Glowing Monkeys Make More Glowing Monkeys

The first genetically modified primates that can pass their modifications to their offpsring have been created by Japanese scientists.

The marmosets, pictured above, express a green fluorescent protein in their skin. The gene for producing the glow was delivered to the first marmoset embryos via a modified virus. But now that modification method could become unnecessary. One male marmoset fathered a child (pictured at right) that also contained the transgenes.

Transgenic animals are a key tool in the biomedical researchers’ toolbox. They allow scientists to model the function of genes and the efficacy of treatments. Many transgenic mice lines exist, but often the small rodents are too different from humans to effectively extrapolate their responses to human beings. Primates, on the other hand, are far closer biologically to humans, but before the new technique, creating primate models had proven difficult and expensive.

Now, biologists may be able to produce whole groups of marmosets that mimic humans with genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

Original article here.

Strange Species Discovered Last Year

Below are several examples from a Wired article on 10 Strange Species Discovered Last Year:

The world’s tiniest seahorse, Satomi’s Pygmy Seahorse, aka Hippocampus satomiae. Found in Indonesian waters, it is about half an inch tall:



The Deep Blue Chromis or Chromis abyssus was named in honor of the BBC program that funded the trip on which it was discovered. This small blue fish was found in Palau, which is hundreds of miles from anywhere:



The nocturnal Ghost Slug, or Selenochlamys ysbryda, is a member of the family Trigonochlamydidae and was found in a garden in Canton, Wales:



Phobaeticus chani is the world's longest insect, measuring in at 22.3 inches total and with a body length of 14 inches. It is found in Borneo:



Opisthostoma vermiculum is a Malaysian gastropod that has a shell that defies the standard laws of shell twisting. It coils along four separate axes, not three like most of its relatives:



Original article here.

Pygmy Jerboa

The video below features a pygmy jerboa. Jerboas are small jumping desert rodents found throughout Asia and northern Africa that resemble mice with long tufted tails and very long hind legs.

Meerkats Don’t Spoil Their Babies

For a meerkat pup’s first 100 days, it follows adults around throughout the day while belting out squeaky begging calls for the entire colony to hear. The adults bend to the pup’s will, sacrificing their own meals to give it meaty sustenance. But by a few months of age, meerkat pups stop begging and become nutritionally independent, acquiring their food exclusively by foraging for themselves.

Zoologists wanted to understand why a young meerkat would stop using its charm to get free food and begin working for its own food. They found that as the pups aged into juveniles their voices changed: pup begging calls reached an average of 1231 Hz, whereas the juveniles peaked at 953 Hz.

This change in pitch might make their begs less persuasive, eliciting less food and leaving the juveniles no option but to forage on their own. To explore this, the zoologists followed adult meerkats around with a loudspeaker that played younger baby meerkat begs. They found the adults started offering their own food, even to older juveniles. And the juveniles — which had been past their begging prime — eagerly ran over to grab the free meals, ceasing their own foraging.

A meerkat’s inevitably maturing voice may be crucial for its colony’s survival. A pup may prefer to get free food rather than work, but the colony would go hungry if this continued for too long.

Original article here.

Whiffling Goose Caught on Camera

The pictures above and below are of a goose performing an upside-down contortion as it battled to land in heavy winds. The bird was captured by a wildlife photographer flying with its neck twisted 180 degrees and its body seemingly facing the wrong way. The bird, a greylag goose, was photographed as it came in to land on a freshwater lake. (See articles here and here).

The maneuver is a tried and tested way of braking, called whiffling.

The aerodynamics of bird flight are similar to those governing a plan, with lift created by the curved shape of the wing combined with velocity. This creates an area of low pressure above the wing and high pressure beneath it, creating upwards force.

But Mother Nature has also provided birds with the ability to decelerate swiftly by turning over their wings to "spill out" the air, a maneuver known as whiffling. According to ornithologists it makes a bird "drop like a stone" so that they instantly lose height.

Some ducks and wading birds such as black-tailed and bar-tailed godwits and pelicans are also known to whiffle.

Below is the bird's "landing sequence":









The additional image below, taken from here, shows a group of pink footed geese in various stages of whiffling:

The Extreme Mammal Hall of Fame

The biggest (and smallest) and baddest (and cutest) mammals recently went on display in the new “Extreme Mammals” exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The exhibit will run through January 3, 2010. Below are several examples of the specimens:

Below is Indricotherium, the largest land mammal ever discovered. An adult could weigh 20 tons, more than a family of African elephants. It lived in the forests of central Asia about 30 million years ago, but died out as those forests turned into grassland. Its closest living relative is the rhinoceros:



The Proboscis monkey (Nasalis gerardis) is nature’s Pinnocchio. A male’s nose can grow to 7 inches long. This extended sniffer is believed to attract the lady monkeys:



The exhibit features six real, live sugar gliders on display. These tiny marsupials can jump for extended distances by using their skin like a parachute:



The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) is covered with scales made from keratin, the same stuff that makes up your fingernails. If you scare them, they turn into a ball of blades while spraying you with jets of skunk-like liquid:



No list of strange mammals would be complete without the platypus. Not only do they look strange, but they don’t give birth to live young like other mammals — they lay eggs. Another strange fact: Platypuses produce milk but don’t have nipples, so it oozes out onto patches of their skin where the babies can access its nutrients:



The odd-looking mammal Macrauchenia has a camel-like body and a long giraffe-like neck and a flexible elephant-like trunk. The South American animal went extinct 10,000 years ago:



Original article here.

