Lstrblg

I’m too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I’m going to assume that the hadal zone gets its name for Hades, the underworld. Hell.

It is literally the crushing depths, about 6,000-11,000 meters, and certainly hellish, indeed. A couple of years ago, one group from the University of Aberdeen sent some probes down to see what’s shaking. (Called HADEEP, short for hadal deep, which is kind of an obvious name, really, but the whole thing is genius, read the blogs from their expeditions here and here, good fun.) One of their discoveries was this species of snailfish, pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, the second-deepest species of fish ever recorded.

Scientists from the expedition described them as “surprisingly cute.”

And they are cute. A cuddly species of fish that look like giant tadpoles. How adorable. Oh look! Here’s a group of them frolicking on the ocean floor.

Except they’re not frolicking, they’re likely stripping clean a corpse. Yes, giant tadpoles that strip dead, fallen flesh. Yay! And that’s what they call food that’s dropped from on high, “food-falls.” The snailfish religion probably involves a lot of looking up and praying for a whale to have a heart attack.

It seems innocuous, after all they’re just part of the circle of life, the janitorial part. Of course, I think there is reason to believe that they’d take matters into their own hands, which is why I’m not going down there. Well, that and the crushing hell part.

You would think this is going to be a scary post about Megalodons a gigantic predatory, be-toothed demon of creature from 20 million years or so ago — the largest shark in history, in fact, about the length of a big tractor trailer (67 feet) — followed by some of my inane prattle about why the ocean frightens me so. And, judging by this picture, you’d probably be right. It’s very name means “big tooth” for criminy’s sake.

The baby teeth are still nothing to sneeze at

But this isn’t that story. No, this is a story about how these gigantic predatory, be-toothed demon creatures loved their babies.

Yes, gentle reader, scientists publishing in the Public Library of Science describe the discovery of Megalodon nurseries (awww!) where hatchling sharks were protected by their enormous mothers until they themselves were big enough to swallow an entire Grateful Dead cover band in one go (including their van, most likely). How sweet.

(via Everyone PLoS ONE’s community blog)

…hard of herring edition.

In Sweden, even the sea life is flat pack.

The Regalecus glesne, known as the King of Herrings or Giant Oarfish, was found dead in the small fishing village of Bovallstrand on Sweden’s west coast, about 140 miles from the Norwegian border.

In less sensational terms, this is an oarfish, which normally makes its home in the Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean. While rare for Sweden, I gather, this isn’t a very large specimen, as they seem to grow to 50 feet. So, for the King of Herrings, this one’s a bit of a pike(r). Here’s an entry from SeaSky, for the wikipedia-averse:

The most noticeable feature of the oarfish is its extremely long, ribbon-like body. These fish can reach a length of over 50 feet (15 meters) and weigh as much as 600 pounds (272 kilograms). Its scaleless body is covered with a silver to silvery blue skin and is topped with an ornate, red dorsal fin that resembles a decorative headdress. This dorsal fin runs the entire length of the fish, with a tiny spine projecting above each of over 400 individual fin rays. The pelvic fins of this fish are elongated and similarly colored. The oarfish has a small mouth with no visible teeth. Their diet consists mainly of plankton, small crustaceans, and small squid that they strain from the water using specially formed gill rakes in their mouth. In turn, the oarfish may be a food source for larger ocean carnivores such as sharks.

Oh, and SeaSky, green and yellow text on black? Really?

So, to sum up. Not really a herring. Not really that big (as far as these things go). And, while it is a plankton eater, I would not be terribly happy to see one swim past. (I’d get bored after the first 30 feet, for one thing.)

(via Museum of the Weird, one of my favorite places in Austin.)

A 5m-long, 1,200 kilo, 40 year-old hammerheaded monster.

It was a thing of beauty, a rare titan of the sea, so of course we had to kill it.

Not the biggest shark ever, certainly, but another reason to stay out of the water.
Full story.

An orca trainer died at SeaWorld yesterday. By all accounts she was a kind, devoted animal trainer who loved her work.

