Seahorse evolution

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News:

Seahorses ‘Stood Up’ 25 Million Years Ago

May 6, 2009 — Seahorses first stood up sometime after 25 to 20 million years ago, when bodies of open water between Australia and Indonesia changed, leaving these horse-resembling bony fishes with shallow sea grass habitat, according to a new study.

The study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, explains that an upright stature, shared by humans but which is extremely rare throughout the entire animal kingdom, allowed seahorses to reside in what was essentially a lawn under water.

To this day, seahorses prefer to live in sheltered areas, such as sea grass beds, coral reefs and mangroves.

“Not only can an upright fish maneuver much better in such an environment than a horizontally-swimming one, but the upright sea grass blades would have improved their camouflage,” explained Peter Teske, who co-authored the paper with Luciano Beheregaray.

“Camouflage is of great importance to seahorses, which are poor swimmers,” added Teske, a postdoctoral researcher in Macquarie University’s Molecular Ecology Lab. “It affords them both protection from predators and allows them to sneak up on their prey — including small crustaceans and tiny fish — without being noticed.”

Teske and Beheregaray first took note of pygmy pipehorses, which look like “non-upright proto-seahorses.” They wondered when these two bony fishes diverged, and how this fit into the bigger picture for the Syngnathidae, a family of fish that includes seahorses, pipefishes and both weedy [see also here and here and here] and leafy sea dragons.

To answer these questions, they constructed a family tree using genetic information gathered from the genus Hippocampus, which includes all seahorses, and the genus Idiotropiscis, which contains the very seahorse-resembling southern little pipehorse.

Molecular dating indicates seahorses split from their pygmy pipehorse sister taxon during the Late Oligocene, right when tectonic events in the Indo-West Pacific resulted in the formation of new shallow water sea grass habitats. It appears that seahorses remained mostly isolated in these new regions, allowing them to evolve a number of distinctive features.

Male seahorses like big mates: here.

UK Seahorse tagging project at Studland Bay in Dorset: here.

October 2010: Marine scientist Paul Kay took this picture of pipefish off the Welsh coast. Thought to be a shore or black-striped pipefish, the photograph is so unusual because of where it was taken – such pipefish are normally found only as far north as the Southern Biscay, with the odd one making its way slightly further up the French coast: here.

Condoleezza Rice defends Bush torture policy

This cartoon about the US Bush administration torture policies is from Internet Weekly in the USA.

Inspiration: Condoleezza Rice Defends Bush Torture Policy Again, To Grade School Student.

A Justice Department draft report produced under Bush opposing criminal prosecution of government lawyers who justified torture has been embraced by the Obama administration: here.

A memo released Wednesday lists 40 secret briefings for members of Congress on the use of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”—in plain words, torture. Republicans have used the memo to indict Democrats for complicity in these criminal practices: here.

British civil liberties endangered again

This video from the USA is called Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties.

Britain: CIVIL liberties campaigners and unions described plans to allow post offices and pharmacies to act as enrolment centres for the government’s ID card scheme as a “farcical, expensive mistake,” on Wednesday: here.

AIRLINE pilots vowed on Tuesday to resist the “Big Brother” state and refuse to co-operate with government plans for national ID cards: here.

CLEANERS on Eurostar trains have voted to boycott “Big Brother” staff fingerprinting machines for clocking on and off after complaining that it made them feel like criminals: here.

Ministers have insisted on maintaining their controversial DNA database, which includes people who have not been charged or convicted of any crime: here.

A LAWYER for one of 11 men facing deportation after being falsely arrested on terror charges has said he fears the government will use closed evidence in a bid to expel his client from the country: here.

ANTI-WAR campaigner Milan Rai appeared in court on Thursday in connection with an alleged unauthorised demonstration: here.

Stop demolition of Dutch botanical garden

From BGCI:

Hortus Botanicus Vrije Universiteit threatened with demolition

AMSTERDAM, 5th May 2009

The Hortus Botanicus of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands is slated for demolition to make room for a new complex of high-rise buildings.

