Extraordinary Animals In The Womb aired last year, using advances in scanning and imaging technology to trace the gestational paths of animals outside the human family. The documentary footage is actually a combination of digital photography, scans, and computer-generated models. The filmmakers took detailed scans of the animal's wombs, then had the model makers recreate every blood vessel and whisker. The resulting images, while not direct photographs, are, according to the researchers, accurate representations of what goes on inside these creatures' wombs.

You can read more about the documentary at the Daily Mail.

Stunning photographs of animals inside womb [This Blog Rules via Maurissa Tancharoen]

No one is completely sure what whale songs are used for – theories include mating calls, other forms of communication, and possibly a form of sonar. A group of researchers recently examined whale songs from several decades and from all the world's oceans. They found that the frequency, or pitch, of blue whale song has been steadily dropping for many years. Recently recorded whale songs are the lowest, while whale songs from the 1960s were higher in pitch.

The researchers don't know what's causing the change, but they have a theory based on a correlation with blue whale populations. When the songs were at their highest pitch, blue whales had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Since the International Whaling Commission banned blue whale hunting in the 60s, the worldwide blue whale population has been slowly but steadily increasing (though it's still a tiny fraction of what it once was). That seems to coincide with the pitch change.

It could be that whales used a higher frequency song when there were fewer whales because those songs traveled farther, hundreds of miles or more. With a sparse population, you'd need a long-distance call to find more mates or family members. With populations rebounding somewhat, the whales are able to use lower frequency songs with more success, since there's a greater chance another blue whale is nearby.

You may be wondering why higher frequency songs would travel farther, since generally low-frequency sounds are thought to be better for long-distance propagation. I asked the researchers about this, and scientist Mark McDonald explained that whales can sing louder at higher frequencies:

Across the frequencies of blue whale song, the underwater transmission losses are nearly the same regardless of frequency. It is absorption which is the primary cause of frequency dependent transmission losses, rather than dispersion in this case, and the absorption loss only begins to become significant when ranges reach thousands of kilometers. Theory tells us the whales can produce higher amplitude songs at higher frequencies, based on given lung volume.

I was also curious if this was an example of evolution in action, with subsequent generations of whales exhibiting a change in pitch due to natural selection, or if it was a behavioral change, with blue whales choosing to use a lower pitch song. He replied:

We presume it is a behavioral change, but we don't really know why the whales are changing their song frequency. We don't find our own best hypothesis entirely convincing.

Which is a pretty excellent example of science in progress. If only we could figure out what blue whales were singing about, so we could just ask them.

The pitch of blue whale songs is declining around the world, scientists discover [via EurekAlert!]

Photo: NOAA.

Along with dolphins, California sea lions have been part of the US Navy's Marine Mammal Program, which employs animals for a wide range of military purposes, for decades. They have long been used to retrieve objects lost or fired underwater, but, in the last few years, the Navy has placed sea lions on more active duty, employing them as sentries for military ships and piers. The animals can apprehend and detain divers, who could be enemy combatants or saboteurs, by placing a special clamp around the divers' legs attached to a line. Once the diver has been immobilized, human operatives can then reel the diver in. Their training in object retrieval has also made them ideal agents for locating and identifying underwater mines.

There are currently just 28 sea lions in the Navy's ranks (along with 80 bottlenose dolphins and a Beluga whale), but one team is about to get a permanent posting. The Navy has just announced that a team of sea lions will defend the Kitsap-Bangor base in Washington State, patrolling for divers, looking for explosives, and participating in naval exercises.

But how long will it be before the sea lions team up with the dolphins and use all that military training to overthrow their human masters?

US use sea lions in terrorism fight [Telegraph via Popular Science]

Metheny includes details about the biology and behavior of her alien species, as well as the ecology of the fictional Morae River region. In addition to the The Morae River blog, she has also published a book exploring the imaginary ecosystem.

[The Morae River via lines and colors]

The Gigatus
The Sabulo
The Blue -Throated Hulompolus
The Balandic Cula
The Spotted Bufodd
The Greater Fugamus
The Red Tailed Mardik
The Banded Terrinsc
The Mountain Uru

Physorg has the report from the Zootaxa journal detailing this clever little descendant from the sharks, chimaera, who has been around since the days of the dinosaurs. The new chimaera has been found off the coast of Southern California and Baja California, Mexico.

