A diatom

Specifically, Navicula variolata.  Photographed by Arturo Agostino for the Nikon Small World Photomicrography 2013 competition.

It never ceases to amaze me how complexly beautiful the microscopic world is.

Why hurricanes cause so much damage

"A coastal town in the Samar province of the central Philippines that was wiped out by Typhoon Haiyan is shown in this Nov. 11 photo. The typhoon, which packed 150 mph winds and 20-foot waves, swept through the archipelago Nov. 8, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake."

This coastal town was effectively built on a sandbar, with virtually zero setback from the ordinary high water level.  

From a photo gallery in the Washington Post.  Credit: Erik de Castro / Reuters.

A fruit fly's wing markings mimic ants

The art appears on the fruit fly’s wings. These translucent appendages contain what has been called the image of an ant. The perfect image is of what appears to be at first glance “ant-like.” Six legs, a pair of antennae, head, thorax and “tapered” abdomen. According to fly specialist Dr Brigitte Howarth, from the Zayed University, the images are “absolutely perfect.” It was the doctor who first spotted the Goniurellia tridens in the UAE.

The G. tridens is part of the tephritidae family that includes 5,000 different species of fruit flies. These insects are also known as peacock flies because of their colorful body markings. These particular fruit flies are called the picture wing species and there are 27 different types who have wing images that range from simple shapes to very complex, like the fly that Dr Howarth discovered...

More at the link.

"A mouth that looks like two saws on the side of a barbed sword"

YouTube link.

Via Curiosités de Titam.

Inclusion in a cut gemstone

"Rutile crystals (titanium oxide) included in rock crystal (quartz) (40x). Technique: Brightfield, Fiber Optic Illumination."

From the Nikon Small World 2013 photomicrography competition.

Ritual whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands

Whaling in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic has been practiced since about the time of the first Norse settlements on the islands. It is regulated by Faroese authorities but not by the International Whaling Commission as there are disagreements about the Commission's legal competency for small cetaceans. Around 950 Long-finned Pilot Whales (Globicephala melaena) are killed annually, mainly during the summer. The hunts, called grindadráp in Faroese, are non-commercial and are organized on a community level; anyone can participate. The hunters first surround the pilot whales with a wide semicircle of boats. The boats then drive the pilot whales slowly into a bay or to the bottom of a fjord.

Many Faroese consider the hunt an important part of their culture and history. Animal-rights groups criticize the hunt as being cruel and unnecessary. As of the end of November 2008 the chief medical officers of the Faroe Islands have recommended that pilot whales no longer be considered fit for human consumption because of the levels of toxins in the whales...

The primary reason for the Faeroes abstaining from joining the EU was in an effort to prevent the EU from meddling in their fishing policies. The slaughter of cetaceans is illegal within the European Union. 

More details, photographs, and a couple videos at this link.

Poachers rule in a world gone mad

The stench of rotting elephant carcasses hangs in the air in western Zimbabwe, where wildlife officials say at least 91 elephants were poisoned with cyanide by poachers who hack off the tusks for the lucrative illegal ivory market.

Massive bones, some already bleached by the blistering sun in the Hwange National Park, litter the landscape around one remote watering hole where 18 carcasses were found. Officials say cyanide used in gold mining was spread by poachers over flat "salt pans," also known as natural, mineral-rich salt licks. They say lions, hyenas and vultures have died from feeding on contaminated carcasses or drinking nearby...

Tusks of the poisoned elephants are thought to have been smuggled into neighboring South Africa through illicit syndicates that pay desperately poor poachers a fraction of the $1,500 a kilogram (2.2 pounds) that ivory can fetch on the black market.

Officials believe at least two deeply drilled wells supplying the water holes may have also been contaminated and will likely have to be sealed. New wells will probably be drilled away from the tainted ones. "We will drill more boreholes in the park because these criminals target areas where there is a shortage of water," said Kasukuwere...

Kasukuwere said Hwange park, Africa's third largest wildlife sanctuary after the Serengeti in Tanzania and South Africa's Kruger National Park, has only about 150 rangers and few fully operational off-road vehicles for an expanse that ideally should have a staff of at least 700.