The Hortus Botanicus, founded in 1967, covers one hectare ( 2.5 acres ), including 1,000 sq m (about 10,800 sq ft) of greenhouses providing a range of climatic conditions.

This small but charming botanical garden contains more than 6,000 taxa including: a large collection of epiphytic orchids and bromeliads, an unusual collection of scented geraniums and pelargoniums, the largest collection of cacti in the Netherlands with some plants being more than a century old, a bamboo collection, plants of the bible and plants of other religions, a Chinese miniature landscape garden (The Penjing Garden), a bonsai collection as well as container plants that are 60 to 80 years old. There is also an extensive collections of Australian trees and shrubs, which overwinter in the Orangerie and are set outside every spring.

There are approximately 40 large trees in the gardens, among others many types of pinus, ornamental cherry and other fruit, the handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata), gingo bibalo’s [sic; Gingko biloba's; see also here], and magnolia.

It is open to the public throughout the year, without entrance fee and the gardens are used by University students studying ecological science. The Hortus also provides a green oasis for patients of the University Medical Centre and the campus population. Patients, staff and visitors to the hospital are often found enjoying the rich colours and filling their lungs with the sweet smells of the gardens. They are very happy to have a garden so close by.

Plants that are taken into custody at Schiphol airport are sent to the Hortus to be cared for. These plants are listed on CITES. They are legally protected and are not the property of the University. These plants will be destroyed if the Hortus is closed, further reducing the biological diversity of the earth and the chance to examine these plants and their DNA.

The Hortus is a member of the national plant collection, an umbrella organisation of all 18 botanical gardens in The Netherlands.

The Hortus colleagues are supported and supplemented by a large group of dedicated volunteers, people from the city with varying skills and expertise. There is also a large group of generous donors who love and support this unique garden in Amsterdam.

We urge those concerned to send a letter or e-mail to the Board of the University and of the hospital, surely we should be creating more gardens, not destroying the valuable ones!

Dr René M. Smit, Chairman
Executive Board
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Fax: (011 31) 20 59 85300
E-mail: rm.smit@dienst.vu.nl

and/or
Raad van Bestuur van het VU Medisch Centrum
Postbus 7057
1007 MB Amsterdam

See also here.

Queen Nefertiti bust only 100 years old?

From Egyptology News:

The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin.

Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin’s Altes Museum was made on the orders of Germany archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt on site at the digs by an artist named Gerardt Marks.

See also here.

Hawass reaction to this: here.

Egypt’s antiquities chief has declared that he will formally demand the return of the 3,300-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti from a Berlin museum after confirming it was sneaked out of Cairo through fraudulent documents: here.

Another article about the Nefertiti bust dispute: here.

Germany to celebrate centennial of Nefertiti bust discovery: here.

Women in ancient Egypt: here.

Dutch caiman eggs

This is a broad-snouted caiman underwater video.

According to Dutch daily De Stentor, there are now caiman eggs in the Ecodrome zoo in Zwolle, the Netherlands.

They are eggs of of the broad-snouted caiman. This species has never before laid any eggs in a Dutch zoo. At the moment, the only other Dutch zoo with these caimans is Burgers’ in Arnhem; but there, they are still too young to reproduce. Only five European zoos have broad-snouted caimans.

850 million year old animal discovered

By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service in Canada:

Sponge-like body believed to be oldest evidence of animals

May 5, 2009

Canadian scientists probing a mountaintop in the Northwest Territories have discovered what they believe is the oldest evidence of animals on Earth — about 850-million-year-old traces of a primitive, sponge-like organism that could push back direct proof of the origin of humanity’s own kingdom of life by an astonishing 200 million years.

The microscopic but distinctively patterned remains — unearthed from a dramatic pinnacle in the Mackenzie Mountains about 800 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife — are interpreted by the research team as rock-encased residues from the decomposed tissues of a primordial sea creature that was the earliest common ancestor of all animals, including humans.

The organism, believed to have lived in the nooks of a reef from a long-lost ocean, represents a stage of life “before sponges and other animals we know today evolved,” University of Laval geologist Fritz Neuweiler, told Canwest News Service.

