Stories tagged Diversity of Organisms
Mutant, man-eating catfish: everything is A-okay
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Interdependence of Life, and Human Organism
This catfish is a small one: And it still wants to eat you.
Courtesy AndyrobThe title of this post might be more accurate if it were something like “Mutant, man-eating catfish: probably not real,” but that one doesn’t thrill me so much. A lot of stuff has been spilled, leaked, excreted, and written on the Science Buzz’s cryptocouch of cryptozoology, but none of it looks like “probably not.”
So get a load of this: goonch catfish in the Kali River, which separates India and Nepal, are rumored to have developed a taste for human flesh and some locals think that they are now targeting human swimmers as prey! Whoa!
Bagarius yarrelli, or the goonch catfish, will commonly grow to a length of around 6 feet, and may weigh over 150 pounds. The story has it, however, that a particular goonch (or goonches) have grown exceptionally large off of a rich diet of partially burned human corpses thrown into the Kali River with the remains of funeral pyres. Not content with the charred leftovers of this nutritious delicacy, the goonch (or goonches) has been seeking out fresh meat.
Over the last twenty years, there have been a multitude of cases of bathers being pulled beneath the surface of the Kali, never to reappear. The most recent reported case involved an 18-year-old Nepali being dragged down into the river by something looking like “an elongated pig.” (Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! Catfish can look like “elongated pigs,” okay?)
Isn’t that awesome? Mutant, man-eating catfish? Pretty sweet, especially if you don’t live by the Kali River.
Heck, I’d say you could stop reading now, if you want. I’m just going to go over a couple other points, which I think are more or less incidental. Not. Worth. Considering. Everything is so cool as it is, why would you want any more?
So. The mighty, carnivorous goonch… Mighty indeed is the goonch—the current world record holder comes in at 6 feet and 161 pounds, and this site claims that goonch weighing between 300 and 400 pounds can be observed in areas where fishing is not allowed (and, presumably, these are un-mutated specimens). “Carnivorous” is accurate too, although, well… generally B. yarrelli is thought to feed on aquatic insects, smaller fish, and prawns.
To describe the huge catfish as “mutants” might be a little sensationalistic too. Technically, to be a mutant something has to have a new genetic characteristic. To the best of my knowledge, eating people shouldn’t actually cause your genes to change. Unless those people were radioactive, or something, but in that case you’d probably just get cancer, not grow really big.
And there’s one other thing, one tiny little thing. I noticed that many of the websites for Kali River resorts and lodges (Bip, Boop, Bip) mention that large crocodiles can frequently be spotted in the water. But, you know, just because there are crocodiles around, and crocodiles have been known, on occasion, to pull people into the water and eat them, and people in this particular river have been pulled into the water and probably eaten… that doesn’t necessarily mean that crocodiles are responsible. Really, it could be anything.
Like, maybe, mutant, man-eating catfish.
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Another record holder: Sign touting Paris, Tennessee, as the 'Home of the World's Biggest Fish Fry
Courtesy Photo by Dieter C. Ullrich, for Worlds Biggest Fish Fry, a Tennessee Local Legacies projectLooks like the world of piscine superlatives has a new leader in the Deepest Living Fish category. The highly-pressurized Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, has been videotaped feeding on shrimp at a depth of 4.8 miles. That’s a lot atmospheres crushing down on it, but it doesn’t seem to mind.
Scientists from the UK and Japan used remote controlled robots with cameras to film the feed-fest in the Japan Trench located around the Pacific Rim. Seventeen of the fish can be seen in the video scurrying about the ocean floor. You can see watch video of the new record holders here.
You notice the category is for Deepest LIVING Fish. The record for deepest of any fish is held by Abyssobrotula galatheae, a fish scooped up from the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench. Unfortunately, it was dead, so it was competing in an entirely different category.
Well, anyway, both fish join the ranks of other gilled record holders. And while we’re at it, we may as well review them. The title for smallest is held currently by Paedocypris progenetica, a bizarre little creature discovered living in highly acidic waters on the island of Sumatra. It’s about the length of your thumbnail, and also holds the record for smallest vertebrate. On the other hand, the world’s largest fish is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). If any of you guessed it was the blue whale, you need to turn off your Xbox machines and bask in my pity. By the way, the whale shark can grow up to 40 feet long, so I guess it’s also the world’s longest.
