Mermaid Jumps Shark

The trailer is out for a film called "Great White Shark: Beyond the Cage of Fear."

There's nothing wrong with a cast of Chippendale's divers (and one "mermaid") trying to "destroy the myth of a mindless killing machine," mind you. But I can't stop laughing over the filmmaker's zany and misguided conceit: dressing a grown woman as a fish (OK, half-fish) so she can briefly get into the frame with a Great White and thus prove that "a shark knows the difference between Us and Dinner." But this picture doesn't tell a thousand words. In fact, it's just too unintentionally ridiculous for words.

Talk about "jumping the shark."

If the 3-meter Great White in that shot turns on that Daryl Hannah look-alike, does it disprove the hypothesis? Then again, how could it, because SHE'S DRESSED AS A FISH!? And if it doesn't, does that confirm the hypothesis -- or simply prove that sharks prefer beefcakes to blondes?

Not So Anomalous After All

It turns out that a hefty Cambrian predator that looked a bit like a cross between a sting ray and a prawn was bigger and hardier than anyone realized. It was widely thought that the anomalocaridids had been successfully displaced by the nautiloids around 510 million years ago. Not true, it now seems.

Dinosaur-tie-donning Yale paleontologist and taphonomist Derek Briggs, who along with colleague Peter Van Roy authored the new report on the basis of fossils found in Morocco, says anomalocaridid had already "become a kind of icon of the 'Cambrian explosion' because it's the largest predator amongst those animals that appeared when all the major groups of Metazoans first appear on the fossil record." But it was also poorly understood for a long time. He notes in this brief film that various parts of the anomalocaridid were initially thought to be separate animals -- the dual barbed appendages in front of the mouth, and the mouth/jaw that looks like the shuttered aperture of a camera. We knew a lot more about them before the Morocco discovery, including that they were probably ravenous predators of soft-bodied organisms like worms and such.

Briggs says the Moroccan revelation is twofold: a) these anomalocarodids were "enormous" at well over 1 meter long; and b) they demonstrate that anomalocaridid or its relatives "persisted" well beyond when the rock record previously suggested, so at least 30 million years beyond the middle Cambrian around 510 million years ago.

"Nature" explains more about these "super-predators" and the Moroccan revelation with regard to their continued survival:

[A]nomalocaridids came in diverse shapes and sizes — from Hurdia victoria, with its triangular carapace, to Schinderhannes bartelsi, with its long, pointed tail — and lived in the areas that are now Europe, the United States, Australia and China. But ancient relatives of sea scorpions and nautiluses that emerged in the Ordovician Period (490 million–440 million years ago) were suspected to have out-competed the anomalocaridids, causing them to die out, says Van Roy.

In 2008, however, an amateur collector, Mohammed Ben Said Ben Moula, discovered specimens that looked like anomalocaridids, Van Roy says. But it wasn't until 2009, when the researchers took a trip to the Fezouata rock formation in southeast Morocco, that they realized just what Ben Moula had discovered.

"National Geographic" has more about their size and evolutionary milieu:

Previous anomalocaridid fossils had shown the animals grew to perhaps 2 feet (0.6 meter) long, which already would have made them the largest animals of the Cambrian period (542 to 501 million years ago)—an evolutionarily explosive time, when invertebrate life evolved into many new varieties, such as sea lilies and worms.

But at a foot longer than previous specimens, the largest of the new anomalocaridids suggests the segmented animals grew to bigger sizes than scientists had imagined.

So while its evolutionary line eventually died out, anomalocaridid was thriving for a lot longer than anyone was giving it credit for.

Ground Control To Major Bobtail

On its historic final journey, the space shuttle "Endeavour" has taken a freckled little Bobtail Squid (Euprymna scolopes) where no squid has gone before. (Photo by Nick Hobgood from Wikipedia Commons)

The idea is to study the response to life in space by a bacteria that part of the squid's natural payload. Will it go all "Deep Blue Sea" on experimenters, like Salmonella did, or at least get altered, like E. coli did?

"New Scientist" explains:

...Jamie Foster of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who is running the experiment, puts it: "Do good bacteria go bad?"

Foster has arranged to send up the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes, a Pacific species that carries a cargo of bacteria called Vibrio fischeri in its body. The microbes colonise young squid soon after the squid hatch and set up home in their light organs. The squid use the bacteria to generate light, which they shine downwards to ensure they don't cast a visible shadow.

Unbeknownst to the cephalonaut, it's being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for science:

Foster's experiment is simple. Newly hatched squid that have not yet encountered their bacterial partners will go up to orbit in tubes of seawater. 14 hours after launch, an astronaut will add the bacteria and give them 28 hours to colonise the squid. Then the squid will be killed and fixed solid, and brought back to Earth for examination.