Experts in evolution, including the famed Origin of Species author Charles Darwin, have long postulated that animals must have been developing eons before the existence of known creatures that left easy-to-see skeletal fossils during the Cambrian and Ediacaran geological eras, reaching back about 635 million years ago.

“If you want to go back to the very origins of animals, you can’t be looking for that,” says Laurentian University paleontologist Elizabeth Turner, one of the three co-authors of a paper detailing the Canadian discovery in the latest issue of the journal Geology.

“Earlier life won’t be that complex,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “What we’re dealing with is a texture you can see under a microscope in a rock that’s been cut until it’s 30 microns thick. This is a wholly different type of evidence of life.”

The site is part of the Little Dal formation near the N.W.T.-Yukon border, renowned among geologists for what Turner calls its “exquisitely well preserved” record of Earth’s evolution.

“These rocks are exactly the right age for us to be exploring for this type of evidence,” she said. “We know that the earliest form of animals would have been from about 850 million years ago.”

Turner added, though, that because the fossil record is “so subtle and enigmatic at this stage” of evolution, she and Neuweiler — along with U.S. geologist David Burdige — used a “novel” series of experiments to verify their theory.

These techniques included comparisons of residue patterns found at the N.W.T. site to trace remains of younger (though still prehistoric) sponge colonies in Spain and Quebec, as well as modern sponge samples from the Bahamas.

The challenge, the researchers note in their published study, was to confirm the presence of a living organism from the dawn of animal life without the aid of “conspicuous body fossils.”

See also here.

Primitive sponge fossils upturn conventional scientific thought and date animal life on earth at 650m years: here.

Packed inside the humble sea sponge is a surprisingly intricate genome: it contains the basic tool kit for all animal life, including complex vertebrates – and it’s not even an animal, really: here.

Eight new kinds of the earliest animals from the Cambrian Explosion have been found in a newly explored section of ancient rock in Canada: here.

Economic crisis

This is a video from the USA of cartoons about the financial recession.

A report released early May by the Economic and Social Research Institute states that Ireland is expected to go through the sharpest economic contraction of any industrialised country since the 1930s: here.

Australia: Young workers and school leavers—and their families—have become the first victims of the Rudd government’s cuts to welfare and social programs: here.

Guam undersea active volcano wildlife

This is a video of an undersea eruption near Tonga.

From World Science:

Expedition to bursting, undersea volcano yields marvels

May 5, 2009

Courtesy National Science Foundation and World Science staff

Sci­en­tists who have just re­turned from an ex­pe­di­tion to an erupt­ing un­der­sea vol­ca­no near the Is­land of Guam re­port that the vol­ca­no seems to be con­tin­u­ously ac­tive, has grown con­sid­erably in the past three years, and its ac­ti­vity sup­ports a un­ique bi­o­log­i­cal com­mun­ity thriv­ing de­spite the erup­tions.

An in­terna­t­ional sci­ence team on the ex­pe­di­tion, funded by the Na­tional Sci­ence Founda­t­ion, cap­tured dra­mat­ic new in­forma­t­ion about the erup­tive ac­ti­vity of NW Rota-1.

This video is called Submarine Ring of Fire 2006: NW Rota1 Brimstone Pit Erupting.

“This re­search al­lows us, for the first time, to study un­der­sea vol­ca­noes in de­tail and close up,” said Barba­ra Ran­som, pro­gram di­rec­tor in the Na­tional Sci­ence Founda­t­ion’s Di­vi­sion of Ocean Sci­ences, which funded the re­search. “NW Rota-1 re­mains the only place on Earth where a deep sub­ma­rine volca­no has ev­er been di­rectly ob­served while erupt­ing.” …

An­i­mals in this un­usu­al ec­o­sys­tem in­clude shrimp, crab, limpets and bar­na­cles, some of which are new spe­cies. “They’re spe­cially adapted to their en­vi­ron­ment,” said Chad­wick, “and are thriv­ing in harsh chem­i­cal con­di­tions that would be tox­ic to nor­mal ma­rine life. Life here is ac­tu­ally nour­ished by the erupt­ing vol­ca­no.”

