For the past 50 years, Jim Phillips has been collecting shed antlers, having a total of around 14,500. In cold climates, antlers shed yearly. He displays them in a 30 x 64 foot building which he constructed specifically for this purpose.
…a species of “Rice Coral” (Montipora spp.) which is native to the Indo-Pacific region. Its range extends from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, through the Indian Ocean to Japan, the East China Sea, Australia and the west and central Pacific.M. aequituberculata
is typically seen on the upper parts of reef slopes, where it is often one of the predominant species. Like many other coral species,
M. aequituberculata
possesses zooxanthellae from which it obtains most of its nutritional needs.
Although it is listed as least concern M. aequituberculata (like many other coral species) faces threats due to habitat destruction and rising sea temperatures which can cause coral bleaching.
Scientists have released the first audio recordings taken from the deepest point on Earth’s surface, Challenger Deep, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Filled with strange moans, low rumbles, and the occasional high-pitched screech, the soundbites below shed rare light on the dark world that lies 10.9 km (6.7 miles) below the crushing weight of the Pacific Ocean… and they’re somehow both haunting and beautiful at the same time.
On the whole, we know very little about what goes on inside the Mariana Trench, located at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean around 322 km (200 miles) southwest of Guam, mostly because it’s so difficult for us to get to.
when we finally manage to wipe out 90% of life on the surface of our earth, it’s reassuring to remember that the great dark gods of the Trench will rise and repopulate with their minions
What a time to be alive though. We live at the convergence of all these technologies such that we can both drop a microphone down to the deepest point on earth and just casually share those sounds on a free to post free to share audio hosting site online and instantly have it heard by random bored people all over the world who have no real understanding of any of the more technical aspects of what it is they are listening too, but can still appreciated it, say “woah” and share it with all their friends, and then make some 100 year old literary reference to go with it.
Ok nerds I know I should finish my Charizard drawing but I’m procrastinating so sit down and grab a drink, I’m here today to preach about our lord and savior,
it’s just a bunch of dead rocks…? Rude. Ok Stromatolite literally means layered rocks but it’s actually a solid structure built by a colony of living cyanobacteria (blue-green algae).
Um so what. Here’s the fun part, our little friends there basically stick together their entire life, drenched in their own microscopic equivalent of sweat and shit, because they’re best buds like that. All this sticky excretion also traps sediment from their surrounding. It’s like stationary Katamari Damacy. Except bit shitty.
Ew. Gross. Didn’t your parents teach you to behave around the elderly? Some of these guys have been around for 2000-3000 years, andtThe cyanobacteria that build these pretty structures are known to be similar to lifeforms found 3.5 billion years ago. So they’re effectively a simulation of Precambrian life. Sorta.
Um. Cool. What are they good for? Remember when I said they basically live in their sweat and shit and fossilize it all together? Like tree rings, their layers tell us about the environment of a certain era. Just like when your bestie dug through your browsing history to see what you’d been watching all week and which restaurants you ordered your food from.
Except they last thousands of years. So in 100 years, when your hopes and dreams are long dead and forgotten, they will still be chillin, keeping a record of time like the true nerds they are.
Whatever I’m done here you nerd. Hey. I’m not done. Did I tell you that they photosynthesize? If you don’t think green little thingies literally devouring sunlight to stay alive while farting out oxygen for you ungrateful metazoan to stay alive and scroll this website is the raddest thing on Earth, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Who are you? Get out of my way, there’s some nerd telling me some bullsh-
But check it out. Stromatolites are made of cyanobacteria, the organisms responsible for the rad-ly named Great Oxygenation Event. Early Earth had virtually no oxygen in its atmosphere, and any that was produced immediately reacted with iron dissolved in the ocean to create iron oxides that were deposited in sediment. As cyanobacteria produced oxygen, cyclical variations in the amount of oxygen available produced striped rocks called Banded Iron Formations, which alternate between iron oxide rich layers and iron poor layers.
Oh my god, where are you people coming from? Why do you even care about ancient dead things?
Cyanobacteria did all this for a good couple million years, happily churning out oxygen on an otherwise anoxic Earth…
…until they ran out of iron.
