In Honor of Michael Jackson: Birds Doing the Moonwalk

Extremeophiles

Life can exist almost anywhere on Earth. It has flowed into every last nook and cranny, from the bottom of the sea to the upper edge of the stratosphere. From blazing heat and freezing cold to pure acidity and atomic bomb-caliber radiation, there’s seemingly no stress so great that some bug can’t handle it.

The pictures below are from a gallery that highlights some particularly tough species of bacteria and archaea. Less than 1 percent of Earth’s microorganisms have been identified, and most of those won’t even grow in a lab.

Hardly a month passes without some newly characterized species setting a new microbial benchmark. Indeed, the very concept of species might not apply. Bacteria and archaea exchange genes “horizontally,” without the need for reproduction. It’s as if, while encountering someone on the street, you could trade for whatever genes came in handy at the time. For example, if you put a particular plasmid into the common gut bacteria Escherichia coli, all of a sudden you have Klebsiella and not E. coli. You’ve changed not only the species, but the genus. It’s like changing a person to a chimpanzee.

With that in mind, below are the examples from the extremophiles gallery:

Herminiimonas glaciei, recovered from ice found two miles beneath a Greenland glacier is one of the smallest microbes ever found. With extra-long, tail-like flagella, it’s perfectly suited to moving through tiny veins in the ice:



Pyrodictium abyssi, discovered in 1979 on the nutrient-rich edges of deep-sea volcanic vents, are the original extremophile all-star. In addition to atmospheric pressure that could pancake a submarine, they can withstand temperatures well above the boiling point of water.

Like other archaea, the flat, irregular disk-shaped P. abyssi has no cell nucleus or organelles, making it a likely representative of life on an early, volcanic Earth. It accumulates in networks of hollow, tube-shaped structures called cannulae that are structurally resistant to heat:



Deinococcus peraridilitoris is the lesser-known cousin of Deinococcus radiodurans, dubbed the toughest bacterium on Earth by the Guinness Book of World Records. Found in 2003 in soil from the Atacama desert, a region of Chile so dry and desolate that NASA uses it for Mars simulations, it can withstand cold, vacuum, drought and radiation. Key to its survival are multiple copies of its genome; when one is damaged, the necessary sections can be copied from the other:



Haloquadratum walsbyi was found in a salt flat near the Red Sea, an environment so saline that just about every other organism on Earth would shrivel up into a "lifeless bag of desiccated stuff.” In response, the square and ultra-flat archaeon has the highest surface-to-volume ratio of any creature on Earth. You can’t get much more shriveled than that:



Halobacterium NRC-1 is the most radiation-resistant organism on Earth, capable of withstanding some 18,000 grays of radiation. (Just 10 grays are required to kill a human.) That nearly doubles the mark set by D. radiodurans, which was originally discovered in the 1950’s as the sole survivor of irradiated meat. Like D. radiodurans and D. peraridilitoris, it’s especially good at repairing its own DNA:



Ferroplasma acidophilum can grow in a pH of zero — conditions that make sulfuric acid look like mineral water. Found in the toxic outflow of a California gold mine, it uses iron as the central structural element of nearly all its proteins:



Desulforudis audaxviator is perhaps the one truly singular microbe. Every other known organism exists in a system in which at least some nutrients are provided by other creatures. But not D. audaxviator, which was discovered in a South African mine shaft, two miles beneath Earth’s surface and entirely alone. Using radioactivity from uranium-containing rocks as energy, it can harvest or metabolize every nutrient it needs from surrounding rock and gas — the world’s only known single-species ecosystem.



Original article here.

2,500-year-old Bird's Nest Found

A 2,500-year-old bird's nest has been discovered on a cliff in Greenland.

The nesting site is still continually used by gyrfalcons, the world's largest species of falcon, and is the oldest raptor nest ever recorded.

Three other nests, each over 1,000 years old, have also been found, one of which contains feathers from a bird that lived more than 600 years ago.

Like many falcons, gyrfalcons do not build nests out of sticks and twigs, but typically lay eggs in bowl-shaped depressions they scrape into existing ledges or old nests made by other birds such as ravens. But while stick nests are often frequently damaged, preventing their repeated use, gyrfalcons will often revisit some ledges and potholes from year to year.

Scientists carbon dated the guano and other debris that the birds leave at various nest sites. The cold dry climate of Greenland slows the decay of the falcons' droppings and various nest sites had built up levels of guano about 6 feet deep.

Carbon dating revealed that one nest in Kangerlussuaq in central-west Greenland is between 2,360 and 2,740 years old.

Original article here.

The nest below is "only" 1,000 years old:

Synchronized Fireflies

Look closely in the below video and you will see fireflies blinking in unison in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The fireflies can sense when their neighbor fireflies are flashing and attempt to flash before them.

Long thought to be an exclusively Southeast Asian phenomenon, the behavior was only discovered in an American firefly species (P. Carolinus) in 1992. Scientists have subsequently discovered other populations in the Congaree Swamp in South Carolina and other high altitude locations in the Appalachian mountains.

Original article here.

Endangered Butterflies

The following pictures were taken from this gallery of endangered butterflies. Click the article link to learn more about each butterfly.

Hummingbirds (relatively) Faster than Fighter Jet

The dramatic "courtship dive" of a small hummingbird has been found to be the quickest aerial maneuver in the natural world for an animal compared to its size. It even outpaces the movements of a jet fighter and the Space Shuttle on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Anna's hummingbird lives in the American south-west and the courtship display of the male is renowned for its death-defying dive that ends abruptly with a dramatic upturn with outstretched wings and tail feathers that stop the bird from crashing into the ground.

Scientists calculated that the 50mph speed of the hummingbird at the fastest point in its descent is equivalent to it moving 383 times its body length each second. The G-force as it turns out of its dive is nearly nine times the force of gravity – the same as the maximum G-forces experienced by fighter pilots. But scientists estimate that the G-forces created as the bird comes out of its dive would make many trained fighter pilots black out as a result of the rush of blood away from the brain.

Aerial diving is seen in the courtship displays of many other birds, such as nighthawks and snipes, and it is a common feature of many bird species that attack their prey from the air – such as kingfishers, seabirds and falcons – but none come close to matching the speed and acceleration of the hummingbird, he said.

Anna's hummingbird dives at nearly twice the speed relative to its body size than the peregrine falcon, which flies at a maximum velocity of about 200 body lengths per second. The hummingbird is also faster than the swallow, which dives from high-altitude migratory flights at a speed of about 350 body lengths per second.

Original article here.

Baby Otter