Dolphin Chefs Prepare Their Food

In a sign of how well-developed the brains of dolphins are, a wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin was observed going through a series of complicated steps to prepare cuttlefish for eating.

The research team said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.

The dolphin then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and "loud click" audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke.

The dolphin then lifted the body up and beat it with her nose to drain the toxic black ink that cuttlefish squirt into the water to defend themselves when attacked.

Next the prey was taken back to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip out the cuttlebone, making the cuttlefish soft for eating.

Original article here.

Antarctica Time Lapse: A Year on Ice

Above is a great time-lapse video taken over the course of a year in Antarctica. Some of the photographers comments are below:

"Each year the sun is below the horizon for 4 months in the middle of winter, and above the horizon for 4 months in summer. During the couple of months in between we have more-or-less normal days.
Includes shots of auroras and the very rare polar stratospheric nacreous clouds, which form when ozone depleting gases crystallize in the upper atmosphere in the intense cold."

You can see more of the photographer's work at his website here, including a gallery of antarctic wildlife.

Below is another video of his specific to Aurora Australis (the Southern Lights):

Immortal Jellyfish?

The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are sky rocketing because they need not die. The jellyfish are originally from the Caribbean but have spready all over the world.

Turritopsis Nutricula is technically known as a hydrozoan and is the only known animal that is capable of reverting completely to its younger self. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.

Scientists believe the cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it potentially immortal.

While most members of the jellyfish family usually die after propagating, the Turritopsis nutricula has developed the unique ability to return to a polyp state.

This tiny creature (just 5mm long) is the focus of many intricate studies by marine biologists and geneticists to see exactly how it manages to literally reverse its aging process.

Original article here.

Jumping Spider Mating Ritual

Below is an interesing video of a male jumping spider (salticidae). He taps, scrapes, turns and twists, and makes interesting noises (be sure to turn your volume up):

Antarctica's Ancient Lakes

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living "time capsules" survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

Lake Vostok is located beneath 2.5 miles of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 155 miles long and 31 miles wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

Because of the long isolation, it's believed that Lake Vostok could contain new lifeforms, and unique geochemical processes.

A major issue is the reality that it is impossible to penetrate an isolated ecosystem without contaminating it. The catch-22 inherent in Lake Vostok is that the very thing that make it potentially unique: because of its millennia of isolation from the rest of the world, it cannot be explored without introduction of microbes from the outer world.



Original article here.

Wired.com's Top Animal Photos

Below are a few selections from Wired.com's Top 10 Animal Photos.

This catepillar is a geometrid moth. Picture was taken in Calicut India. Check out caterpillars.org while you're at it:



Mucho the Alpaca:



Lemurs on break:

Venomous Mammal Caught on Camera

Rare footage of a Hispaniolan solenodon - one of the most strange and elusive mammals - has been captured by scientists. To see a video of the creature, click here.

Large, and with a long, thin snout, the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus) resembles an overgrown shrew; it can inject passing prey with a venom-loaded bite.

Little is known about the creature, which is found in the Caribbean, but it is under threat from deforestation, hunting and introduced species.

The mammal was filmed in the summer of 2008 during a month-long expedition to the Dominican Republic - one of only two countries where this nocturnal, insect-eating animal can be found (the other is Haiti).

It is the only living mammal that can actually inject venom into their prey through specialised teeth. The fossil record shows that some other now-extinct mammal groups also had so-called dental venom delivery systems. So this might have been a more general ancient mammalian characteristic that has been lost in most modern mammals, and is only retained in a couple of very ancient lineages.

Happy Otter