Two 15-Foot Oarfish Surface Off Mexican Coast, Elusive ‘Sea Serpents’ Caught On Camera [VIDEO]

Vacations are about experiencing and seeing new things – and then gloating about them to friends and co-workers back home. A group of travelers who recently took a trip to Mexico’s Sea of Cortés will have plenty of material for water-cooler parleys after this adventure. While kayaking, they came across two 15-foot oarfish, which belong to an elusive species of deep sea fish that has inspired countless tales of brushes with sea serpents and is rarely spotted alive.

Unlike the stuff of legend, the recent sighting of the giant oarfish was totally legit. One wise vacationer got some of the oarfish encounter on video. 

As seen in the footage of the oarfish posted to YouTube, the 15-foot fish swam into shallow waters and circled the kayakers, who were affiliated with Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. At one point, one of the oarfish nearly makes its way completely onto the shore. Someone with a kayak paddle scoots the fish back into the water, where it takes off and passes underneath one of the kayaks.

“My God, look at the size of that thing!” one of the kayakers exclaims.

Oarfish, the world’s largest bony fish, are rarely seen in the wild. Until recently, biologists knew very little about them. They live in temperate and tropical waters around the globe and typically spend their days between 650 feet and 3,000 feet below the surface. Oarfish can grow up to 36 feet in length, with some specimens exceeding 50 feet.

Humans’ encounters with oarfish usually occur only when corpses wash up on the beach. Last year, snorkelers on Catalina Island off the California coast encountered a dead 18-foot oarfish, which they towed to shore and photographed. A few days later, a 14-foot oarfish corpse turned up north of San Diego.

Legend maintains that the appearance of an oarfish is a sure sign of an impending earthquake. But the jury is still out on whether the myth has any scientific standing.

“Deep-sea fish living near the sea bottom are more sensitive to the movements of active faults than those near the surface of the sea,” Kiyoshi Wadatsumi, director of non-profit earthquake prediction research organization e-PISCO, told the Japan Times in 2010 following several sightings of oarfish near the Japanese coast.
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Why are fruit flies so hard to hit? UW research has an answer

Once they sense danger, fruit flies can pitch their bodies like a fighter jet during flight, rolling almost upside down in order to shift momentum and speed to avoid a oncoming threat, new research shows.

“We discovered that fruit flies alter course in less than one one-hundredth of a second, 50 times faster than we blink our eyes, which is faster than we ever imagined.” Michael Dickinson, UW professor of biology and co-author of the paper about these findings, said in a news release.

In his lab, Dickinson and other researchers have found that evasive maneuvers performed by fruit flies, also known as Drosophila hydei, are very similar to those of a fighter jet. His research will be published in the April 11 issue of Science.

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Freeman voices concerns about endangered lemurs in documentary

In ‘Island of Lemurs: Madagascar’, Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman tells the story of the oldest surviving primates, the lemurs.

Shot with IMAX 3D cameras, the film follows conservationist Dr. Patricia Wright as she studies Madagascar’s lemur population and attempts to protect the endangered primates from deforestation.

“We have an extraordinary animal called the Indri. That’s the largest of all the lemurs that are alive today and it is an incredible singer-like, operatic,” says lemur expert Dr. Patricia Wright.

“The Sifakas are what we would call the Dancing Lemurs. They’re the ones that… they can go on the ground and do the elegant dance, or they can be in the trees going from tree to tree… huge leaps, wonderful, wonderful animals!,” says Dr. Wright.

“All these lemurs have one thing in common – from the little one to the very largest one – they all have female dominance. The females are the leaders. The females are the ones that make the choices of where they go and what foods they eat and where they’re going to sit,” says Dr. Wright.

‘Island of Lemurs: Madagascar’ is open now in IMAX theatres across the United States.

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Dog Sells at Nearly $2 million

We’ve all heard about dog breeds known as pets for the rich and famous. We see movie stars and business tycoons with their little toy dogs in designer doggy bags. However, the idea of an elite breed has been around for a long time.