The world’s slowest fish is the seahorse (Hippocampus sp.) which drags along at .001 per hour, and would take about an hour to move five feet. The sailfish, Istiophorus platypterus, which has been clocked at 68 miles per hour, is the fastest. Not bad for giant-finned brute that can weigh up to 200 pounds.
The winner of the World’s Ugliest Fish is as yet undecided, and probably has something to do with the fact there’s not even a category for Most Beautiful Fish. But I think the right choice was made for the Scariest Fish. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark sewer.
I suppose the record holder of the Funniest Fish title could be the clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris), but the category seems too broad. Funniest how? Looking? Tasting? Ability to tell a joke? The Dumbest Fish in the World category is equally too broad? Again, it depends on the criteria. It certainly could be the spawning moronic salmon you always see on nature programs jumping right into the waiting jaws of a hungry grizzly bear. Or it could be all fish.
Since I’ve taken it this far, here are some lesser-known categories. I suppose the Fastest Fish Recipe could somehow involve a sailfish, but I doubt the World’s Biggest Fish Fry in Paris, Tennessee has anything to do with the whale shark.
A closer look at bird banding
I went to the "Fall Color Blast" at the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center this afternoon. I arrived to watch the bird banding just as a large group was leaving. Since we were the only people there, we were able to watch a bird being banded up close. I used my camera to capture it on video.
If you want to view the video in higher quality double click on the video and choose "watch in high quality" (below the video). You can also choose to watch it full screen by clicking on the icon in the lower right.
What on earth am I supposed to do with this thing?: A pterosaur considers his situation.
Courtesy John ConwayPaleontology, y’all, paleontology. We’ve got these bones, these fossilized bones. And they’re nice bones, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes they leave a little to be desired when it comes to reconstructing the nitty gritty and sticky details of what living dinosaurs (and pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, therapsids, etc) were actually like. A skeleton can give us a good idea of a creature’s general shape; it can show where the muscles went (more or less), what sort of food it ate, how it probably moved—that kind of thing. But how did they behave? What color were they? Exactly how strong were they? There are a whole slew of questions that get to be a little tricky.
So, how do paleontologists go about answering these questions? They get creative, they study all the tiniest details of the fossils, and, sometimes, they look to living animals for analogy—that is to say, if an animal alive today that lives in a similar environment to that of an extinct animal, and has a similar body type to the extinct animal, you might be able to base knowledge of the extinct animal on what you know of the living animal.
It’s a valuable avenue of study, but dinosaurs and their ilk were pretty different, after all, so how far do you think can we take analogies to living creatures?
And now on to the news item.
A Japanese researcher has opened up his sass-box and gotten all up in the faces of paleontologists around the world. Pterosaur specialist paleontologists are particularly fired up, and they’re a dangerous bunch. “Peer review” among pterosaur specialists, as I understand it, involves switchblades, and the majority of the community sports eye-patches.
This scientist, Katsufumi Sato of the University of Tokyo, is saying that pterosaurs (all of the huge extinct flying reptiles) probably maybe couldn’t actually, you know… fly.
Oh no you di’en’t!
Says Sato: Yes, yes I did. Specifically, what the scientist did was place accelerometers on the wings of a couple dozen sea birds on the Crozet Islands. The accelerometers measured, more or less, the flapping force and speed of the birds’ wings.
Among the birds studied were wandering albatrosses, which have the largest wingspans of any living birds. Large seabirds like this have often been used as analogies for pterosaurs for their somewhat similar body shapes. Many pterosaurs probably lived in a similar habitat to modern seabirds as well.
Albatrosses fly by riding shifting wind currents, and by flapping their wings when the wind isn’t suitable, or is absent entirely. Sato found that the seabirds he studied have two flapping speeds, a faster speed for taking off, and a slower speed for staying aloft in the absence of wind. He also noticed that, as this flapping speed is limited by the birds’ strength, it decreases in heavier birds with longer wings.
According to the calculations Sato based off of this data, birds (or pterosaurs) weighing more than about 90 pounds would be unable to fly without using wind currents—they simply wouldn’t be able to flap their wings fast enough to stay in the air. There were certainly pterosaurs that size and much smaller, but a lot of flying reptiles were probably a great deal larger than that (a very conservative estimate for the quetzalcoatlus, for example, would have it weighing around 220 pounds).
