In the shadowy depths of the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii, a shark battled what may have been a giant squid—and lived to tell scientists about it.
The tentacles of the massive cephalopod left golf ball-size suction marks on the skin of the shark, a seven-foot oceanic whitetip.
This is the first scientific evidence ever found of a shark interacting with a giant squid or any other similarly large species of squid, which live at depths of more than a thousand feet, researchers say in a new study.
Jiake Zhou and three of his colleagues traveled 16 days on inflatable rubber boats in the northern Alaskan wilderness without seeing any other human, with nothing but a few guns and some pepper spray in case something went awry with the bears or moose they were surveying.
They traveled 568 kilometers on an epic journey along three connected rivers. But despite the excitement of close encounters with grizzly bears (Ursos arctos horribilis) and waking up to discover wolf (Canis lupus) tracks around their campsites, the team was concerned in large part about the shrubbery.
Do food shortages, social distancing or political posturing define your current life?
If so, you can at least take some comfort in the fact that it isn’t the first time in history that people have had to deal with such problems. Life under pandemics such as the Black Death or the 1918 influenza outbreak entailed many of the same conditions we are experiencing today — and many that were much worse.
To put things into historical perspective, we’ve highlighted four earlier pandemics and the conditions people faced.
Some 152 million years ago, the Mygatt-Moore Quarry that now sits in present day western Colorado was as good a place to die as any for a dinosaur. Whether the creatures whose remains litter the site were killed by predators or died of old age or sickness is unclear, but we now know that many of the dinos that breathed their last breath at Mygatt-Moore were eaten. Some were likely even cannibalized.
“It would take a while for these things to be buried,” said Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville. “There were an awful lot of jokes about what this place smelled like.”
The fear of a larger set of teeth may drive blacktip sharks closer to beaches, where they have more chance of coming across humans.
For the first time, drones have captured video footage of giant hammerhead sharks chasing individuals, and sometimes groups, of blacktip sharks into shallow water near the beaches of southeast Florida.
Forget the white whale — some of the most rarely seen albinos on the planet are deep-water sharks that spend most of their lives in a world without light.
“It’s not common, that I’m aware of, in any particular shark or ray group,” said David Ebert, director of the Pacific Shark Research Center of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California. Since it’s even rarer for researchers to see deep-sea creatures at all, “it is fascinating when we do see [albino sharks] come up.”
Frederic Dulude-de Broin sat on top of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies with a telescope, waiting above the forested valleys for mountain goats on the alpine peaks to take care of their business. Once they were done, he zoomed in with his camera to snap a shot, then radioed a colleague to direct him to the fresh goat scat.
“Because I had the camera, I was lucky to be the picture taker,” joked Dulude-de Broin, who was working on his master’s degree at Laval University in Quebec at the time. Throughout their research, though, the dirty work was a shared duty. “I never thought I would be so happy to pick up scat,” he said.
Releasing captive-bred marmots into a “cushy” ski resort area for a year improves their chances of surviving predation and teaches them how to hibernate.
“What we found is that you’re best off, if you start in captivity, to have this cushy introduction to the wild in Mount Washington,” said Sarah Converse, unit leader with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit and an associate professor at the University of Washington. “It’s a safe place to learn before we send you out into the real world.”
Typical female fence lizards (Sceloporus undulatus) sport drab brown colors, but a few of them display the shiny blue neck patches more commonly found on males.
Previous research has shown that these females with male-like characteristics don’t have as much luck finding male suitors in the wild, but a new study suggests they make up for this lack of reproduction by producing better quality offspring.
Colored in drab brown with zebra-like stripes across its breast and standing about a foot tall, the Guam rail that zookeepers call Tasi isn’t much to look at in first glance. But shortly after it’s released from its cage at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, the flightless bird putters around the feet of a group of reporters on the concrete floor, pecking at shoelaces and dipping its beak inside shoes to investigate.
Eventually, Warren Lynch, the bird unit manager at the institute, regains the reporters’ attention by scooping up the energetic rail and placing it on his shoulder as he discusses the conservation issues in Guam that invasive species pose to birds like this one.
Joshua Rapp Learn 