Lost Rainbow Toad Found After 87 Years

Herpetologists at Conservation International have rediscovered the exotic Sambas stream toad (aka Borneo rainbow toad, aka ansonia latidisca) after 87 years of evasion, and released the first ever photographs of the brightly-colored amphibian.

The spindly-legged species was last seen in 1924 and European explorers in Borneo only made monochrome illustrations of it. A decade or so later, the conservation groups added the species to their World’s Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs campaign.

Researches recently took a team to look for the frog in the area of Western Sarawak.  After months of fruitless hunting, the researchers finally found the small toad two meters up a tree. Later they found another.

In the end the team had found three individuals of the missing toad species — an adult female, an adult male and a juvenile, ranging in size from 51 mm to 30 mm. All three toads exhibited those gangly limbs and the brightly colored patterns on their backs.

Read more in the original article here.  Also, see CNN's article here.

Also, learn more about Conservation International's Global Search for Lost Amphibians.

Rare Hermaphrodite Butterfly Hatches in London Museum

Visitors to the London Natural History Museum can currently see a butterfly that is both male and female.

The gynandromorph Papilio Memnon butterfly hatched in the puparium at this year’s Sensational Butterflies exhibition. It is one of just 200 gynandromorph butterflies among the 4.5 million butterfly specimens in the museum.

The term gynandromorph comes from the Greek “Gyn” to mean female, and “Andro” to mean male. The butterfly has distinctly different male and female markings — darker colorings on the male side and paler coloring, with flecks of blue, red and tortoiseshell on the female side.

As the coloring denotes, the butterfly is literally half female, half male — its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths.

The Museum explains: “Insects can become gynandromorphs if the sex chromosomes do not properly separate during the first division of a fertilized egg, resulting in an insect with both male and female cells. They can also occur when an egg with two sex chromosomes, instead of a single one, gets fertilized by two sperm.”

Gynandromorph lobsters, spiders and crabs have also been observed.

Read more in the original article here.

Chipmunks and Woodchucks Eavesdrop on Each Other

Chipmunks and woodchucks are entirely different rodent species, but they apparently speak the same language when it comes to alarm.

Despite belonging to a different genus, eastern chipmunks take heed of woodchucks’ alarm calls. To a lesser extent, woodchucks understand the warnings of chipmunks. Such inter-rodent understanding may not seem surprising, but both species are considered very solitary. They are not like prairie dogs that live in family groups.

Many creatures respond to their own species’ alarm calls, but interspecies comprehension is less documented. To see whether woodchucks and chipmunks responded to each other, scientists visited a nature preserve in Maine, recording their reactions to possible danger — both species share common enemies in red-tailed hawks, bald eagles and foxes — and to unthreatening chickadees.

Over the course of a few weeks scientists played the calls back on portable speakers. While woodchucks occasionally perked up to chipmunk squeaks, chipmunks were more attentive to woodchucks’ high-pitched whinnies. Sometimes the woodchuck alarms even sent chipmunks fleeing to their burrows.

To listen to the calls of both the woodchuck and chipmunk, read the original article here.

Both animals responded most to their own species’ alerts, but neither reacted much to crow alarms or chickadee songs.

Read more in the original article here.

Deepest-living land animal found

Worms have been found living at depths in the Earth where it was previously thought animals could not survive.

Discovered in South African mines, the roundworms can survive in the 118 degrees Fahrenheit water that seeps between cracks 1.3km beneath the Earth's crust.

The find has surprised scientists who, until now, believed only single-celled bacteria thrived at these depths.

The researchers found two species of worm. One is a new species to science, which the scientists have named Halicephalobus mephisto after Faust's Lord of the Underworld.

The other is a previously known roundworm known as Plectus aquatilis.

Read more in the original article here.

Emperor Penguins Rotate Through Giant Huddle for Warmth

Massive huddles of male Emperor penguins are crucial to keeping warm during Antarctica’s brutal winter while they incubate their eggs.

These tightly packed penguins shuffle en mass every 30 to 60 seconds, reordering themselves so every individual gets to cycle through the warm, central part of the huddle.

By taking small, 2- to 4-inch steps every minute or so, the penguins achieve maximum packing density. It’s like tapping on a can of flour to jiggle everything into the bottom.

But the shuffling also results in a wave of movement that rolls through the group and rotates every bird through the warmest parts of the huddle. Penguins can join the group on one end, cycle through the huddle and exit on the other end.

Read more in the original article here.

There's no such thing as a jellyfish

The video above is from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.  It illustrates how organisms commonly referred to as "jellyfish" are actually quite varied and diverse.  See the rest of the institute's videos here.

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.