The article I read on this research doesn’t get into Sato’s hypothesis much more than that, but I’d assume that this means that larger pterosaurs would then also be unable to take off from anywhere other than, say, a cliff face. I wonder if the implication is also that they wouldn’t be doing any flying at all; that medium to large pterosaurs wouldn’t even be gliding on wind currents because, at some point, they’d need to gain some altitude on their own steam.
But, whatever the specifics, them’s fightin’ words, and pterosaur specialists the world over are no doubt sharpening their boot-spikes, and wrapping their fists in chains.
Is it a valid analogy? Maaaaybeeee… But I’m betting against it. There have been some interesting theories lately about how the largest of the pterosaurs may not have flown as much as we used to think, but they don’t imply that they couldn’t fly at all. In fact, the study I’m thinking of would further distance pterosaurs from large seabirds in terms of behavior and their ecological niches (making any analogies a little less apt).
Other scientists argue that in addition to anatomical and physiological differences that should be considered, the atmosphere of the Mesozoic was, on the whole, somewhat denser, and had higher concentrations of oxygen—factors that would have allowed flight for larger, heavier animals. Actually, I recommend checking out the discussion following the article. There are a bunch of explanations of how pterosaurs could have flown, despite what this study suggests. But, if you do go, bring your knives—they’re an angry bunch.
Cute, nautical, and Scandinavian: But probably smaller.
Courtesy hans sSo… we’re learning about genetics, aren’t we? We can’t help it—here we have see-through frogs, there we have genetically engineered vegetables, here we have a fatherless child with the same hair color, eye color, and blood type as me. Genetics are all around us these days, in our schools, in our dinners, and calling our lawyers. As much as we might try to hide from it, the subject is unavoidable.
It’s nice, then, when some aspect of this genetic tsunami can take our minds off of all the tricky stuff. Things like mutant frogs are fun (All those legs! Somebody give them their own cartoon!), but they never last long (The frogs tend to die. Cancel the frog show.)
I think, however, that I may have found a winner: Viking mice. They’re genetically remarkable, and they’re lifespan is the same as any other mouse: about 2 or 3 years. Somebody start work on a Viking Mouse cartoon!
So what we have here is your common house mouse. The house mouse evolved into a variety of different strains as it spread into Western Europe about 3,000 years ago, during the Iron Age. Little French house mice learned to wear berets and smoke cigarettes, German mice developed a love of sausages and efficiency, and so forth; the Iron Age was a wonderful time, and it birthed many of our favorite cultural stereotypes. However, something interesting has come up in a recent genetic study of British house mice.
The surprising result of a nationwide rash of mouse paternity cases, the mice of Britain were surprised to find that they themselves were the products of unexpected parents. Studying their mitochondrial DNA (traceable genetic material from the mother’s side), it appears that most mice from mainland Britain are closely related to mice from Germany (the descendants of little Saxon mice?). Mice from the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland, however, were found to be “Viking mice,” genetically similar to mice from Norway. And it makes sense—the Orkneys were an important center of the Norwegian Viking “kingdom,” back in the 11th and 12th centuries. These little mousies are the descendants of the warlike Viking mice, who hitched rides across the North Sea in the holds of Viking longboats a thousand years ago. Or… maybe they had their own tiny boats… Viking mice!
We pretty much already knew that Vikings were in the Orkneys at that time, but the genetic evidence from the mice are is a good example of how non-human DNA (mitochondrial DNA in particular) can be a tool for tracking other historical human migrations, and… and…
Just picture those little Viking mice. Tiny helmets, curly little beards, squeaky battle cries… they must have been adorable. Just to see them slaughtering little monk mice, it must have been too cute.
Oh, also, while we’re on the subject of house mice—I noticed this little section in Wikipedia’s article on them. After being accidentally introduced to the south Atlantic Gough Island, house mice, which normally have a body length of about 3 inches, began growing “unusually large” and feeding on albatross chicks. The mice kill the chicks, which can be about a meter tall, by “working in groups and gnawing on them until the bleed to death.” Talk about Viking mice.
