The Chilean seabass is no stranger to being mislabelled. It bears little relation to the various fish that are also known as basses, and it’s more properly referred to as the Patagonian toothfish (a name that is presumably more difficult to market). But the confusion doesn’t end there. While the toothfish is the target for illegal and unsustainable fishing operations, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has certified one fishery as being sustainable. It’s found around the island of South Georgia near the tip of South America.
But some products marked as certified toothfish don’t come from this fishery. Some aren’t even toothfish at all.
I’ve just come back from a week in Peru, doing some reporting for a piece I’m writing for Wired UK. I’ll have more on that closer to the point of publication. For the moment, here are some photos of the Peruvian Amazon and nearby mountains, taken from the air.
A stressful early life can have long-lasting consequences, not just for you but for your partner. Pat Monaghan from the University of Glasgow found that zebra finches are more sensitive to stress as adults if they had unusually high levels of stress hormones as chicks. To no one’s surprise, they also died at a younger age. But it came as more of a shock that these tightly wound finches passed the consequences of their early hardships to their partners. They too died earlier even if their early days had been stress-free.
A wide variety of animals react to stressful conditions by become physiologically more jumpy. Their bodies flood with stress hormones at slight provocations, and they take longer to return to normal. In the short term, these changes help animals to survive through difficult times. But they can also be harmful in the long term. Not only can they shorten an individual’s life, but they can turn it into an undesirable partner.
Many studies have found that individuals across many different species are less likely to secure mates when they grow up if they have stressful upbringings. This might be because they are less physically attractive but, based on his study, Monaghan thinks that it could also be that such individuals pose a health hazard to their mates.
The blue whale – the largest living animal on the planet – can eat half a million calories in a single titanic gulp. It accelerates to high speeds and lunges into a swarm of tiny krill. It opens the world’s biggest mouth, which expands like a balloon to swallow up to 110 tonnes of water. The mouth closes, and the tongue pushes the water against bristly plates called baleen, which filter out the krill.
The blue whale’s skull is specially adapted to allow it to engulf large volumes of water. If you push against your chin, nothing happens because the two halves of your lower jaw are firmly fused together at the front. That’s not the case for the blue whale. The joint between its lower jaws – the mandibular symphysis – is particularly loose and elastic, allowing the jaw to flex and expand with the incoming tide of water and krill.
This elastic joint is a defining trait of all whales that sieve their food from the water, including the blue, humpback and right whales. Not all of them are lunge-feeders. The right and bowhead whales swim through schools of plankton with jaws open, while gray whales suck up mud from the seafloor. But all of them rely on the elastic joint that allows them to open their mouths as wide as possible. It was an important innovation that allowed this group – the mysticetes, or baleen whales – to hunt the smallest of prey in the largest of volumes. It allowed them to evolve into the largest animals this planet has ever seen.
But that wasn’t always the case. Ancient whales had the same fused jaws found in toothed whales like sperm whale and dolphins (and, for that matter, humans). Now, Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria in Melbourne has found a fossil that bridges the gap between this standard set-up and the flexible jaws of titans.
In a lab in Singapore, scientists are designing and breeding suicide bombers. If their efforts pan out, they will be applauded rather than jailed, for their targets are neither humans nor buildings. They’re bacteria.
Nazanin Saeidi and Choon Kit Wong have found a new way of killing Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic species that thrives wherever humans are weak. It commonly infects hospital patients whose immune systems have taken a hit. It targets any tissue it can get a foothold on – lungs, bladders, guts – and it often causes fatal infections. To seek and destroy this threat, Saiedi and Wong have used the common lab bacterium Escherichia coli as a sacrificial pawn.
If any group of animals looks like a nightmare made real, it’s the whip spiders. Also known as whip scorpions, these creatures look like flattened versions of true spiders, and they’re close relatives of their namesakes. Their front pair of legs has been transformed into long ‘whips’, which they flail ahead of their bodies to search of prey. Anything unfortunate enough to make contact gets grabbed by the whip spider’s massive pincers, each twice as long as the animal itself and tipped in fiendish spikes.
Here’s a brief note to commemorate the fact that Not Exactly Rocket Science is five years old today! Once again, thanks to my wife, my science writer colleagues and all of you for giving me the motivation and support to carry on writing.
And by coincidence, I’m flying off to Peru for my first field-reporting assignment. More on that later.
(Image from camflam)
The planet’s land plants are engaged in an ancient alliance with the so-called “AM fungi” that grow into their roots. One plant might be colonised by many fungi, and a single fungus could connect up to many plants. The fungi harvest nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from the soil and channel them to their hosts. In return, the plants provide the fungi with the sugars and carbohydrates they need to grow.
This symbiotic partnership covers the planet in green. It’s common to 80 percent of land plants, and is credited with driving the evolution of this group some 470 million years ago. Now, Toby Kiers from Vrije University in Amsterdam has found that plants and fungi have maintained their grand alliance by setting up a strong market economy.