This isn’t funny, of course, and I don’t intend to make light of a tragedy. However, this is a good time to question the captivity of orcas. Continue Reading Why I don’t go into the water with...

Because sharks with 1000s of teeth will eat me.

Paleontologists have just identified the remains of a gigantic, 88.7-million-year-old shark nicknamed the “shell crusher.” The Cretaceous species could pulverize large, shelled animals with its 1,000 teeth, suggests a new study.

A handful of other fossils for the shark, Ptychodus mortoni, had been previously found and hinted that the species was extremely big. The new discoveries support that contention and reveal the shark likely grew to at least 33 feet in length and chomped on its prey with its 3-foot-long jaw.

National Geographic photog Paul Nicklen comes face to face with a leopard seal of unusual size.

One seal brought a penguin over to me. I didn’t touch it; I just sat there and photographed. The penguin took off, and the seal grabbed it, brought it back to me, and put it on my camera dome again.

Eventually the seal got upset and started blowing bubbles at me. It was the most fascinating interaction I’ve ever had.

Watch the full video here. And another version here:

Part of me is amazed that an enormous leopard seal could be so kind to another creature…and the other part is annoyed on behalf of the leopard seal. All of me would have been paralyzed with fear.

Still…if someone offers you a penguin, eat it. We are talking common manners here.

Always.

I’d be afraid of a 10-foot Great White…even behind a foot-thick wall of aquarium glass. Sure, I’d put a brave front up for the kids, but I’d also shudder the chill of the damned, as if a mariachi band — at that very moment — were collectively walking over my grave playing Besame Mucho Tiburon.

So, I’m fairly certain I would become paralyzed instantly if I saw a 20-foot Great White bite the first one in half.

“That cannibal thing is what great whites do; they’ll eat anything, including their own kind,” Hugh Edwards, a local shark expert, told Australia’s 7 News. “It would be sensible not to swim in that area for a little while.”

Dya think?

Not for the faint of heart…hit the read more button (or the link above) if you weren’t planning to sleep tonight anyway.

Continue Reading Why I don’t go in the water: There’s...

That’s whale fall — what happens when an enormous cetacean corpse hits the ocean floor — not whale fail — what happens when Twitter breaks.

You see, when the carcass lands on the bottom of the sea, a whole host of unpleasant critters come out to eat it in a process that can take months — or even years if the whale lands in deep, deep water. Among those critters are members of the genus Osedax, bone-eating worms related to tubeworms or those guys you see hanging out by thermal vents…if you happen to go past a lot of thermal vents, that is.

Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute first discovered these little red bone-munching guys while out in the ROV Tiburon, which is a vehicle with just an awesome name. Their press release provides a great read. (And, doesn’t he look like something out of central casting for ocean explorer?)

Sure, unless your diet has really slipped and you’ve reached blue whale proportions, you don’t have much to worry about from these critters (aside from the fact that you’d be dead and lacking cares, in general). But the fact that these guys are down there waiting…just waiting…gives me the creeps.

Even creepier is that all those little red wigglers you see in the picture above are all females. They’re not hermaphrodites. Oh no, that would be normal in comparison. All of these worms are actually giant masters over their microscopic male concubines. That’s right, mini sex slaves. Invertebrates with a dwarf fetish.

But, according to Vrijenhoek, “That was not the end of the weirdness. In looking at the worms under a microscope, we discovered that every one of them was a female. We didn’t find any males until I got another call from Greg Rouse. He said, ‘Bob, it’s worse than you think.’ I said, ‘What now, Greg?’ He said ‘There really are males, but they are microscopic. They are dwarfs!’”

Sure enough, living within the tube that enclosed each female were 30 to 100 microscopic male worms, each only about a millimeter long. Not only that, but the male worms were still in a larval stage of development. They were making sperm in one part of their bodies, while other parts of the bodies still contained the yolk droplets. As Vrijenhoek put it, “These males don’t feed. A male lives its entire life off the yolk that was provisioned by the egg from which it hatched. This is one of the few cases in the animal world where sexually reproducing individuals are barely more developed than eggs. It’s weird.”