More about the new species, technically called Hydrolagus melanophasma:

Like sharks, chimaeras have skeletons composed of cartilage and the males have claspers for internal fertilization of females. Unlike sharks, male chimaeras also have retractable sexual appendages on the forehead and in front of the pelvic fins and a single pair of gills. Most species also have a mildly venomous spine in front of the dorsal fin. Chimaeras were once a very diverse and abundant group, as illustrated by their global presence in the fossil record. They survived through the age of dinosaurs mostly unchanged, but today these fishes are relatively scarce and are usually confined to deep ocean waters, where they have largely avoided the reach of explorers and remained poorly known to science.

You say chimaeras I say....

Snork. Come on how is that not some crazy cousin of the Snork? Still that's one bad ass genitalia rocking chimaeras, with possibly the best name in the ocean. More proof that evolution works.

Of course, the paper's main conclusion isn't that the 40-pound predator of the sky was eating children. The real significance of the paper is that the bird wasn't the scavenger that some paleontologists thought it was. It's evolutionary characteristics and brain size, as measured using CAT scans, indicate that it was more of a big-game hunter.

The paper also offers another example of how rapidly evolution can happen in a closed ecosystem like an island. The eagle's body grew much faster than its brain, in this case. This growth was apparently due to the availability of much larger prey. This prey was most likely the moa bird, but the study also suggests that the eagle might have victimized small children.

In fact, if this bird really did harass the Maoris in New Zealand, it would explain their legend of the pouakai or hokioi, a giant bird that would swoop out of the mountains to attack people, sometimes even killing small children. This giant Haast's eagle might be the mythical beast from these stories. Hopefully this news doesn't mean that there actually is a frightening beast roaming the Americas sucking the blood of innocent goats.

Extinct New Zealand eagle may have eaten humans [via PhysOrg]

(Image: the Haast's eagle attacking moa birds, from PLoS)

It's built out of the leg of a human-sized wetsuit and customized just for Ralph (the wetsuited penguin is named Ralph). He might have to wear the wetsuit for another two or three weeks, while his feathers grow back in.

Apparently, Ralph's penguin brethren didn't recognize him at first, but once the others got used to the strange suit, he was welcomed back into the tribe. I can understand their hesitation; with his wetsuit on, cute little Ralph looks like a hyper-evolved penguin from the future, here to either uplift his feathered brethren or enslave them.

Bald penguin gets sunburn wetsuit (with video) [BBC News]

Discovery's Jennifer Viegas reports in her blog Born Animal that a group of researchers from Leeds studied the friending practices of 42 juvenile lemon sharks, 2-3 years old, off the coast of the Bahamas. Basically these sharks are the equivalent of human teens and early-twenties, prime ages for Facebookery. So what does it take to have a giant friend list among lemon sharks?

First of all, lemon sharks tend to like other lemon sharks, though they will occasionally hang out with a few select other species. So if you want more lemon shark friends, be sure to send a note with your friend request explaining how close you are to being a lemon shark.

And second of all, most lemon sharks prefer friends who are close to them in size.

Writes Viegas:

The biologists also discovered juvenile sharks would rather be in the company of other similarly sized lemon sharks than to be alone. Perhaps mini gangs help the sharks with foraging, warding off predators, dealing with bigger bullies of their own species, or with some other aspect of survival.

And the fact that these sharks are so social opens the doors to additional possibilities about their behavior.

"This type of associative pattern has been linked to the evolution of cooperation and may also have implications for the flow of information through a population and social learning," the researchers note, adding that the "sharks' relative brain mass overlaps with that of mammals and birds."

You heard it here first. The new growth market for your social software is sharks. I'm not sure why the scientists didn't ask the sharks about superpokes and applications for comparing favorite human limbs to chew on.

via Discovery

Image by Doug Perrine.

In 2005 the German zoo attempted to test sexual orientation of homosexual penguins. According to the BBC, "Three pairs of male penguins had been seen attempting to mate with each other and trying to hatch offspring from stones." The zoo tried to fly in female penguins to get the males to mate with them, but gay rights activists protested, and the zoo decided to see if the male penguins really could make a family on their own.