What, I can only lock this from the outside?: Scientists have observed behavior in ants in Brazil where a small group of ants sacrifice themselves each night for the good of the colony by covering the colony entrance from the outside, leaving them outside at night exposed to all sorts of natural forc
Courtesy Fir0002How do you secure your home at night? With a deadbolt lock? Switching on some high-tech electronic security system? A pit bulls (without lipstick)?
Whatever you do, it's probably not as problematic as what a few ants do each night in Brazil. Researchers have observed that one to eight ants from a colony each night sacrifice themselves for the well being of the colony. They stay above ground pushing sand over the entrance to the colony to protect their peers from predators during the night. Because they're left outside, they most often die in the night, either from freezing in chilly temperatures, getting blown away in high winds or being a midnight snack for a predator.
A typical ant colony in Brazil can number over 100,000, so the few ants lost each night for security is not a huge mathematical loss. How exactly the night workers are selected isn't known for sure, but researchers think they're probably older ants who are approaching the end of their natural life span.
Six-toed cats can remain at Hemingway museum
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Hemingway cat: One of Snowball's many descendants takes it easy behind the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe fifty or so cats living around the former estate of author Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida, have been granted a reprieve from the US Department of Agriculture and are being allowed to remain on the grounds where the famed novelist once lived. The island property is now the Hemingway Home and Museum, and one of Key West’s more popular attractions. The federal agency originally wanted the cats removed or caged because the museum lacked the proper license to exhibit animals.
All the cats roaming the grounds are descended from a cat named Snowball given to the author by a ship’s captain in the 1930s. Snowball was a polydactyl cat, meaning its paws contained more than the usual number of toes. Typically a cat has 18 toes – five on the front and four on back. Polydactyls commonly have six or seven toes on the front, and sometimes an extra one on the rear, but the record is held by a California cat that had an incredible eight toes on each foot! Polydactyly is a congenital abnormality genetically passed down to offspring. In some cases the extra toes are like opposable thumbs giving the cats an almost human-like dexterity. Snowball’s descendents all carry the genetic trait but not all are polydactyl.
Ernie the cat
Courtesy Mark RyanOur family cat was a polydactyl, and we named him Ernie in honor of Hemingway and his six-toed cats. Ernie’s extra-large feet allowed him to gain lots of weight during his life with us. At his heftiest he weighed 24 pounds. He was huge, a real lard butt. His full name - Ernesto ”El Gato Gordo” Hemingway - was well deserved.
Science Buzz Creature Spotlight: The Crocowhale
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
The Ambulocetus: Not looking very fearsome at the moment, but it's thinking horrible, horrible thoughts.
Courtesy ArthurWeasleyIt’s Friday, y’all, and you know what that means!
No, not falling asleep at a booth in Applebee’s (should have gone to TGIF, right?)!
No, not a methadone suppository (not from me, anyway)!
And, no, not matching butterfly tattoos (that’s a Saturday thing)!
What’s left? Why a Science Buzz creature feature, of course! Sure, Friday has never been Creature Spotlight day before, sure, and, yes, it’s unlikely that I’ll remember to do it next Friday… But, hey, we’re Buzzketeers, right? We live in the now.
And so, with a small current science introduction, the creature of the week:
The crocowhale* (also known as ambulocetus, or “walking whale”).
If you’re keeping up on your cetacean evolution paleontology, you might have noticed this story recently. The ancestors of whales, paleontologists are quite certain, were land animals. Finding the evolutionary steps of their return to the water has been a challenge, however.
The distant ancestors of whales were carnivorous ungulates (ungulates are hoofed animals), that probably looked a little like dogs (with hooves). At some point these creatures began adapting to live and hunt in and around the water, eventually evolving into fully aquatic species.
Living vertebrates that swim employ a variety of propulsion methods. Several swimming styles seem to develop in sequence as a group of animals becomes more fully adapted to living in the water: swimming with four legs, paddling with just the back legs, undulation of the hips, undulation of the tale, and finally oscillation of the tail. The sequence of whale ancestor fossils seemed to follow this pattern (with modern whales having lost their hind legs to propel themselves with just their tails), except that for a long time it appeared that the step of swimming by hip undulation.
Recent fossil discoveries, however, show a whale ancestor that appeared to have a long fluke-less tail (it didn’t have big tail fins, like a modern whale), along with long hind legs and large, webbed feet. The skeleton seems to indicate that this creature would have propelled itself by undulating its hips, using its webbed hind feet as hydrofoils. And so, la de da, we have an important step in whale evolution in the bag. But, for the creature spotlight, we’re going back a couple branches in the cetacean family tree.
