Chicken-eating Spider

There are around 800 species of Tarantula spider in the world - at least those are the ones that have been discovered. It is estimated that there could be just as many unknown species in the rainforests, tropical scrublands and savannas around the world. The Chicken-eating Spider has been confirmed as one of these new species (second article here), identified as being within the genus Pamphobeteus. It is called the Chicken Eating spider because eye witnesses claim to have seen it dragging chickens into its burrow on the edge of jungle clearings. Estimates put it at around 10 inches from one hairy foot to another.

As well as being new to science, the Chicken Spider has thrown into doubt many of the accepted truths about tarantulas that have been held for almost a century. For instance, tarantulas are supposed to be strictly solitary creatures. Usually baby spiders - or spiderlings - quickly disperse once they emerge from the nest. This is because a mother tarantula's maternal instincts don't last long once the spiderlings have hatched. She starts looking for food, having fasted during the incubation period. Any spiderlings remaining in the nest find themselves on the menu. This solitary behaviour also minimizes competition for food. Tarantulas are ambush predators and stay very close to their burrows at all times, waiting for their prey to pass close by. With more than one spider in the same burrow there is less food to go around and one would expect smaller spiders and compromised populations.

The Chicken Spider, not only tolerates its offspring shortly after they have hatched, it shares its burrow with several generations of its progeny. Up to 50 spiders in one burrow and a thriving, healthy population in the surrounding forest. Here is evidence that this remarkable spider subdues any aggressive responses to its fellow burrow inhabitants and has actually learned to cooperate in prey capture, allowing for the predation of larger animals than would be possible if it were alone.

Vegetable Sculptures

Below are some examples from this neat gallery of vegetable/animal sculptures:

Parrot developmental pictures

Some examples from this photo gallery documenting the growth of a parrot:

World's largest fossil forest found in Illinois coal mine

Illinois geologists have discovered the remains of one of the world's oldest tropical rainforests, preserved in the ceiling of a coal mine 250 feet below the surface. The fossil forest encompasses four square miles, which is the largest find ever.

Plant fossils are common in coal beds, as coal is the compacted result of peaty plant material. But scientists are surprised by the size of this fossil bed, which they suspect came about because of a freak event: an earthquake that flooded and buried the forest. The vast extent of the fossil forest, which existed in a swampy time of giant dragonflies and tree ferns, has allowed the scientists to infer subtle ecological changes across the ancient landscape.

These are the remnants of extinct plants from a geological period 300 million years ago, called the Carboniferous, when the world was covered in a riot of green. Illinois was near the equator and much warmer and wetter. It was also a time before flowering plants had evolved, and so the plants would seem bizarre to modern eyes.

Giant tree ferns would have formed a lower canopy 30 feet high. Poking up through the ferns would have been 100-foot-tall clubmosses — asparagus-like poles that sprouted crowns full of spores. It was the age of insects, with 6-foot-long millipedes and dragonflies with yard-long wingspans.

When the ancient earthquake hit, a sudden flooding in the submerged block killed the rainforest. Mud and silt rushed into the depression, preserving the stumps and logs in a layer that eventually became shale.

Mr. Miyagi Says Don't Mess with this Mantis

From Wired.

Whales Speak in Dialects

A new study shows that some whale species sing in different dialects depending on where they're from. Blue whales off the Pacific Northwest sound different than blue whales in the western Pacific Ocean, and these sound different than those living off Antarctica. And they all sound different than the blue whales living near Chile.

The whales in the eastern Pacific have a very low-pitched pulsed sounds, followed by a tone. Other populations use different combinations of pulses, tones, and pitches. Using newly developed underwater microphones called autonomous hydrophones, scientists recorded the symphony of whale clicks, pulses, and calls throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The hydrophones were developed to listen for earthquakes. But researchers soon realized that they were picking up the sounds of right whales from 25 miles away, and even farther if the water is shallow and the terrain is even. It is not known why whales around the world sound differently, including whether it is tied to genetics or some other reason.

The research is detailed in the January issue of the journal BioScience.

Is Mount Everest really the highest point on earth?

Mount Everest is well known as the highest spot above sea level on our planet and is likely to remain so for a long time; that is, unless you reconsider the definition of "highest."

When measured as the either the spot on earth closest to space, or the spot on the surface furthest from the center of the earth, Mount Everest is in fact NOT the highest point -- Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is!

The Earth is in fact not a perfect sphere. It is more like a beach ball that someone sat on: It has a slightly distended middle.

Mathematicians call this an "oblate spheroid," which means there is a bulge that circles the Earth just below the equator, so anyone standing in that part of the world is already standing "higher," or closer to outer space, than people who aren't on the bulge.

Mount Chimborazo, in the Andes, is a 20,000-plus-foot peak sitting on top of a bulge on the Earth. Mount Everest is a 29,000-plus-foot peak sitting lower down on that same bulge. Because Chimborazo is a bump on a bigger part of the bulge, it is higher. In fact, it's 1.5 miles higher than Everest!

Perhaps more interesting: using this same logic, Death Valley -- the lowest point below sea level in North America -- is in fact higher than Mount McKinley, the highest point above sea level in North America!

In fact, the Dead Sea -- the lowest point on the terrestrial Earth -- is also higher than Mount McKinley!

Listen to NPR's audio story here.

Study Suggests Earth was Purple

The earliest life on Earth might have been just as purple as it is green today, a scientist claims. Ancient microbes might have used a molecule other than chlorophyll to harness the Sun’s rays, one that gave the organisms a violet hue.

Chlorophyll, the main photosynthetic pigment of plants, absorbs mainly blue and red wavelengths from the Sun and reflects green ones, and it is this reflected light that gives plants their leafy color.

According to the scientist, chlorophyll appeared after another light-sensitive molecule called retinal was already present on early Earth. Retinal, today found in the plum-colored membrane of a photosynthetic microbe called halobacteria, absorbs green light and reflects back red and violet light, the combination of which appears purple.

Primitive microbes that used retinal to harness the sun’s energy might have dominated early Earth, thus tinting some of the first biological hotspots on the planet a distinctive purple color.

Earthquake Lifts Island Ten Feet Out of Ocean

Residents of Ranongga island in the South Pacific Ocean sit on a massive coral reef that was exposed by the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that struck in the Solomon Islands last week, sparking a deadly tsunami.

The quake lifted Ranongga ten feet out of the sea, widening beaches by up to 230 feet. The uplift has left some of the island's pristine coral reefs fatally exposed. In some places the beaches in the Solomons now resemble a barren moonscape with once vibrant corals bleaching under the sun.

Dry Valleys of Antarctica

The Dry Valleys of Antarctica get almost no snowfall, and except for a few steep rocks are the only continental part of Antarctica devoid of ice. The terrain looks like something not of this Earth; the valley floor occasionally contains a frozen lake with ice several meters thick. Many simple organisms, the subject of ongoing research, live under the ice in the extremely salty water.

Below are some examples of this landscape taken from this photo gallery.