All your fly base are belong to us

Just to clarify, there are over 1,000 species of endemic Drosophila (fruit flies) on the Hawaiian Islands. These are all thought to have descended from a single introduction 26 million years ago.

Over one hundred of these Drosophila species are members of the 'picture wing group'. The figure I showed in class just depicts the hypothesized dispersal events necessary to create the 112 members of the picture wing group. Although the picture wing species are quite distinct from each other in morphology, pigmentation, and behavior it is now known that this explosive adaptive radiation occurred with relatively little change in DNA sequence. These factors make the Hawaiian Drosophila an important model system for analysis of evolutionary processes at the species level.

Learn more at FlyBase - A Database of Wing Diversity in the Hawaiian Drosophila

Every second breath...

Well I could make fun of some parts of it but I won't because it's actually a pretty nice video. They get a lot across in 3 minutes and hopefully leave you more interested in the Census on Marine Life than you were when you started. Can we ask any more than that?

National Geographic Photos

Cool pictures of weird things that live in the ocean!
(Just for fun) :)

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photos/underwater-oddities/#/pacific-octopus-eye-grall_18495_600x450.jpg

Carcinonemertes kurisi

In case you didn't see the Nexus today:  New Nemertean Worm Species Named After UCSB Scientist


UCSB zoology professor Armand Kuris has received one of the greatest honors biologists can hope for — having a newly discovered species named after him.
Carcinonemertes kurisi, a species of ribbon worm, was first found and documented by Kuris and Patricia Sadeghian, one of his former students. Sadeghian wrote her Master’s thesis on the species in 2003 and then named the ribbon worm after Kuris in an October 2010 issue of the Journal of Natural History after producing a formal description of the worm.

City of gonads

And whilst we are on the subject of oversized gonads (if you missed the museum visit that will be intriguing) here is the newly discovered 'city of gonads' jellyfish. Only a few millimetres wide with a cluster of gonads on top the jellyfish was found in the River Derwent in Hobart, Tasmania.

The new species has been named Csiromedusa medeopolis, meaning "jellyfish from CSIRO" and "city of gonads" and is so different from other jellyfish that it has been placed into a new family.

Anaerobic metazoan

Sandwiched between 'Earliest known Led Zeppelin recording' and 'Evolutionary Psychology Bingo' on BoingBoing is A multicellular organism that lives without oxygen.

This is based on a paper in BMC Biology entitled The first metazoa living in permanently anoxic conditions.

This is the first evidence of a metazoan life cycle that is spent entirely in permanently anoxic sediments. Our findings allow us also to conclude that these metazoans live under anoxic conditions through an obligate anaerobic metabolism that is similar to that demonstrated so far only for unicellular eukaryotes. The discovery of these life forms opens new perspectives for the study of metazoan life in habitats lacking molecular oxygen.

Squid friends

Although Blobby was often sad he always had his squid friends, the Glass Squid and the Piglet Squid, to cheer him up. How can you not be a biologist when such fabulous creatures exist?

Toco Toucan Tradeoff

A Toco Toucan at London Zoo.

I was doing some reading about Toucans. I confess I was never this enthusiastic as a student but these days I seem to be finding everything interesting. Anyway, I came across this curious conservation paper: Conservation puzzle: Endangered hyacinth macaw depends on its nest predator for reproduction.

In the Pantanal wetlands of Central Brazil, the endangered hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), the largest psitacid in the world, makes its nest almost exclusively in natural hollows found in the manduvi tree (Sterculia apetala). The recruitment of manduvis greatly depends on the seed dispersal services provided by the toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), responsible for 83.3% of the seed dispersal. The toco toucan, however, is responsible for about 53% of the preyed eggs, resulting in a case of conflicting ecological pressures in which the reproduction of the hyacinth macaw is indirectly dependent on the seed dispersal services of its nest predator.

Freaky frogfish

It's been a while since we had a crazy critter here - although we did see some bizarre plants on Saturday.

This new species of frogfish uses its leg like pectoral fins to crawl - that is when it isn't bouncing around like a rubber ball. See yesterdays University of Washington press release for information and some great photos and video.

Members of Histiophryne psychedelica, or H. psychedelica, don't so much swim as hop. Each time they strike the seafloor they use their fins to push off and they expel water from tiny gill openings on their sides to jet themselves forward. With tails curled tightly to one side --which surely limits their ability to steer -- they look like inflated rubber balls bouncing hither and thither.

' A cross between a cow, whale, shark, alligator and sea lion. '

I talked about how a phylogeny is a testable hypothesis of the evolution of a group, or clade. In the case of marine mammals such as whales the hypothesis is that they evolved from non-aquatic ancestors. Well a paper in PLoS One this week, with the catchy title: New Protocetid Whale from the Middle Eocene of Pakistan: Birth on Land, Precocial Development, and Sexual Dimorphism describes the discovery of a rare fossil of a ancient whale with a fetus still inside that reveals that its species, ancestors to modern whales, gave birth on land 47.5 million years ago.

The discovery, along with prior fossil finds, suggests the first whale ancestors were full-time land dwellers that might have been related to the early relatives of hoofed animals, such as sheep and cattle. It lived at the land-sea interface and often moved back and forth between the two environments in what is Pakistan today and looked like an improbable cross between a cow, whale, shark, alligator and sea lion.

Snake longer than school bus

Researchers have unveiled fossils of the world's largest snake, a 42-foot-long relative of the boa constrictor.

Reported at Cryptomundo (which has the best headline), Science News, and many more, details are in this week's Nature. Apart from the fact a giant snake is inherently cool, the discovery also sheds light on the paleoclimate.

The maximum body size that a snake species can reach is related to the average annual temperature of the environment in which it lives. So, average annual temperature in Titanoboa’s rainforest probably measured between 32° and 33° Celsius, about 6 degrees C higher than the average temperature in the region today, the team reports.

Researchers knew the temperature was higher 60 million years ago than it is today, but the new finding could help scientists better calibrate models of ancient climate.

I guess Titanoboa is kind of a cool name but I still prefer Beelzebuffo. Beelzebuffo had a better picture too. Am I the only person who thinks the artists reconstruction above would be greatly improved by the addition of a schoolbus?

Predatory squirt

This newly discovered carnivorous sea squirt traps fish and other prey in its funnel-like front section Tethered to the seafloor over two miles down the 20-inch sea squirt is one of the deepest-dwelling animals ever found in Australia. The new species is one of many new deep-sea creatures discovered on a recent expedition that used a remotely operated vehicle. National Geographic has more details and photographs.