In China, the Tibetan mastiff has always been considered as a status symbol for the wealthy. These dogs have been used to guard homes and temples for hundreds of years, and the Chinese have managed take good care of this dog’s heritage.

Recently in a "luxury pet" fair held in Zhejiang’s eastern province, one of these Tibetan mastiff puppies were sold for nearly $2 million in what could be considered as the priciest dog sale in history. According to Zhang Gengyun, a dog breeder based in the area, the pups are sired by the best mastiff studs and have a strong bloodline. He also mentions that there was one red-haired mastiff that was sold for around 6 million yuan.

Spending all that money for a dog might sound crazy, but these dogs are taken very seriously in China. Owning them means more than just having a loyal companion, it’s also a mark of power and wealth. Sending prices of these dogs have skyrocketed over the years.

This huge and sometime aggressive dog is one of the oldest breeds around. The Tibetan mastiff is known for their round manes which makes them look like lions, capable of growing 380 centimeters tall and weighing as much as a full grown man. What makes these dogs even more special how rare they are, another reason why they’re so expensive.

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That goat may be a whole lot smarter than it looks

"That's the common public impression, that goats and most other farm animals are not very intelligent," says Elodie Briefer, a researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Zurich.

In a recent study, she and her colleagues found that behind that dazed look is a pretty smart brain, too.

It turns out that goats haven't really been studied for their cognitive skills, at least not in the same way that chimps have.

"By working with them, we realized that they are actually very curious animals," Briefer says. "Most people who own goats, they know that they can open locks and escape from any pen."

The goats involved in the study were already domesticated. They were put through a series of tests over the span of several months to measure their thinking abilities.

What they designed was essentially an obstacle course to get food out of a box. Briefer and her team timed the goats to see how fast they could get their grub.

"After these really long intervals, they could solve the task within two minutes, which was quite surprising for us," she says.

Even though the research focused on obtaining food, a goat's intelligence isn't limited to that. In fact, a goat's intelligence is one of the reasons the animal can survive pretty much anywhere, contributing to the resilience of the species.

"They can manipulate objects easily, they can learn complex tasks, and they can remember them," Briefer says.

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New Baby Gorilla in San Diego Zoo

The closest way for us to see exotic animal from another corner of the world without leaving our city or town is to visit the zoo. Zoos are great places to take kids and to have them experience a small glimpse of the wild. Animals in the zoo are also well taken care of and are given enclosures that mimic their natural habitat. Some animals are even born in the zoo after adapting to their environment.

Recently, one of the biggest zoos in North America, the San Diego Zoo, welcomed a new baby gorilla to their family.  This is the 17th gorilla delivered in the zoo, and was via a Caesarian section, srare for gorillas in captivity. The birth was successful, however the baby gorilla caught pneumonia. One of its lungs was also treated since it collapsed.

A statement from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park explains that it developed the illness which turned into an inflamed lung with congestion after it was born. The park director of veterinary services, Nadine Lamberski, says that they’ve been working on getting the baby to recover after some days of treatment.

Christina Simmons, the zoo’s spokeswoman, says that the vets have performed some procedures which inflated the baby gorilla’s lungs.

The mother gorilla, named Imani, has been recovering well since her birth. The baby and its mother are lowland gorillas, which are labeled as endangered. There is no name for the baby just yet, but the staff is optimistic about its recovery.

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Anemones are Half Plant, Half Animal

If you’ve been watching shows that talk about how the human race started, like Cosmos or shows about genetics, you’d know that there are certain pieces and traits in our DNA that are similar to plants. Although animals and plants are two very different organisms, there are species that could bridge the gap between them. The “missing link” as what most would call it.

Recent genetic studies have discovered that sea anemones, like the ones that certain types of fish live in and eat, are part animal and part plant. The phylum Cnidaria, which contains around 10,000 kinds of animals found mostly in water and marine environments, kept a lot of their plant-like traits, and sea anemones fall under this classification.