Before the group had evolved to the point of the hip wiggler above (called georgiacetus, by the way), there was the ambulocetus. Ambulocetus was a creature that probably still spent some of its time on land. It was about 10 feet long, and moved around on short, powerful legs. With its eyes and nostrils located on top of its long head, it probably looked something like a furry crocodile. Indeed, paleontologists think that ambulocetus probably acted very much like a crocodile, and filled a similar ecological niche.
Ambulocetus could have waited for large prey almost entirely submerged in shallow water, with only its eyes and nostrils breaking the surface. When something worthwhile came down to the water’s edge, it could have launched its body out of the water with its particularly powerful hind legs, ambushing its prey. The ambulocetus would have then dragged its struggling meal back into the water, and waited for it to drown. Yes! Crocowhale!
Here’s a cool illustration of ambulocetus in action.
* “Crocowhale” is a brand new term, and while I’m all for you using it in everyday life, don’t put it in any biology papers or anything. Yet.
Local chump provides opportunity for skunk-related science
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Flow of Matter and Energy, and Human Organism
Look, everybody!: A cat!
Courtesy justinleifIn a delightful reverse-Pepe Le Pew scenario, a Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania, woman recently mistook a skunk for a cat and was blasted with skunk juice.
Supposedly the woman had mistaken the wild animal for her neighbor’s cat, and was petting it (or attempting to pet it?) when it sprayed her. The skunk then ran into the woman’s home. Police spent hours at the scene (seriously) although there has been no confirmation as to whether or not they were able to retrieve the skunk.
So… first of all: wow. I hope this woman wasn’t extraordinarily elderly, or suffering from some condition that prevents her from distinguishing cats from skunks, because then that would make me a bad person for making fun of her. And I’m surely doing that in my head right now.
Cats, after all, belong to the order felidae, skunks to caniformia. (Skunks technically aren’t mustelids any more—how about that?) Also unlike cats, skunks are characterized by short, powerful legs, long front claws for digging, and a unique black and white striped pattern. And, of course, their pungent anal scent glands, which brink us back to ol’ ma’am skunk.
Close enough to pet the animal, the lady was well inside what we in the skunk business like to call “the danger zone.” Muscles located around their scent producing glands, after all, allow skunks to accurately spray at ranges up to 15 feet. Her close proximity likely means that the woman received a full dose of spray, something around 3 ml. Skunks carry enough scent for about 5 sprays before they need to spend more than a week “recharging.”
If the spray catches you directly in the eyes, it can cause severe burning and eye watering, or even 10 – 15 minutes of blindness in some cases. Most of the time, however, the smell will be your main concern. As this site details, skunk spray is mainly composed of seven volatile molecules. The stinkiest three of them are called “thiols,” compounds that contain a sulfur and hydrogen group. Thiols are known for their powerful repellent odor and, uh-oh, they bond strongly to the proteins in our skin. The remaining four molecules in skunk spray aren’t as stinky initially, but they can be converted to thiols when they interact with water. This is why hair sprayed by a skunk can stink for months after the incident when it becomes damp. This is also why I hate my roommate’s golden retriever.
To deodorize these thiols, one must convert them into compounds that have little odor. Thiols can be changed into less stinky sulfonic acids by oxidizing them with baking soda or hydrogen peroxide, but this, unfortunately, can leave you looking a little fried.
Except for the possibility that there might yet be a skunk in the her house, the Pennsylvania woman may have gotten off pretty light, all things considered. Skunks will only expend spray if they can’t warn another creature off by posturing: they will hiss, stamp their feet, and raise their tails threateningly. These are not generally the actions of a happy cat. It could be that some additional mistakes and oversights were made on the part of the lady, or it could be that the skunk was behaving erratically. If this was the case, it raises another concern: rabies. The CDC states that skunks make up about a third of the reported rabies cases in all species in this country. There haven’t been any reported cases of skunks transmitting rabies to humans in the last couple decades, but it seems to me that this woman has something of the pioneer spirit, and would be a likely candidate for getting bitten by a rabid skunk. But not this time.
And so we salute you, skunk lady, for mistaking a skunk for a cat. I like to think that all of us are a little wiser for it.
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