So the zoo went ahead and gave the aquatic birds an abandoned egg to rear:

"Z and Vielpunkt, both males, gladly accepted their 'Easter gift' and got straight down to raising it," said a zoo statement.

Fast forward to today, and you have a healthy and happy baby chick ready for its own sitcom (I'm going to call it, Two And A Half Penguins.)

The fathers have been behaving, "just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring."

Penguins, the forward thinking socially embracing animals of tomorrow.

The exhibit “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids” was created by the American Museum of Natural History and is currently on display at the Museum of Science in Boston. The exhibit looks at mythical creatures from all over the world, from Greek legends of cyclopean giants to modern sightings of Bigfoot. It also compares similar regional myths, such as contrasting European images of the unicorn with similar Asian legends.

But the cornerstone of the exhibit examines the real inspirations behind these mythical creatures, displaying various models, animals, and remains. For example, the aeropyornis, a giant, now-extinct bird likely inspired the legends of the roc. Fossilized remains of the protoceratops found in the Gobi desert resemble descriptions of the griffin, alleged denizens of that region. Legend claimed that the skull once mounted in an Austrian town hall belonged to a slain dragon, but was, in fact, the head of a woolly rhinoceros. It might risk shattering your childhood dreams, but it’s also a fascinating object lesson in how “proof” of a creature’s existence has been misinterpreted as well a look at the genuinely remarkable animals that have tread the Earth.

The exhibit will be at the Boston Museum of Science through March 22, 2009.

Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids [American Museum of Natural History via Biology in Science Fiction]

In a tragic turn of events, Rocky the liger attacked the man feeding him, biting his neck and chest. The man remains in critical condition and the Wagoner County wildlife sanctuary is currently closed. Reports Cryptomundo:

According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, accredited zoos frown on the practice of mixing two different species and have never bred ligers. Keeping the two species separate has always been standard procedure. However, the AZA has admitted that ligers have occurred by accident. Several AZA zoos are reported to have ligers. Safari’s Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary is not an AZA-accredited zoo.

Sounds like ligers don't occur in nature — only when big cats are cooped up in zoos together.

Liger Attack [via Cryptomundo]

Apparently things are working out pretty well — Rocky can make the proper noises to communicate, and knows how to warn other squirrels with special shakes of his tail. Once we can create a Rocky who has the capabilities of Big Dog, the autonomous robot who can recover his balance after being kicked around by humans, we may have to worry less about whether it will join the squirrels and more about whether the squirrels will join it. A mechasquirrel may be just what rodent culture needs to have its revolution and overthrow the grain-hoarding humans.

Over at Technovelgy, Bill Christensen also thinks we should integrate the roboquirrel with a tree-climbing bot. Basically, I'm all in favor of any creature who can integrate cuteness with ninja powers, so that sounds good to me.

RoboSquirrel [Technovelgy]

Genetic engineers could create a way for humans to absorb water through their skin, so we could drink fog. That would be a more efficient way to use the water available on Earth.

National Geographic has a terrific photo feature on "biomemetics" which includes this lizard, as well as several other life forms whose features engineers hope to emulate.

This magnified image of a sharkskin reveals why sharks can move so quickly through the water. Their skin is made of interlaced scales that channel water rapidly, allowing them to move much more quickly than they would if their skin had a different texture. Scientists want to recreate sharkskin in materials that would allow seaborne ships or people to move rapidly through water.

Sign me up for gills, sharkskin, and foot drinking. I mean, if it's reversible. Top photo by Robert Clark/National Geographic and bottom photo by Eye of Science/Photo Researchers.

Biomimetics [National Geographic] (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Famous names: Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely

Crunchy goodness: 5

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: New Line Cinema has optioned We3 as a movie, with a script by Morrison. The three animal protagonists would be all CGI.

Quotable: The animals have basic speech capabilities, thanks to computer implants. The cat mostly says "stink boss," while the dog keeps asking if it is "gud dog."

Social message: Grant Morrison uses the cute (and heavily armed) beasties to preach against animal experimentation, a theme in his work going back to Animal Man in the 1980s.

9th Art Review by Matthew Craig