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.

Paranormalists often point to the commonalities of near death and out-of-body experiences as evidence of the proof of an afterlife or astral projection. Turns out there is a more mundane — though fascinating — explanation. These experiences are common because that’s how we’re all wired in the noodle:

The doctors believe they are seeing the brain’s neurons discharge as they lose oxygen from lack of blood pressure.

“All the neurons are connected together and when they lose oxygen, their ability to maintain electrical potential goes away,” Chawla said. “I think when people lose all their blood flow, their neurons all fire in very close proximity and you get a big domino effect. We think this could explain the spike.”

It’s possible a cutoff of oxygen would trigger a similar but recoverable event that becomes seared into memory.

“Not everyone reports this light sort of business. What you hear most often reported (in near-death experiences) is just a vivid memory,” Chawla said.

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.”

Among its many features, aside from looking like Satan’s own translucent centipede, it is sightless and poisonous, complete with nasty fangs.

The divers were searching for specimens of a closely related crustacean species that they’d discovered 25 years ago in the same cave. But after capturing several of the sea creatures, the researchers noticed something peculiar.

“Some animals were much more active in swimming around than others in the small sample bottles,” said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University at Galveston, who was part of the team that discovered the new species. “On closer examination, and subsequently with DNA testing, we confirmed that they were actually two different species.”

So, just so we’re straight on this, its a blind and poisonous creature that’s much more active and, therefore, liable to thrash around blindly poisoning things. Lovely.

Sure, judging by the fact it can be bottled, it’s tiny and it isn’t poisonous enough to kill a human. But why take the chance? Don’t go in the water. Things in there want you to die.

There is no Davy Jone’s Locker waiting for you on the bottom, dear mariner. (Not even a Peter Tork’s Wastebasket.)

Just the horror…the horror…

Don’t go in the water. Things in there want you to die.

Specifically, these things. They’re just hanging out, waiting for you.

As the Discovery News reports, monster jellyfish like this are becoming more common as fish populations dwindle.

They say climate change could also cause jellyfish populations to grow. The team believes that for the first time, water conditions could lead to what they call a “jellyfish stable state,” in which jellyfish rule the oceans.

The combination of overfishing and high levels of nutrients in the water has been linked to jellyfish blooms. Nitrogen and phosphorous in run-off cause red phytoplankton blooms, which create low-oxygen dead zones where jellyfish survive, but fish can’t, researchers said.

Just great. We’re doomed.

Hibernia Mine doesn’t appear to be an active spelunking site, but you never know what desperate cavers might do in New Jersey. The Star-Ledger report fails to mention that the Fish and Wildlife Service has asked for a voluntary moratorium in the northeast to prevent the further spread of the disease.

So, like the frogs and bees, we have another fungal infection at the root of an animal die-off. With the bats, however, it seems decidedly linked to human activity, but there still could be a climate connection. (After all, why are people suddenly carrying fungi?) This press release from Cardiff University suggests climate change is causing fungi to grow more rapidly and “fruit” more frequently.

So, if you are doing math at home, is it:

warmer/wetter climate = more fungi + disease + accelerated decay (fungi hasten wood rot) = more CO2 = climate change

Yikes.

Here’s the article (originally posted on the Guardian’s site). And here’s an occurrence of the horrid word:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

Is he wrong? I don’t think so. (In case you stumble across this, feel free to point me to the literature that shows chiro can treat children for the problems described above, Damien. Sorry, bro. I’ve always loved ya, man, but it seems implausible given the method of action.)

We don’t have the same libel laws in the US, of course, but chiropractic doesn’t really need the “protection” — few in the mainstream press ever call into question the effectiveness of chiropractic. Like many alternative medical practices, they tend to be accepted uncritically in the press. I think it might have something to do with the illusion of “balance” in reporting and the reluctance of the American press to tackle complicated issues surrounding science and medicine.

The Telegraph reports finding a 600ft jellyfish crop circle found in an Oxfordshire field.

Kill it!!! Oh, wait…

At the end of the article, the writer oddly refers to an entirely different crop circle from last year, and reuses the quotes from a retired astrophysicist on how THAT crop circle encodes pi.

I had to re-read it to figure out the this reference really had nothing to do with the jellyfish. Bizarre.