Suddenly, oxygen levels skyrocketed. All of life on Earth, including cyanobacteria themselves (and all other photosynthetic organisms, for that matter), had evolved to operate in anoxic environments. Cyanobacteria (which, don’t get me wrong, include a great many other species besides the stromatolite-making ones) were therefore responsible for Earth’s first mass extinction.
…So if they evolved in low-oxygen environments, why are these ancient murder blobs still around?
Glad to see you’re coming around on them.
No, I’m not. Nevermind, forget I ask-
Different groups of photosynthetic organisms have different coping mechanisms for photorespiration, the thing that makes photosynthesis in the presence of oxygen less efficient, but they are all much stupidier than, say, a system that uses something besides RuBisCo. We can therefore take it as (yet another) piece of evidence that photosynthesis originally evolved in anoxia. Picture cyanobacteria going, “Shit, shit, shit, how do we fix this??? :(”
Are you done yet? Even if you’re not, I’m leaving now. Again.
WAIT WAIT WAIT, I HAVEN’T EVEN TOLD YOU ABOUT HOW THE EXTINCTION OF 80% OF STROMATOLITES IS CORRELATED WITH THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION BECAUSE MULTICELLULAR GRAZERS EVOLVED, OR HOW THEY TENDED TO BE MORE COMMON DURING EXTINCTION EVENTS BECAUSE THE STUFF THAT ATE THEM WAS DYING OUT, OR HOW TODAY THEY’RE ONLY FOUND IN HYPERSALINE ENVIRONMENTS BECAUSE THEY WON’T GET EATEN THERE
Just when you thought octopuses couldn’t get any more fascinating, they do!
A paper published on January 28th, 2016 in the journal Current Biology found that there is more to octopuses changing colors than camouflage or anti-predator behavior. Using close to 53 hours of recorded video and 186 interactions in a heavily octopus-populated area off in the waters of Australia, the scientists found that some displays of colors are signals that actually mediate combative interactions with one another.
(Octopus in foreground turn pales when retreating from confrontation with another octopus, seen standing tall and menacing in the background. Photo by David Scheel)
This is the first study to document the use of signals during aggressive interactions among octopuses.
David Scheel recalls for NPR the first time he observed this behavior: “I took a look fairly early on at one sequence in which one octopus approaches another in a fairly menacing way. He gets all dark, stands up very tall, and the other octopus crouches down and turns very pale. And then, when the approaching octopus persists, the other one flees. And this is immediately followed by the first octopus approaching a third octopus that’s nearby. And the third octopus turns dark and doesn’t crouch down. He just stays where he is, holds his ground.”
Excerpts from the paper:
Interactions in which dark body color by an approaching octopus was matched by similar color in
the reacting octopus were more likely to escalate to
grappling.
Darkness in an approaching octopus
met by paler color in the reacting octopus accompanied retreat of the paler octopus. Octopuses also dis-
played on high ground and stood with spread web
and elevated mantle, often producing these behaviors in combinations.
(Source: Scheel et al. 2016)
“[An aggressive] octopus will turn very dark, stand in a way that accentuates its size and it will often seek to stand on a higher spot,” explained Professor Godfrey-Smith to the BBC.
The scientists in this research actually dubbed the pose “Nosferatu” because the spread of the octopus’s web was reminiscent of a vampire’s cape, and they looked like Dracula was approaching his prey.
In the end, the color displays ultimately are correlated with the outcome of the interaction.
(Source: Scheel et al. 2016)
Scientists don’t exactly know why octopuses engaged in such heated and feisty exchanges. “It could be an attempt by one or more animals to control territory, as we saw males excluding males but not females, but this isn’t always the case,” Professor Godfrey-Smith said.
It had been previously thought that octopuses were mostly solitary creatures, and changes to body color and shape were viewed as tactics to avoid predators or to hide. This study however not only shows a very interesting range of behavior, but also may indicate complex social signaling.
Octopuses actually have a pretty exciting and dramatic social life after all.
The video above shows a dark-colored octopus, standing in the Nosferatu pose before attacking another dark-colored octopus, which eventually turns white and retreats.