Scores of vultures, the first predators at a kill, have died from the cyanide. Rangers say their absence makes the ecological impact of the poisonings much harder to fight and control.

Photos and text via PhysOrg.

Opalized pine cone

"This beautiful specimen was found at... "Kens Retreat" in the Coocoran mining area N/West of Lightning Ridge..."

The centre of Australia used to be an inland sea. Miners now unearth opalized fossils from its hot dry deserts.  Opalized fossils include vegetation or wood from Boulder Fields and opalized clam shells from Coober Pedy.

Opalized fossils also include sea shells, teeth, and even opalised belemnites (squid). Opalised shells with good colour and small amounts of potch are hard to find, and many are worth more if left natural and unpolished. Among the rarest are opalized pineapple, found only in White Cliffs Opal Fields."

Text and image from Opal Auctions, via Bijoux et Mineraux.

Global lightning strikes. And lodestones.

An interesting distribution, with some curiously sharp demarcations.

And this interesting tidbit, from the source Wikipedia page:

The intense currents of a lightning discharge create a fleeting but very strong magnetic field. Where the lightning current path passes through rock, soil, or metal these materials can become permanently magnetized. This effect is known as lightning-induced remanent magnetism, or LIRM. These currents follow the least resistive path, often horizontally near the surface but sometimes vertically, where faults, ore bodies, or ground water offers a less resistive path. One theory suggests that lodestones, natural magnets encountered in ancient times, were created in this manner.

Eels inside the cardiac chambers of a shark

This image will be familiar to those of you who have encountered dog heartworm or other heartworms.  In this case it's the heart of a mako shark, and the "worm" is a type of eel:

These particular eels, called pugnose eels, Simenchelys parasitica, have been recorded before burrowing into the flesh of halibut and other large North Atlantic fishes (hence their species name), but never completely internal and certainly not in the lumen of the heart, so this was a truly remarkable find...

Their conclusion?  That this was a facultatively parasitic relationship.  In other words, the eels didn’t need to be living in the sharks heart (that would be obligate parasitism), rather they took advantage of an opportunity to get a meal.  They proposed that the eels probably attacked the shark after it had been hooked and was dangling, distressed, from the longline.  They had some evidence that the shark was probably resting on the bottom, which may have made it easier for the eels to find.  The pugnoses somehow gained entry (hypothesised to be through the gills) and made their way to the heart, where they dined on the beasts blood up until it died.  Maybe they would have burrowed out again after the animal expired, maybe they would have suffocated (remember – the eels had be swimming in and breathing the sharks blood once they were inside, how bizarre is that?).  We’ll never know because the carcass went in the fridge, which ended things for the eels, but also led to this amazing discovery.

Further details at Deep Sea News, via Neatorama.

Trinitite in "atomic ant sand"

As reported in Science News:

During his first visit to New Mexico’s Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb test occurred, polymer scientist Robb Hermes could feel the military police watching him. Or maybe it was just his nagging conscience. Milling around with other tourists, he had to fight the urge to bend down, pretend to tie his shoes and swipe a piece of Trinitite — a glassy, mildly radioactive substance created by the explosion 68 years ago.

Removing Trinitite from the site is a federal crime. But Hermes was fascinated by the strange material and wanted to figure out how the little bits formed in the heart of an atomic blast. So he hatched a scheme. He returned to his office at Los Alamos National Laboratory, called up officials at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range (home to Trinity) and asked for a box of ant sand. Ants, he knew, build their mounds from mineral grains gathered up to 15 meters from their homes.

“I thought if I could get some ant sand, maybe I’d find at least a vial of little Trinitite pieces collected from around the site,” says Hermes.

When the sand arrived in the mail, Hermes and a geology club friend did indeed discover beads of Trinitite. The pieces were surprisingly spherical, which turned out to be the key to piecing together how the glass formed...