It's just the latest way in which cephalopods are helping unravel the mysteries of life, a topic to which I'll surely return in a future post.

Video: Ice Diver Inspires

"National Geographic" photographer and polar-ice enthusiast Paul Nicklen, who has shared his wild story of an encounter with a seemingly nurturing Leopard Seal in the past, talks more about his passionate love for the Arctic and its inhabitants, as well as polar ice's crucial part in the web of life.

He's an engaging host with an invaluable message in this recent TED talk.

Odds And Ends

Ever wonder how Humpback Whales mate? Scientists do. But now witnesses have actually seen two of these winged giants in flagranti. And there are photos to prove it. (Thanks, Underwater Times).

The highlight, the "Narooma News" explains about this landmark bit of lovin', is not the voyeurism of a second bull spectating but rather the mating couple's preferred position:

What Jon witnessed is called a “heat run”, where as many as 40 humpback males chase down a female, and vie for the right to mate with her.

After the female chooses her mate, they usually swim off, and until now, humpbacks mating had never been witnessed, let alone recorded, he said.

The mating took place in a relatively shallow lagoon where he was able to get less than 10 metres from them, fixated by both the mating pair and a huge male located just underneath them.

He said that all the researchers who saw his images were surprised how the whales mated side by side and continued swimming, rather than belly-to-belly as traditionally was thought how it happened.

Bonny Schumaker blogged about Sea Shepherd and friends discovering encouraging signs of life in the Gulf of Mexico over Labor Day weekend, including 21 Whale Shark sightings in all:

We spotted 12 whale sharks on Sunday. Again, they were always near or in the middle of a school of jumping tuna and lots of baitfish. Some of those bait balls had tiger sharks with them; we never did see both tiger and whale sharks together. And of course we also were delighted to find more leatherback turtles and dolphins.

There was also this little behavioral gem:

We witnessed five dolphins apparently playing with the sub-adult whale shark -- they seemed to be taking turns chasing each other. The dolphins, if not the young whale shark, appeared to be having quite some fun with it all; the scientists were quite excited about this, as it is yet another feature of whale shark behavior about which we know very little.

I haven't tracked down the purported "Whale Shark finning" video itself, but maybe that's just as well. I wonder whether the shark's fin properties that are so highly coveted in parts of Asia are even present in Whale Sharks.

A Six-Gill Shark is caught chomping a fish head on video nearly a mile down. Can the six-gill's bite be so innocuous, or is that a titanium fish head?

A music video inspired by sea life that's just a joy to watch.

Offline For A Little While

I'm offline for a while. Little diving expected, I'm afraid.

My nonfiction reading list includes: Rachel Carson's "The Sea Around Us," Tony Koslow's "The Silent Deep," Philip Hoare's "The Whale" and Jared Diamond's "Collapse," among others.

Marine Miscellany

Alvin lives, we are reminded by Scientist at Work; and the Generation-X research submersible is still doing great work. This time, it's for an expedition to Hydrate Ridge to study carbonate rock, deep-sea ecology, protozoans called foraminifera (whatever that is), and other inscrutibles. Okay, it is showing its age sometimes.

Alvin's bio courtesy of Jeffrey Marlow:

The most important member of the expedition, however, is the 35,000-pound, egg-shaped submersible named Alvin. Alvin has been the workhorse of the deep-ocean scientific community for more than 45 years, allowing us to explore unseen worlds thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean. To sweeten the deal, Alvin comes equipped with robotic arms and an array of sample boxes, so we can collect promising samples and continue our investigations in the relative comfort of a laboratory. Faded photographs and dusty plaques commemorating the sub’s prolific history adorn the walls of Atlantis’s library. Alvin helped recover an unexploded hydrogen bomb in 1966, took Walter Cronkite to hydrothermal vents in 1982 and explored the Titanic in 1986. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. In 1967, an ambitious swordfish attacked Alvin’s foam outer layer, got stuck and was eventually cooked for dinner by the crew. A couple of years later, the sub sank during deployment and spent 10 months on the seafloor before it could be resurrected.

Aw, shucks. Chinese and U.S. scientists at BGI-Shenzhen claim to have tracked down the oyster genome. And it looks like this could lead to a genetically engineered oyster that comes out of the water on the half-shell.

Scat-terbrained scientists (that's a pun, not an insult) are still on the hunt for the elusive feces of the Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus). If you think the feces are tough, by the way, you should try capturing their urine.

More evidence that beachside resorts and hotels aren't taking the threat to hatchling sea turtles seriously. (hat tip: DotEarth)

Oceanographer John Delaney delivered a recent TED talk in which he stumped for "new eyes" (that's a Proust quote) in the ocean through the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). Should man really "be present throughout the ocean at will," as Delaney describes it? My mind's not made up.