Nature is wild

The Corinthian said:
Baby Shark Born in All-Female Tank Could Be The First 'Virgin Birth' For Its Species


Scientists say a rare shark "virgin birth" may be the first of its kind after a baby shark was born in an all-female tank in an Italian aquarium.

The baby smoothhound shark, named Ispera, which means hope in Sardianian, was born at the Acquario di Cala Gonone in Sardinia, Italy, according to Italian outlet AGI.

Its mother had spent ten years living in a tank with one other female, the outlet said, and scientists suspect the newborn could be the first documented case of shark parthenogenesis in that species.

Parthenogenesis is a rare phenomenon where an egg develops into an embryo without being fertilized by a sperm.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-baby...rn-but-the-mother-lived-in-an-all-female-tank
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An aquatic zoo (or how do you call that?) in the Netherlands had the same happen with a ray, I read in a report just a few weeks ago. It was actually known already that parthenogenesis was possible in rays though, but it had not been observed like this before.
 


Some incredible high resolution pics here.
 
https://www.livescience.com/butterflies-drink-their-babies.html
Milkweed butterflies tear open caterpillars and drink them alive

Massimo.jpg
 
The Corinthian said:
Baby Shark Born in All-Female Tank Could Be The First 'Virgin Birth' For Its Species


Scientists say a rare shark "virgin birth" may be the first of its kind after a baby shark was born in an all-female tank in an Italian aquarium.

The baby smoothhound shark, named Ispera, which means hope in Sardianian, was born at the Acquario di Cala Gonone in Sardinia, Italy, according to Italian outlet AGI.

Its mother had spent ten years living in a tank with one other female, the outlet said, and scientists suspect the newborn could be the first documented case of shark parthenogenesis in that species.

Parthenogenesis is a rare phenomenon where an egg develops into an embryo without being fertilized by a sperm.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-baby...rn-but-the-mother-lived-in-an-all-female-tank
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"All-female", which one of them identified as a female in order to get in and then changed his gender back?
 
JPRouve said:
"All-female", which one of them identified as a female in order to get in and then changed his gender back?
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Not cuttlefish JP, sharks.

(Sorry, just saw a movie where they brought that up.)
 
JPRouve said:
It's probably where one of them sharks got the idea. :lol:
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All conspiring underseas. Slippery bastards. (Not the ones born through parthenogenesis though; I guess that technically cannot produce bastards.)
 
Cheimoon said:
An aquatic zoo (or how do you call that?) in the Netherlands had the same happen with a ray, I read in a report just a few weeks ago. It was actually known already that parthenogenesis was possible in rays though, but it had not been observed like this before.
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It’s incredible. These types of stories always reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s line from Jurassic Park. “Life, uh…finds a way.”
 
FireballXL5 said:
How do they know how old it is?
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"The Greenland shark's eye lens is composed of a specialised material - and it contains proteins that are metabolically inert," explained Mr Neilson.
"Which means after the proteins have been synthesised in the body, they are not renewed any more. So we can isolate the tissue that formed when the shark was a pup, and do radiocarbon dating."
The team looked at 28 sharks, most of which had died after being caught in fishing nets as by-catch.
Using this technique, they established that the largest shark - a 5m-long female - was extremely ancient.
Because radiocarbon dating does not produce exact dates, they believe that she could have been as "young" as 272 or as old as 512. But she was most likely somewhere in the middle, so about 400 years old.
It means she was born between the years of 1501 and 1744, but her most likely date of birth was in the 17th century.
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The coldest seas are amazing for this. Or at least, my understanding is that the cold slows down body processes and allows these creatures to become ultra old. Given how much remains to be learned about the deep seas, there might well be even older creatures that we are yet to discover (or know creatures of which we are yet to discover their age).
 
For dinosaur nerds...

Parts of an ankylosaurus skeleton have been found in Morocco (which makes it unique), dated to the Middle Jurassic Period around 168 million years ago (making it the oldest ankylosaurus ever found), with spikes directly attached to rib-bone (which has never been seen before in living or extinct vertebrates).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58657862

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Dr Susie Maidment is describing a fabulous new fossil in her possession.
All she has is a section of rib with prongs attached. But even from just this, the palaeontologist can tell it's a novel species of armoured dinosaur and the oldest ankylosaur ever found.
What's more, it's come out of Africa, from Morocco, where these creatures have never been unearthed before.

That's exciting enough but there's also something very strange about this ancient specimen.
The spikes are fused directly to the bone, and this is a big puzzle, says Dr Maidment, who's affiliated to London's Natural History Museum (NHM).

