Wildlife Photography

Below are several examples from this neat gallery of wildlife photos:

Food Fight

Purpose of appendix believed found

Scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut. For generations doctors figured it had no function. Surgeons removed them routinely and people live fine without them.

In this picture, the appendix is visible at the lower right, labeled as "vermiform process":


According to the new research, the function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria" according to scientists. Its location -- just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of "gut cul-de-sac" -- helps support the theory.

Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs. That use is not needed in a modern industrialized society, according to the scientists. If a person's gut flora dies, it can usually be repopulated easily with germs they pick up from other people. But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn't as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy.

Tiny Frog Species Discovered

India’s smallest land vertebrate, a 10-millimeter frog, has been discovered in the Western Ghats of Kerala. The picture shows the tiny frog sitting on an Indian 5 rupee coin.


Scientists discovered the tiny frog living under leaf litter and among the roots of ferns in a humid and mountainous rainforest. The species has been named Nyctibatrachus minimus. This frog can be found during the night (hence the common name of the genus - "Nightfrog") and its mating calls can be heard from under the leaf litter during monsoon months, the ideal time for reproduction.

Pink and White Katydids

A resident of Osaka, Japan found some interesting insects in her flower bed. Among them was an odd pair of grasshopper-like bugs — one pink, one white. An Osaka Museum of Natural History entomologist identifies them as the larvae of Euconocephalus thunbergi (”kubikirigisu” in Japanese), a close relative of the katydid. While he says it is normal for these insects to change between green and brown to match their surroundings, pink and white are considered abnormal. Speculation is that the pink is an extreme variation of the brown coloration, and the white specimen is believed to be an albino, though nobody will know for sure until it becomes an adult.

Zoo Sells Gorilla's Art On eBay

Little Joe and Okie, two of the western lowland gorillas at the Boston zoo, are avid finger painters and their paintings are now being sold on eBay. The finger painting is a part of the zoo’s enrichment program designed to keep the gorillas intellectually stimulated.

Polar Bear Gallery

Some cool pictures taken from this Flickr photo gallery:

Eel Species with Protruding Throat Jaw

Researchers studying one species of moray eels have uncovered a deadly secret that helps the fish to swallow their prey. Like the creatures from the sci-fi movie Alien, these eels have a second, extendable pair of jaws — encrusted with sharp teeth — that thrusts forward to ensnare their prey.

High-speed videos and X-ray photos show how the second jaws, called pharyngeal jaws, lie in wait inside the throat (top of picture), and then extend forwards into the mouth to grab prey that has been captured by the eel's main teeth (bottom of picture). The morsel is then drawn into the eel's esophagus.

This helps the eels (Muraena retifera) to be deadly hunters, despite the fact that, unlike many other predatory fish, they cannot generate strong suction forces inside the mouth cavity to capture a meal. Zoologists had previously been puzzled as to how moray eels, which live on coral reefs and rocky shorelines all over the world, keep hold of their prey long enough to swallow it. Unlike the movie creatures, however, these moray eels cannot extend their second set of jaws out beyond their first.

Many fish species have extra jaws in their throats, which can function to filter food from water or to grind prey when swallowing. But the eel's extendable jaws are the first throat jaws known to be adapted to help catch prey, rather than simply to help swallow it.

Be sure to check out the video of the jaws in action:

Monster spider web spun in Texas

Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in Lake Tawokoni Texas State Park.

Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be the result of a mass dispersal in which the arachnids spin webs to spread out from one another.

Genome transplant changes one species into another

For the first time, scientists have completely transformed a species of bacteria into another species by transplanting its complete set of DNA. The achievement marks a significant step toward the construction of synthetic life, with applications including the production of clean fuel in as little as a decade. The researchers hope that genome transplantation will enable the production of synthetic microbes for green energy sources, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and textiles.

The scientists’ results show that it is possible to transplant the complete set of DNA—the genome—from one species into the genome of a different species, so that the recipient organism is phenotypically and genotypically identical to the donor organism.