Ve­re­na Tun­ni­cliffe, a bi­olo­g­ist from the Uni­ver­s­ity of Vic­to­ria, Can­ada, said that most of the an­i­mals are de­pend­ent on dif­fuse hot-wa­ter ven­t­ing that pro­vides bas­ic food in the form of bac­te­ri­al fil­a­ments coat­ing the rocks. “It ap­pears that since 2006 the dif­fuse ven­t­ing has spread and, with it, the ven­t an­i­mals,” Tun­ni­cliffe said. There are pro­fuse popula­t­ions of shrimp on the vol­ca­no, with two spe­cies able to cope with the vol­can­ic con­di­tions, she added.

“The ‘Loi­hi’ shrimp has adapted to graz­ing the bac­te­ri­al fil­a­ments with ti­ny claws like gar­den shears,” said Tun­ni­cliffe. “The sec­ond shrimp is a new spe­cies—they al­so graze as ju­ve­niles, but as they grow to adult stage, their front claws en­large and they be­come preda­tors.” The Loihi shrimp was pre­vi­ously known only from a small ac­tive vol­ca­no near Ha­waii, far away. It sur­vives on the fast-growing bac­te­ria and tries to avoid the haz­ards of the vol­can­ic erup­tions. Clouds of these shrimp were seen flee­ing vol­can­ic bursts, re­search­ers said.

The oth­er spe­cies at­tacks the Loihi shrimp and preys on ma­rine life that wan­ders too close to the vol­can­ic plumes and dies. “We saw dy­ing fish, squid, etc., rain­ing down on­to the sea­mount, where they were jumped on by the vol­ca­no shrim­p,” Tun­ni­cliffe said.

NW Rota-1 pro­vides a one-of-a-kind nat­u­ral lab­o­r­a­to­ry for the in­ves­ti­ga­t­ion of un­der­sea vol­can­ic ac­ti­vity and its rela­t­ion to chem­i­cal-based ec­o­sys­tems at un­der­wa­ter ven­ts, where some bi­ologists think life on Earth orig­i­nat­ed.

“It is un­usu­al for a vol­ca­no to be con­tin­u­ously ac­tive, even on land,” Chad­wick point­ed out.

“This pre­s­ents us with a fan­tas­tic op­por­tun­ity to learn about pro­cesses we’ve nev­er been able to di­rectly ob­serve be­fore,” he said. “When vol­ca­noes erupt in shal­low wa­ter they can be ex­tremely haz­ard­ous, cre­at­ing huge ex­plo­sions and even tsunamis. But he­re, we can safely ob­serve an eruption in the deep ocean and learn valua­ble lessons about how lot la­va and seawa­ter in­ter­ac­t.” …

Ocean acidifica­t­ion is a se­ri­ous con­cern be­cause of human-induced car­bon di­ox­ide ac­cu­mu­lat­ing in the atmo­sphere. “Subma­rine vol­ca­noes are places where we can study how an­i­mals have adapted to very acid­ic con­di­tions,” Chad­wick said.

Blog of this expedition: here.

Unique and new species thriving around erupting undersea volcano: here.

Giant Undersea Volcano Found Off Iceland: here.

Loihi undersea volcano, Hawaii: here.

From a Psysorg news article: An observation ward for the long-term observation of a mud volcano in the Norwegian deep sea has been set up by, among others, three research institutes from the German federal state Bremen: here.

Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens: here.

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist: here.

Bats of Staelduinse bos

This video says about itself:

Belize’s fishing bats may catch and eat up to 30 fish in one night – but sometimes it may be a fish that catches a bat!

Staelduinse bos is a nature reserve in the Netherlands. Every year, bats winter there, in former World War II military bunkers.

According to Zuidhollands Landschap, this winter 143 bats slept in the bunkers. 100 of those were Daubenton’s bats. 22 were brown long-eared bats, 14 whiskered bats. There were one common pipistrelle and one pond bat each.

Bats ‘recognise other’s voices’: here.

Young pipistrelle reunited with mother: here.

Common pipistrelles in Tilburg: here.