Calliphorid fly.
Seven Mile Beach, Tasmania
Bowmouth guitarfish (Rhina ancylostoma)
The bowmouth guitarfish is a species of ray. This rare species occurs widely in the tropical coastal waters of the western Indo-Pacific.
This large species can reach a length of 2.7 m (8.9 ft). The jaws are heavily ridged with crushing teeth arranged in wave-like rows. Usually found near the sea floor, the bowmouth guitarfish prefers sandy or muddy areas near underwater structures.
It is a strong-swimming predator of bony fishes, crustaceans, and molluscs. This species gives live birth to litters of two to eleven pups, which are nourished during gestation by yolk. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed the bowmouth guitarfish as Vulnerable because it is widely caught by artisanal and commercial fisheries for its valuable fins and meat.
The bowmouth guitarfish, often described as prehistoric in appearance, is considered by some scientists to be the ‘missing link’ between sharks and rays based on the ray-like placement of the mouth and gill openings, and disc shape of the front part of the body and the shark-like streamlined appearance of the rest of the body and the powerful tail.
photo credits:
(via 123zero)
Source: cool-critters
Translucent Creature Photos
1. Juvenile Cowfish. Photograph by Chris Newbert, Minden Pictures
2. Pelagic Octopus. Photograph by Chris Newbert, Minden Pictures
3. Sea Butterfly Snail. Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Minden Pictures
4. Hydromedusa in Antarctica.Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Minden Pictures
5. Jelly Larva. Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Minden Pictures
6. Larval Shrimp and Jellyfish. Photograph by Chris Newbert, Minden Pictures
7. Jellyfish, Antarctica. Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Minden Pictures
(via 123zero)
Source: the-star-stuff
Source: florafaunagifs
The sarcastic fringehead (Neoclinus blanchardi) is a footlong fish that lives off the Pacific coast of North America. When unthreatened, the fringehead’s visage is fairly unremarkable. But if a marine predator (or stray human hand) attempts to dislodge a fringehead from its crevasse, the fish will race into action, brandishing its frightening Predator-like mouth at the interloper.
And things get even stranger when two sarcastic fringeheads get embroiled in a turf war. How strange? Two words: “mouth wrestling.” Are you brave enough to behold the angriest make-out party in the animal kingdom?
via // [video source]
wow, “sarcastic fringehead” describes me pretty well. that’s a spot-on depiction of my make-out technique also.
Astounding photos.
(via 123zero)
Source: underthevastblueseas
E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth iBooks Textbook and iTunes U Course
E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is an innovative new iBooks Textbook for high school biology students created by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Available for free on the iBooks Store, Life on Earth is accompanied by an iTunes U course called Biology: Life on Earth. The iTunes U course brings together content from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, National Geographic, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and other institutions with content emphasizing important themes like citizen science, evolution, climate change, and the protection of biodiversity.
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) content and resource are available in the first section of the course: Unity and Diversity of Life on Earth. Activities include an audio interview with E.O. Wilson, creating virtual collections of species and accessing the biodiversity resources available through EOL’s iTunes U collections.
quote from Charles Darwin
Marine Biodiversity Data- let’s get organized!
The past several hundred years of marine research have left us with a real embarrassment of riches. A vast amount of information has been discovered and recorded about the world’s oceans. When we started recording it, we probably never imagined how much knowledge we would eventually have at our disposal, and how difficult it could be to wade through it all. Research groups supported by the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) have been combing through the literature and other knowledge stores in their fields and extracting datasets of species attributes of sea birds, copepods, macro algae and other groups, and are preparing this information for dissemination online. These data will be shared via the EMODnet data portal as well as familiar venues like the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and EOL Traitbank.
25 scientists from EMODnet, WoRMS, EOL, and several pioneering research groups which have been unearthing the first of these datasets met last week at the headquarters of Ifremer in France to discuss how best to continue this data hunt, which attributes to prioritize, and how best to format and disseminate them so they’ll be available and useful to researchers, policymakers, students, and ecosystem modelers.
There’s some marine trait data available on EOL already, so if you want to know which diatoms are the biggest, which worms are predatory, or which whales have the longest pregnancies, we can help you. Soon, though, a much wider array of information will be available. What kinds of marine wildlife attributes do you want to be able to look up?
EOL/BHL Research Sprint at NESCent - Update 3
Reports are still rolling out from last week’s Research Sprint.
The NoPlaceLikeHome team used ENVIRONMENTS to annotate North and South America Bird (Aves) information such as ecology, habitat, migration descriptions etc. They used the SEQenv R package to visualize the results as above. Species are on the X axis and the Environment Ontology (EnvO) habitat term associations on the Y axis, with the redness (or size in the inset Wordle) based on simple term counts. This kind of visualization was originally designed for characterising the sequences of microbial samples with the environments in which they are found. It also appears to be valuable for assessing rare/frequent habitats, species habitat breadth, and researchers are beginning to answer questions about how do environments differ among species of the same genus.
The NoPlaceLikeHome team included Evangelos Pafilis (Hellenic Center for Marine Research), Rob Stevenson (U Mass Boston), and Carl Nordman (NatureServe),
For more information, see this full list of Research Sprint projects and participants.
Breaking results from the NESCent-EOL-BHL Research Sprint
Some parts of the bird family Corvidae (crows, jays, magpies and their allies) have more available data than others. Colors represent a score from 1 to 5 based on how many of the following exist:
- A rich EOL page
- EOL TraitBank trait information
- Georeferenced occurence records from Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
- Non-georeferenced GBIF records
- GenBank sequence records
Phylogenetic tree from Jetz et al. 2012.
Analyses like this can guide investment into new data collection where it is most needed or allow researchers to quickly select parts of the tree of life where they can answer their research questions. The team plans to scale this analysis to vertebrates and build a pipeline to make it easy to visualize the progress of scientific knowledge.
The research sprint team team included Jessica Oswald, Karen Cranston, Gordon Burleigh, and Cyndy Parr.
For more information, see this full list of Research Sprint projects and participants.
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