Posts tagged animals

A huge, softball-size eyeball that washed ashore in Pompano Beach, Fla. may have come from a deep sea squid or a large sword fish, the Associated Press reports.

A man spotted the eyeball Wednesday and reported it to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which has sent it off for study to identify the creature to which it belongs.

The internet and marine biology community has been buzzing about the eye since the commission shared a photo of it on its Facebook page. People are suggesting it came from everything from a giant squid to Bigfoot.

The blue eyeball may have come from a deep sea squid or a large sword fish, said Heather Bracken-Grissom, an assistant professor in the marine science program at Florida International University in Miami.

“Any time something weird and crazy washes up on the beach, it’s definitely interesting,” she told the AP. “It’s going to be very interesting to see what the genetic analysis shows.”

The professor and her colleagues concluded that the eyeball’s lens and pupil are similar in shape to that of a deep sea squid. She noted that a deep sea squid’s eyeball can be as large as a soccer ball and can easily become dislodged.

Officials won’t really know where the eyeball came from until testing at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg is complete.

(Source: futurenow321)

Scientists have identified a new species of African monkey whose coloring “is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” as one of the researchers put it. The monkey, known by people in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the lesula, has a blond chin and upper chest, in contrast to its dark limbs. It has a reddish colored lower back and tail. The first lesula seen by researchers was a captive one, the pet of a schoolgirl. Although it bore a strong resemblance to another species, the owl faced monkey, the unusual coloring made the researchers suspect it was something new. They were able to identify more lesulas in the wild and locate hunters with specimens of the monkey. They analyzed tissue samples to confirm that the lesula is in fact genetically distinct from other species.

(Source: futurenow321)

A tiny microorganism found in Norwegian lake sludge may be related to the very oldest life forms on this planet, a possible modern cousin of our earliest common ancestor. It is not a fungus, alga, parasite, plant or animal, yet it has features associated with other kingdoms of life. It could be a founding member of the newest kingdom on the tree of life , scientists said. Life on Earth is divided into two main groups, the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes. Prokaryotes are simple life forms, with no membranes or cell nuclei; this group includes bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotes, which include humans, animals, plants, fungi and algae, have cell membranes and nuclei. This new organism is a eukaryote. More specifically, it’s an algae-eating protozoan, a type of creature that have been known to science since the Civil War but which have lacked genetic studies because they’re difficult to culture. Researchers in Norway were able to harvest them from a lake bed and breed them in the lab. This one is called Collodictyon.Researchers led by Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, head of the Microbial Evolution Research Group (MERG) at the University of Oslo, were examining the species’ genes and morphological makeup and found it is not like anything else. It evolved a billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million years. It could have been living the same way since then, providing scientists a glimpse of what the earliest life forms looked like. The organism is weird in several key ways. It has four flagella, for instance, which makes it different from bacteria and eukaryotes. Mammals, fungi and amoebae only have one flagellum — that’s the propeller-like feature that helps cells move (think of the “tail” of a sperm cell). Algae, plants and single-celled parasites called excavates are thought to have had two flagella. Collodictyon is somewhere between an excavate and an amoeba. Also, the organism has the same internal structure as a parasite, but it uses amoeba-like protuberances to catch its food, which are blue-green algae. So again, it combines features from two branches of the eukaryotes, further evidence that it’s a primordial creature, the researchers say. Even at its highest levels, the tree of life is mutable — the domain archaea was only recognized in 1990. So it wouldn’t be out of the question for this organism to spark an entirely new kingdom.

(Source: futurenow321)

The tiny crustaceans burrow under boulders and roots in streams, feeding on dead plants, fruits, carrion and small animals in the water at night, said Hendrik Freitag of Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Zoology.

Found only in small, lowland-forest ecosystems in the Palawan island group, most have purple shells, with claws and legs tipped red.

“It is known that crabs can discriminate colours. Therefore, it seems likely that the colouration has a signal function mating,” Freitag told AFP by email on Saturday.

“This could explain why large males of various Insulamon species are more reddish compared to the generally violet females and immature males.”

Scientists began extensive investigations of similar freshwater crabs in the area in the late 1980s, when one new species was found the Insulamon unicorn, Freitag said.

More field work led Freitag to conclude there were four other unique species.

“Based on available new material, a total of five species are recognised… four of which are new to science,” Freitag wrote in the latest edition of the National University of Singapore’s Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

(Source: futurenow321)

 A team of Russian scientists say they will embark on a quest next week to observe the only all-white, adult killer whale ever spotted — a majestic and elusive bull they have named Iceberg.

The researchers from the universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg first spotted the orca’s towering, six-foot (two-meter) dorsal fin break the surface near the Commander Islands in the North Pacific in August 2010.

Living in a pod with 12 family members, Iceberg was deemed to be at least 16 years old, given the size of his dorsal fin, said Erich Hoyt

(Source: futurenow321)

Steller sea lions from Alaska’s Panhandle to California’s Channel Islands have reached recovery targets and should be removed from the endangered-species list, according to the federal agency that oversees them.

The eastern population of the marine mammal has increased from about 34,000 in 1997 to 70,000 in 2010, according to federal officials.

The recommendation Wednesday from the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), does not affect the endangered status of the western population, which includes sea lions throughout the Aleutian Islands.

Fishing restrictions put in place there to aid sea lions were challenged by commercial fishing interests and the state of Alaska.

(Source: futurenow321)