"The Magnificent, Ultraviolent, Far-Seeing Shrimp from Mars" (Wired Science)

Wired Science recently ran a fascinating article on the mantis shrimp, or stomatopod - which is neither a mantis nor a shrimp.

"Four hundred million years after bushwhacking its own evolutionary path out of the Cambrian, the mantis shrimp is one of the world's freakiest animals," reads the blog.

How freaky? Well, it sees something called circular polarized light - a form of light that no other creature on Earth can perceive...

The mantis shrimp single-clawedly expands the realm of possible visual perception by thirty-three percent.

(The other types of sight are black-and-white, color and linearly polarized.)...

"They're enchantingly violent, [said researcher Tom Cronin] in an affectionate, almost paternal tone. "They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around."

[Mantis shrimp can break through aquarium glass with a single strike from their powerful claws, says Wikipedia.]

Cronin seemed especially pleased that the shrimps' visual uniqueness would return them to the record books. "The movement they use to hit prey used to be the fastest movement made by any animal," he lamented. "But it turned out there was a jaw-snapping behavior in an ant that's even faster."

Stomatopods only get about a foot long, but apparently can mutilate small appendages with relative ease. But don't worry too much about your small appendages on your next trip to the Jersey shore, because mantis shrimp mostly stick to the beds of tropical seas, like between Africa and Hawaii.

"Pets Pampered with People Products" (LiveScience)

With an alluringly alliterative title, Maryann Mott's article for LiveScience.com is a nice follow-up to my own pet industry post on this blog a little bit ago.

Check it out.

Pic: from New York School of Dog Grooming

World's Ugliest Animals

LiveScience.com has a feature up to rate the ugliness of some pretty horrid animals, and it includes some little tidbits and cheapshots in the captions.

But I really think they missed some. A simple Google image search turns up hundreds of thousands of hits, and though some pics are dubious and some are just of disheveled dogs or unkempt kitties, I heartily recommend wasting some time perusing them.


Somehow LiveScience.com passed over the little freak pictured above. The Aye-aye, or Daubentonia madagascariensis, is the largest nocturnal primate, hiding its shame among the treetops under cover of darkness, poking its elongated middle finger into holes that it gnaws in trees looking for grubs. It can barely stand to be seen even by others of its kind - it's a solitary forager.

Lastly, I think LiveScience.com was way out of line calling the Brushtail Possum ugly:


Look at it! What were they thinking?

New species this week: Big loud bats, long extinct

One of six new bat species recovered from fossils in Egypt may be the largest echolocating bat known to the animal kingdom. The species lived about 35 million years ago, and their discovery in Africa raises questions about the origin of their family.

Echolocating bats are called microbats, in contrast to the megabats which use smell to hunt, are on average larger, and comprise the fruit bats. The largest of the new species - whose names are as yet unreleased - could have had a two foot wingspan, while the largest megabat measures three feet across.

This vocal vespertilian would have been "loud" and "obnoxious" according to the study's lead scientist. "Just going by the large echolocating bats that I know that live today," he said, "many are very loud and very pushy and very boisterous...I am assuming these bats would have been, too."

It was hard choosing these long dead "boisterous bats" for the Species of the Week, especially with the discovery recently of a "thumb-sized" lemur-like monkey that lived even longer ago and ties extant primates for the title of smallest. The only living new species discovered recently was a Microbacterium that can live in hairspray, watch out!

Image: Bonnie Miljour