Hermes, now retired, supplies the ant sand to geologists who study meteorites. Microscopic spheres found at sites around the world resemble the Trinitite beads, evidence perhaps for a controversial theory that a meteor broke up in the atmosphere about 13,000 years ago and bombarded Earth with stones that burst in the air like miniature nuclear warheads.

Via The Agateer, newsletter of the Madison Gem and Mineral Club.

Small embed photo:Mary Caperton Morton/The Blonde Coyote.

"It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Photo of a divi tree in Aruba's Arikok National Park.  My mind immediately anthropomorphizes it to a woman with long hair.

Photo credit: Toni Stroud Salama • MCT, via the StarTribune.

"O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!"

 

Miranda would have been as awed by this little creature as I am.  It's real.  It's a newly-discovered species of planhopper:

Many planthopper species exude waxy secretions from the abdomen, and these sometimes form long strands, such as can be seen in this photo. The long waxy strands may provide protection from predators - it could be that they fool a predator into attacking the wrong part of the insect, and the wax breaks off while the insect jumps to safety.

Photo credit Trond Larsen/Conservation International, via a gallery of 20 new species posted in Salon.

Antlion larva

This is one of a variety of critters that lie in wait beneath those conical depressions in the sand.  What an amazingly evolved adaptation of the mouthparts.

Photo by J. Gallego (gallery here), via Neatorama.

Prions can be taken up by plants

Researchers in Wisconsin have a particular interest in prions because they are responsible for an endemic "chronic wasting disease" in wild deer.  Now new research from the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison has documented that the responsible prions can be taken up by plants:

Prions — the infectious, deformed proteins that cause chronic wasting disease in deer — can be taken up by plants such as alfalfa, corn and tomatoes...

The research further demonstrated that stems and leaves from tainted plants were infectious when injected into laboratory mice. The findings are significant, according to the researchers and other experts, because they reveal a previously unknown potential route of exposure to prions for a Wisconsin deer herd in which the fatal brain illness continues to spread...

Previous studies have shown the disease can be transmitted animal-to-animal and via soil... 

It is worth emphasizing that there is no evidence to date of these particular prions being transmissible to humans, and the relevance of this plant uptake to spread of the disease in deer has not been established.  The quoted research has not yet been submmitted to a peer-reviewed journal.

An extremely clean harvestman

As reported by Susannah Anderson in her delightful blog Wanderin' Weeta (With Waterfowl and Weeds):

I took a blouse out of the washer and hung it to dry. This daddy-long-legs came running out of a fold. Good thing I used cold water and the gentle cycle.

I saw him last night, roaming placidly around the bathroom; he looked duller then. Today, the first thing I saw was the flash of brick red. And he was panicking; I don't think I've ever seen a harvestman run as fast as he was before.

More photos at the link, along with this interesting question: "I wonder: does he run faster with shorter legs? Do those long, wobbly legs slow down his brothers?"

I don't have an answer, but I did find this interesting tidbit:

The legs continue to twitch after they are detached. This is because there are 'pacemakers' located in the ends of the first long segment (femur) of their legs. These pacemakers send signals via the nerves to the muscles to extend the leg and then the leg relaxes between signals. While some harvestman's legs will twitch for a minute, other kinds have been recorded to twitch for up to an hour. The twitching has been hypothesized as a means to keep the attention of a predator while the harvestman escapes.

Just like a skink's tail.  Cool.

A mechanical gear in an insect - updated

This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect and one of the fastest accelerators in the animal kingdom. As a duo of researchers in the U.K. report today in the journal Science, the issus also the first living creature ever discovered to sport a functioning gear...

At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g's—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand...

Another odd thing about this discovery is that although there are many jumping insects like the issus—including ones that are even faster and better jumpers—the issus is apparently the only one with natural gears. Most other bugs synchronize the quick jolt of their leaping legs through friction, using bumpy or grippy surfaces to press the top of their legs together, says Duke University biomechanics expert Steve Vogel, who was not involved in this study. Like gears, this ensures the legs move at the same rate, but without requiring a complicated interlocking mechanism. "There are a lot of friction pads around, and they accomplish pretty much of the same thing," he says. "So I wonder what extra capacity these gears confer. They're rather specialized, and there are lots of other jumpers that don't have them, so there must be some kind of advantage." 

