inner surface of the tent, yet seldom flew away. Also, the female groomed herself and typically stayed close to her mate.

It is plausible that this female's behavior increased male arousal [22].

There's also a video. Enjoy.

Thanks to Chris Combs at National Geographic Newsfor alerting me to this study.