Cicadas Primed for Defense

The periodical cicada is one of the world’s longest-living insects, but nobody knows why it times its death with bizarre precision: It either lives for 13 years or 17 years, on the dot. Now, Japanese researchers have developed a model that may explain the animals’ mysteriously accurate biological clocks.

The noisy winged critters spend more than 99 percent of their 13 or 17 years as juveniles, sucking on roots in underground lairs. In the summertime, they crawl out en masse — up to 40,000 can emerge from under a single tree within days. Their subterranean tenures are intriguing not only because 13 and 17 years are long periods over which to remain synchronized, but also because both numbers are prime — divisible only by themselves and the number 1.

A leading theory is that long, prime-numbered life cycles minimize the likelihood that the 13-year broods and 17-year broods will ever mate. If the animals lived smaller prime-numbered lives, like 5 and 7, they’d sync up every 35 years; if their lifespans were large, non-prime numbers, like 12 and 16 years, they might inadvertently mate every 48 years. But the large prime numbers 13 and 17 only match up every 221 years.

Though this theory is mathematically sound, no one could say why the animals would need to minimize hybridization, so a researcher developed a mathematical model to explore the rationale. He thought if 13-year and 17-year broods interbred, they might produce offspring with intermediate lifecycles — for example 15 years. This would result in their emergence two years before or after the vast majority of their fellow cicadas.

This is a problem, Cooley said, because periodical cicadas find strength in numbers. They’re easy to catch and don’t bite or sting, so they easily become snacks for hungry predators. But by buzzing around with hundreds of thousands of other cicadas, the probability of any one being eaten is close to zero.

The researcher's model shows that this negative consequence of hybridization could explain the prime life cycles. In his model, which starts with all possible life cycles, the only way to arrive at enduring 13- and 17- year life cycles is to include this density-dependent effect.

Read more in the original article here.

Enormous Shark’s Secret Hideout Finally Discovered

After half a century of searching, scientists have finally discovered what happens to the world’s second largest shark every winter: It has a Caribbean hideout.

Basking sharks, which can grow up to 33 feet long and weigh more than a Hummer H1, spend the late spring, summer and early fall in the temperate regions of the world’s oceans. But then they pull their great disappearing act, eluding scientists throughout the winter months.

Scientists tagged the giant fish off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and tracked them by satellite, piecing together their mysterious winter wanderings. He discovered the beasts were absconding to the depths of the Caribbean, some voyaging as far as the Brazilian coast, though the attraction of these destinations poses yet another mystery.

The basking shark about three miles per hour with its four-foot-wide mouth gaping open, filtering through almost 500,000 gallons of water every hour for its plankton sustenance.

The sharks were found to travel well-outside their known range, spending months in the warm waters of the Caribbean and even deep into the southern hemisphere. They also periodically dove to more than 3,000 feet, and often stayed at those depths for months at a time. One shark remained at a depth of nearly 600 feet for upward of five months.

No one has ever seen a baby basking shark, no one’s found a pregnant shark, knows when they reproduce or what their gestation period is.

Original article here.

Infrared Proteins Give Deep View Inside Living Animals

A fluorescent protein found in an extremophile bacteria could give scientists an unprecedented view inside living animals.

The proteins, which glow with tissue-penetrating infrared light, could be used to tag cells in living animals, allowing researchers to watch real-time biological processes that have until now been hidden.

The scientists found the protein in Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremophile microbe, that emits infrared light. The original protein was relatively dim, but they tweaked its amino acid content to make it brighter. They then injected mice with infrared proteins that attached to genes in their liver cells.

Using a specialized microscope called a fluorescence molecular tomograph, which assembles three-dimensional images from two-dimensional scans taken at different depths in a target specimen, the liver shells showed up glowing through layers of living tissue.

Original article here.

Galapagos Islands: National Geographic Video

The Galapogos Islands were Darwin's laboratory for the study of the origins of life. See the creatures he studied in 1835 -- giant tortoises, sea turtles, flightless cormorants, iguanas, and penguins.



For more National Geographic videos, click here.

Whale Fossil Found in Limestone Kitchen Counter

Underwater Photography Contest

Below are some of the results from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science amateur underwater photography contest:

This photo was the overall winner. It shows two boxer crabs (Lybia tesselata) ready for a fight. The crabs defend themselves by carrying tiny stinging sea anemones in their claws:



The male banded jawfish (Opistognathus macrognathus) holds brooding eggs in its mouth until they're ready to hatch:



This pygmy seahorse is only about a half-inch tall and has flesh that blends masterfully well with the sea fans it lives among:



This shot of a dwarf minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata acutorostrata) was caught just after daybreak on part of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The photographer was only 6 or 7 feet away:



This shot is of the Molly Miller blenny, also known as the combtooth blenny:



These scarlet-striped cleaning shrimp (Lysmata grabhami) were spotted in the Florida Keys:



Original article here.