Ordinarily, you would expect rib bones to be covered by muscle, and then by skin, and for the armour - made of a protein called keratin, like your fingernails - to be sitting on top of that.
But for the spikes to be connected straight through to the bone is just odd. For one thing, you'd think this would restrict the extension of the muscles and make it difficult for the animal to move.
"Honestly, it's bizarre," Dr Maidment told BBC News.
"We don't see this in any other extant (still living) or extinct vertebrate anywhere. It's a totally unprecedented morphology in the history of life on Earth."
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Speaking of prehistoric creatures, here's a nice reconstruction of one:

invertebrate_horseshoe-crab_600x300.ashx


Or not. This is actually a horseshoe crab, a freakin' weird creature that's real and alive right now. They're also not actually crabs, but a different kind of arthropods altogether. But one thing that finally does make sense: fossil records for horseshoe crabs extend back as far as 240 million years ago, and they are considered living fossils.

For some more fun, here is their underside:

Tachypleus_tridentatus_Cat_ba_2.JPG


And here they are having sex (not quite NSFW):

Horseshoe_crab_mating.jpg


Finally, in an interesting turn of events, the blood of horseshoe crabs (which is blue; they're the world's real nobility!) actually has human uses (quoting from Wikipedia):
Horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin to carry oxygen through their blood. Because of the copper present in hemocyanin, their blood is blue. Their blood contains amebocytes, which play a similar role to the white blood cells of vertebrates in defending the organism against pathogens. Amebocytes from the blood of L. polyphemus are used to make Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), which is used for the detection of bacterial endotoxins in medical applications. There is a high demand for the blood, the harvest of which involves collecting and bleeding the animals, and then releasing them back into the sea. Most of the animals survive the process; mortality is correlated with both the amount of blood extracted from an individual animal, and the stress experienced during handling and transportation. Estimates of mortality rates following blood harvesting vary from 3–15% to 10–30%. Approximately 500,000 Limulus are harvested annually for this purpose.
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milemuncher777 said:
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Thats amazing! The lengths that animals go to for mating. :) The Dancing with the Birds documentary is great for that as well. (No fish there though.)

Probably someone should do nature-style documentary at the things we humans do to get out mates. That would be hilarious. :D

I'm also imagining groups of pufferfish doing this along a large stretch of ocean floor, and people treating it like grain circles. :lol:
 
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/12/amphibian-die-offs-can-cause-human-health-problems/

I never appreciated the link between the two, but essentially the amphibian population world wide is declining. This is directly linked to growing malaria rates across the equatorial belt. The loss of amphibians world wide is linked to many things such as invasive fungi, habitat loss…all due to humans.

Frogs and other amphibians are great mosquito-reducers. If you remove a huge number of them from the landscape, what happens to malaria rates? To investigate, researchers cross-referenced dates of Bd-driven amphibian decline in different parts of Costa Rica and Panama with changes in malaria incidence in those same places. Bd swept across these two countries over the course of about twenty-five years, starting in northwest Costa Rica and progressing south and east. They found that, generally, around a year after Bd entered a county, malaria cases began to increase. They continue to rise for two years, then stay at that higher level for six more, before beginning to attenuate 9 years after the fungus arrived.

“For the six years our estimated effect of amphibian decline is at its highest, the annual expected increase in malaria ranges from 0.76-1.0 additional cases per 1,000 population,” they write, which makes up “a substantial share of cases overall.” (This rate of increase in Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, would translate to 1000 more cases there.) Higher temperatures and reduced tree cover were also associated with increased malaria cases, although to a lesser extent, and other mosquito-borne diseases saw similar trends, they found.
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For a bit more on the amphibian population crisis there’s this article:

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2016/10/14/13147056/amphibian-extinction-frog-bd

It’s estimated that 200 species of frogs have gone extinct since the 1970s, and many fear it’s a harbinger of greater biodiversity loss that will come for birds, fish, and mammals too.

Ecologists fear that the planet is in the midst of a mass extinction — the sixth in the long history of life on Earth. And it’s looking like amphibians are the most at-risk class of vertebrates.

This is particularly disturbing because amphibians — which include frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (they look like worms crossed with snakes) — have been around for hundreds of millions of years.


“During the great extinctions of the dinosaurs in the Pleistocene, amphibians made it through with no appreciable effect,” Mendelson says. “So they’re not the most delicate creatures in the world. But the world has gotten so bad now that even the amphibians can’t tolerate it.”
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