Fauna feed - various animal news, bad puns

They're back! Goopy stinging groups of gobs given the deceptively poetic name "blooms" are overrunning seas too numerous to name, and costing fishing and tourism industries hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few decades. Jellyfish are swarming all across the globe, a phenomenon I reported on a while ago ("Jellyfish plague punishes the humans"), but never thought was so out of hand, turning fisheries and beaches into "veritable jellytoriums" in the newly invented words of ScienceDaily.

These jellyfish jams can be deadly but usually just stick to disrupting industry, commerce, and infrastructure. "[S]uspicion is growing that population explosions of jellyfish are being generated by human activities," such as pollution and global warming.

In other freaky news, LiveScience reports that a species of Panamanian termite has the world's fastest bite, clocking in at 157 chomp and awe mph. "Because a termite soldier faces down enemies inside a narrow tunnel and has little room to parry and little time to waste, this death blow proves to be incredibly efficient, though it works only over short distances."

The New York Times runs an article about fear among conservatives that the 1972 Endangered Species Act might be used as a "'back door' means of regulating the emission of gases that accelerate climate change."



They've also got a "radical" editorial out calling for a moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing - if only they could show a bit more radicalism (or at least backbone) on topics like the decision to invade Iraq!

For some real radicalism, we turn to PETA, which is "so very excited" to bring us good animal rights news from Bernalillo County, New Mexico. After pressure from citizens, the county council voted on a bill that, among other things, requires better living conditions for farm animals, and bans the sale of cats and dogs in pet stores. (And just a few days ago I found out I have to hate zoos too!)

Lastly, I found an oldish article on the New York Times site about service dogs trained by inmates of the maximum security Bedford Hills women's prison. The majority of the dogs go to Iraq War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. (Do not read this article if you don't want to cry, and certainly don't watch the accompanying video - I almost cried and I barely have canine emotions, let alone human ones!)

New Species! Leaping lemurs, sea creepies, a gecko in gay Paris

New species popping up all over the place!

From the treetops of Indochina and Sundaland will now be leaping three certifiably separate species of flying lemur, or "colugo." The colugos had been thought to comprise only two species, the Sunda colugo and the Philippine colugo. But upon comparison of DNA between Sunda colugos from mainland Indochina, Java, and Borneo, researches discovered each region had a unique species, having diverged as much as five million years ago.

Colugos glide using a membrane stretched between their appendages, like a flying squirrel. Apparently, their diversification "might be explained by the colugos' unusual way of getting around. While they have the most developed gliding membrane of any mammal, they are nearly helpless on the ground, leaving them incapable of crossing large open spaces that lack trees." Groups could easily have isolated themselves and had to settle down and speciate.

That's not to disparage these floating fellows, since they are the closest living group of mammals to ours, the primates.

Scientists from the seven year old Census of Marine Life met recently to discuss the 120,000 undersea species they'd documented thus far, including newly discovered blind lobsters, giant oysters, sea spiders the size of dinner plates, and the progenitor of many deep sea octopodes. Creepy pics, as usual, at Natty G.

Lastly, a new gecko with a dramatic tale, and the recently rediscovered pygmy tarsier from Indonesia, feared to be extinct since the 1920s.

Pics: Norman Lim, colugo; Sharon Gursky-Doyen, tarsier

New species: Weird creatures of the water

This weekly feature has been anything but. We will just have to see what fate it meets as Red Squirrel News Service grows.

Tricky choice this time around: a haul of bizarre sea creatures off Antarctica should end up yielding plenty of new species, but none have been formally described yet; and an "odd, flat-faced fish" found in Indonesia looks sure to be declared a new species.

The Antarctic haul brought creatures to the light of day that range from cute to gross to terrifying to surreal.

"Weird-fish expert" Ted Pietsch will call the odd Indonesian anglerfish the "Maluku frogfish" if it's a new species - and if he publishes it first. Like other anglerfish, it can use it's fins like feet, and makes its own lures for prey. The specimen that's been observed is about four inches, and is symmetrically, "psychedelically" striped.

What's interesting is its flat face. "We've never seen a fish with remotely this kind of face," said one of its discoverers. It could have humanlike binocular vision, which, for fish, "is extremely rare."

"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.

New species this week: Devil frog from hell

To celebrate the craziness of the animal kingdom, and because I have nothing better to do, I'll be picking a newly discovered species to highlight here each week on Friday.

The clear winner this week is Beelzebufo, "perhaps the largest frog ever to exist," according to the National Science Foundation. It lived 65 to 70 million years ago on what is now Madagascar and was "about the size of a beach ball." And with "an extremely wide mouth and powerful jaws," you would not have wanted to try and chase him around the pond.


Apart from the fact that the discovery may put the landmasses of Madagascar, India, and South America together as one in that time period, and apart from the titillating observation that Beelzebufo was likely "capable of killing lizards and other small vertebrates, perhaps even hatchling dinosaurs," most interesting are the monikers reporters have come up with for the big toad: "giant fossil frog from hell"; "Frogzilla"; "armored frog from hell"; and the tamer just plain "frog from hell". Well, the scientists that discovered the big bastard started it--their Latin name for it, Beelzebufo, means "devil frog".

The runners up this week include two new species of the fat, funny-shaped wobbegong (funny-named I might add) shark near Australia, and whatever's on three ships recently "returned from the Southern Ocean, their decks overflowing with a vast array of ocean life including a number of previously unknown species collected from the cold waters near the East Antarctic land mass." (Video here.)

Pic: SUNY-Stony Brook