Further details (and a photo of the insect) at Popular Mechanics.

Updated with this video, via BoingBoing:

YouTube link.

Copper ring in datolite

Datolite is a calcium boron hydroxide nesosilicate, CaBSiO4(OH)... It is common in the copper deposits of the Lake Superior region of Michigan. It occurs as a secondary mineral in mafic igneous rocks often filling vesicles along with zeolites in basalt. Unlike most localities throughout the world, the occurrence of datolite in the Lake Superior region is usually fine grained in texture and possesses colored banding. Much of the coloration is due to the inclusion of copper or associated minerals in progressive stages of hydrothermal precipitation.

This specimen comes from the Tamarack Mineral Company in Calumet, Michigan, on the Keweenaw Peninsula where I went on an interesting rockhounding field trip several years
ago.

Inverted hummingbird explained

Our hummingbird feeder has been thriving with activity this week, as migrants head south from the north woods.  So I was interested in this observation from the Wingnut (bird-watchers) blog at the StarTribune:

The Hanging Hummingbird has returned. For the third September in a row, on the same feeder on the same Lutsen shoreline property, a female Ruby-throated Hummingbird is displaying what I consider odd behavior. It hangs upsidedown from one of the perches on a sugar-water feeder here...

Sunday morning it hung by one claw on one foot, what looked like a precarious position. I thought perhaps the bird was weak or injured. The hanger returned that evening, hanging for perhaps 30 minutes. It was close to dark when it released its grip and flew away. Monday morning, at 8 a.m., there was the Hanging Hummingbird one more time, firmly gripping the perch with all toes on both feet, eyes open, no problem evident. It hung there while a second hummingbird fed, the feeder returning more than once.

More details at the link.  He requested help, and posted a reply the following day.  Ponder the problem for a while, if you wish.  The explanation is below the fold...
The hanging hummingbirds? Most likely juveniles too weak, too depleted of energy to hold themselves upright at the feeder. Nancy Newfield, who feeds, bands, and studies hummingbirds from her Louisiana home sent an email to answer my question....

“The Ruby-throated Hummingbird appears to be a youngster. Many recent fledglings embark upon a rigorous migration before developing their full strength,” she wrote. “During migration a certain percentage of them will seriously deplete their energy reserves (fat), and become weakened, at least temporarily.”..

The meadows between Lutsen and Grand Marais are filled with blooming wild flowers right now, but few that offer the nectar cup the hummingbirds seek. Migration takes a toll on birds of all ages. “Especially during fall migration,” Ms. Newfield wrote. “These energy-deficient youngsters are the most vulnerable. They’re less able to force their way to a feeder, and are much more vulnerable to predators.”..

So, why didn’t the exhausted bird simply drop from the perch instead of hanging there like an ornament? Ms. Newfield explained that when birds perch their feet automatically lock onto the perch. We humans must make a conscious effort to tighten a fist or curl our toes. It’s the opposite for birds. They must make the effort to release their grip. The bird would fall only when it became so weakened that it lost even reflexive muscle control.

Ethiopian opal

Apparently from the Wollo province of Ethiopia.

Opal from Ethiopia that hit the market in 1993 from deposits near Mezezo, Shewa Province, has a tendency to craze. But the Wollo Province deposit was hailed as one of the most promising deposits of precious opal for the coming years in the Summer 2010 issue of Gems & Gemology and the Summer 2011 issue of InColor. “Wollo opal should be recognized as a new type because it can absorb or lose water, affecting transparency and play-of-color when wet, but recovering all its qualities when dry,” report researchers. They describe this new Ethiopian opal find as different from the opals of Shewa Province. Laboratory testing of the Wollo opal revealed most specimens were resistant to crazing after repeatedly being immersed in water and dried out over a period of time. Not only are they stable, researchers say, they’re surprisingly tough. 

Nine views of the specimen in this imgur album.  Video of a beautiful cab here.  Via Reddit.