Researchers discovered the sea anemone’s half animal and half plant trait though gene expression. They examined the two different processes of gene expression, transcription and translation, and found that an anemone’s transcription is similar to animals while their translation mimics the characteristics of plants.

So if we all have the same bits of pieces of DNA as plants, why don’t we have the same attributes as they do? Well, it’s either because we lost these traits or we changed them through time. It’s like how polar bears changed from brown bears to adapt to their environment.

Evolution is a very complex process that takes a very long time. In fact, it took a single cell organism billions of years to turn into something that could survive on land.  As new discoveries about genetics are revealed, we can understand more about other living organism and how they relate to us, no matter how distant.

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World's largest nests are socialist bird collectives

NO, IT'S not a giant haystack - it's an example of one of the largest structures constructed by birds.

Sociable weavers (Philetairus socius) build huge communal nests - multistorey apartment complexes - from sticks and grass. The structures last for decades, sometimes over 100 years. Multiple families live together and even help raise each other's young; you could call them socialist weavers, though that might bring to mind a collective of 19th-century Lancashire textile workers.

The birds - anything up to 100 pairs per nest - live in the harsh Kalahari desert in southern Africa. The thick thatched roof protects them from the sweltering sun, and retains heat during the chill desert night. Photographer Dillon Marsh is interested in how humans and other animals interact, and the weaver's habit of building their nests on telegraph poles attracted him as a subject. "I then became intrigued by the way the nests, although inanimate, almost seemed to be living organisms as they are in a continual state of collapse and repair," he says.

Food is not super-abundant in the desert, so the birds, pictured below, delay breeding until they are 2 years old. It's one of the reasons that it makes evolutionary sense to live communally. In the past the birds had to nest in trees, something else not commonly available in the desert. Telephone poles have allowed the weavers to expand their range.

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Moth that Looks Like A Poodle Baffles The Internet

Pictures of a mysterious creature that looks like a cross between a moth and poodle recently went viral on the Web, with some people turning these pictures into memes, only increasing their popularity. The creature is called a Venezuelan poodle moth, and because of how peculiar it looks, plenty of questions revolve around whether it’s real or not.

Fortunately, the poodle moths are 100 percent real, and are possibly a new species of moth identified a few years ago. In 2009, Kyrgyzstan-based biologist Dr. Arthur Anker discovered the moths in Venezuela’s Gran Sabanaarea. The species seems to be related to another fuzzy looking moth, the Muslin Moth or Diaphoramendica.

The poodle moth almost certainly fits into the Lasiocampidae family and the genus Artace or other genus connected to Artace. There is also a possibility that the poodle moth is a new subspecies of the Artacecribraria, a species known to reside around Argentina and up to the northern parts of North America. So far, there are about 10 to 15 Artace species in South America that have been described and scientifically acknowledged. The possibility of the poodle moth to be a new species of previously scientifically undescribed species, or even a new regional subspecies, is high.

Beyond the photos and detail of its discovery, not a lot is known about this strange looking creature.

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The Worst Places To Get Stung By A Bee: Nostril, Lip, Penis

It started when a honeybee flew up Michael Smith’s shorts and stung him in the testicles.

Smith is a graduate student at Cornell University, who studies the behaviour and evolution of honeybees. In this line of work, stings are a common and inevitable hazard. “If you’re wearing shorts and doing bee work, a bee can get up there easily,” he says. “But I was really surprised that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.”

That got him thinking: Where’s the worst place on the body to get stung?

Everyone who works with stinging insects has their own answers, but Smith couldn’t find any hard data. Even Justin Schmidt was no help. Schmidt is the famous creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index—a scale that measures the painfulness of insect stings using wonderful synaesthetic descriptions that almost read like wine-tasting notes. Wine-tasting notes of agony.

According to Schmidt’s index, the sweat bee sting (1 on a scale of 0 to 4) feels like “a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm”. The yellowjacket sting (2) is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent; imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” And the daddy of stinging insects—the bullet ant (4+)—produces “pure, intense, brilliant pain, like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel.”

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