Spider Hunting Strategies

Stabbing, crushing, spitting and seducing are some of the more unusual, gruesome and clever ways spiders catch and kill their prey.

Though these predators are best known for ensnaring their food in sticky webs and paralyzing them with venom, this is only one of many ways the world's 40,000 or so known spider species catch a meal.

Spiders are found everywhere from rain forests to deserts, and can even be found in tide pools along the coast. What they eat, and how they capture it, is just as varied as where they live. Spiders catch and consume insects, other spiders and even small animals including snakes and birds.

The above fishing spider waits near water, typically with their front legs resting on the surface to detect the vibrations of potential prey. Once an animal comes close enough, fishing spiders strike with their fangs.

Net-casting spiders, below, hang upside down on a scaffold of silk, spin fuzzy webs they hold tight between two of their front legs and wait for insects. If a flying insect comes within reach, net-casting spiders will sweep their net toward the prey, snagging it out of the air. If an insect passes underneath them, the spiders drop down and spread a net over the victim.

To read more, see the original article here.

Tracking Whale Sharks With Astronomical Algorithms

With the help of algorithms designed to guide the Hubble telescope’s starscape surveys, conservation-minded coders have designed software that helps biologists identify whale sharks by their spots. The program enlists the help of citizens with cameras, and lets researchers track Earth’s biggest fish across time and oceans.

If you put a tag in the whale shark's skin, it wears off or falls away. But using this method scientists can recognize these animals without marking them, and it’s permanent.

The researchers developed a pattern recognition program that mapped X- and Y-coordinates of spots, then compared them between whale shark photographs

Soon they were joined by a NASA astrophysicist who introduced them to an astronomer who’d developed algorithms to compare photographs of the night sky and determine what star patterns they had in common.  The scientists adapted the equations to instead study whale sharks.

Read more in the original article here.

Eight potentially new fish species found along Bali reefs

Scientists have found eight potentially new species of reef fish and a potentially new species of bubble coral in waters surrounding the Indonesian island of Bali.

The species haven’t been named. The fish, with their genus in parenthesis, are:

– Two types of cardinalfish (in the genuses of Apogon and Siphamia).
– Two types of dottybacks (Manonichthys and Pseudochromis).
– A garden eel (Heteroconger).
– A sand perch (Parapercis).
– A fang blenny (Meiacanthus).
– A goby (Grallenia).

Above are pictures of the Manonichthys (top) and Parapercis (bottom).

Read more in the original article here.

The World's Ants Captured in 3D

Scientists have taken on a project to create detailed images of all approximately 12,000 known species of ants.  Below are several examples:

Click here to learn more about the ants depicted in these images.

Ghostly ‘Winged’ Octopus Caught on Camera

A rarely seen white deep-sea octopus has been captured on camera in high definition by researchers. The octopus features two “wings” which make it look just like the ghosts from Mario videogames, aka Boos.

The Grimpoteuthis bathynectes octopus, also nicknamed the Dumbo octopus, was filmed with an HD video camera at a depth of more than 6,500 feet about 200 miles off the coast of Oregon.

Little is known about the deep-sea octopuses, which live near the hydrothermal vent fields — fissures in the Earth’s surface generally found near volcanically active places that release geothermally heated water.

Original article here.

World’s Biggest Gathering of Whale Sharks

To see a single whale shark — the world’s largest fish, a solitary behemoth that can grow to school-bus size — is a rare experience.

Seeing hundreds gathered in one place is unprecedented.

The so-called "Afuera gathering" took place in August 2009 off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, not far from the waters around Cabo Catoche. Dozens of whale sharks have converged there each summer since 2002, drawn by crustaceans that feed on massive plankton blooms fueled by upswellings of nutrient-rich deep-sea water.

The Afuera whale sharks are just eating, not mating; the mating habits of whale sharks are a mystery to biologists. The gathering contained no juveniles, only adults; biologists don’t actually know where juvenile whale sharks live, where they’re born or even how they’re born. Whale sharks are literally a colossal mystery.

Read more in the original article here.

High-Speed Video Shows How Hummingbirds Really Drink

New high-speed videos of hummingbirds overturn nearly two centuries of conventional wisdom on how they drink.

Researchers previously thought tube-like channels in their tongues sucked up fluid by capillary action. But the new analysis shows that their tongues actually trap nectar by curling around it.

Read more in the original article here.