Alligator Gar!
It’s actually not a reptile at all, but instead a primitive ray finned fish. It’s exclusively a freshwater fish, found only in North America. The largest was caught just this past valentines day, in Mississippi measured at 8 ft 5 in long, and weighing 327 lb.
Culture and the ability to transmit novel learned behavior from one generation to the next was once believed to be a trait unique to humans, but researchers are starting to realize that culture may be far more common in nature than we ever thought possible.
7 animals that have culture
Vampire Squid!
Tumblr won’t let me add more pics! So please check out this aweseom video from national geographic - the squid turns inside out to avoid any attacks.
Historical squid - not changing much at all since it arrived on earth over 300 million years ago.
Who knew these things exist????
Nudibranch!
Aka - sea slug
“A nudibranch is a member of what is now a taxonomic clade, and what was previously a suborder, of soft-bodied, shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusks, which are noted for their often extraordinary colors and striking forms. The clade Nudibranchia is the largest clade within the heterobranchs, with more than 3,000 described species.”
Great White Sharks
Yesterday in class we watched Sharkwater and it was really amazing. It was about how sharks are looked at deadly when in fact they kill SIGNIFICANTLY less people than elephants do. As the movie depicted they kill about 5 people each year where as elephants and tigers kill about 100. The picture above is Rob Stewart - the director of Sharkwater petting and feeding sharks in the ocean.
The movie shows the illegal and cruel shark poaching and stresses that sharks are not dangerous. I feel this is the same as plane crashes - most people are scared to go on a plane because they fear that they will crash… while there are signifcantly more car crashes/deaths but because plane crashes (and shark attacks) happen so infrequently, the get lots of news coverage.
There is no record of a hammerhead shark ever killing anyone. Which mostly people view great whites as a threat, but hammerheads are still being poached for their meat and because they are in the shark family - thus deadly. He says how sharks usually are more scared of humans.
I recommend watching the documentary. You can find it on youtube and perhaps other various sources (hulu, netflix).
Some may see this as propaganda and that of course sharks are dangerous! But either way - the illegal poaching and killing is cruel and harmful for all of our ocean ecosystem. Greenpeace - as featured in the documentary - help fight against illegal poaching of sharks, but also whales, seals, etc.
Deep-Sea Coral
Photograph by Cheryl Morrison, USGSIn November, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the discovery of two communities of dead and dying deep-sea corals 7 miles (11 kilometers) from the damaged well and about 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) beneath the waves.
The corals were discolored, degraded, and coated with a brown substance that made researchers suspect the Gulf oil spill was the cause.
Fortunately, despite a number of expeditions, no additional deep-sea coral die-offs have turned up yet, said Steve Ross, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who studies some of the biggest, most vibrant deep-sea coral sites in the Gulf (pictured, a deep-sea coral species in the genus Lophelia). Some of his sites are located just 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the damaged well, but they appeared healthy on recent visits.
“We’ve been working these sites for years,” Ross said. “We know what they’re supposed to look like, and they didn’t look any different.”
But subtler effects may take years to appear. “There certainly is a tremendous amount of concern over the potential for long-term impacts.”
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