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Saturday, March 31, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
My Second PhotoShop Image
I took this photograph on my trip to Niagara Falls.
I have just finished enhancing it.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Australian Saltwater Crocodiles Are World’s Most Powerful Biters
"ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) — In Greg Erickson's lab at Florida State University, crocodiles and alligators rule. Skeletal snouts and toothy grins adorn window ledges and tables -- all donated specimens that are scrutinized by researchers and students alike."
Erickson, a Florida State biology professor, has been wondering of the bite force of crocodilians.
The answer?
A value of 3,700 pounds per square inch for a 17-foot saltwater crocodile (with tooth pressures of 350,000 pounds per square inch). This is the most powerful bite force recorded in history.
And that's not all. Erickson and his team estimated that the extinct crocodilians (which were 30-40 foot animals), had a bite force as much as 23,100 pounds.
The team reported their remarkable findings to the journal PLoS One.
They were funded by the National Geographic Society and the FSU College of Arts and Sciences. The study has taken over a decade, measuring the bite force of every crocodilian species (gharials, alligators, crocodiles, and the rest).
It was reported that to measure the bite force of all of these specimens, it required an army of undergrad and graduate students, a "wily" team of croc-handlers, and statisticians.
Not only did they manage to collect such challenging data, but they found new ways of measuring bite force.
Over the 11 years that his current study took place in both the United States and Australia, Erickson and his team roped 83 adult alligators and crocodiles, strapped them down, placed a bite-force device between their back teeth and recorded the bite force.
Dangerous is an understatement here.
Overall, the researchers looked at crocodilians both mundane and exotic, from American alligators to 17-foot Australian saltwater crocodiles and the Indian gharial. Among the world's most successful predatory reptiles, these creatures have been "guardians of the water-land interface for over 85 million years," Erickson said.
Erickson commented that if you could bench press a pickup truck, you could escape a crocodile's jaws.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Basketball-Sized Eyes Help Squids Play Defense
" ScienceDaily (Mar. 15, 2012) — Giant and colossal squids have eyes as big as basketballs, and a Duke scientist thinks he knows why. "They're most likely using their huge eyes to spot and escape their predators, sperm whales," said Duke biologist Sonke Johnsen. "
Duke biologist Sonke Johnsen wanted to understand how and why
the giant and colossal squids use such a large eye.
He collaborated with a group of scientists, and the team discovered that the size and structure of the squid's eye allows it to see sperm whales approaching as they disturb bioluminescent organisms in the water.
"Big squids come in two types -- giant and colossal. They can grow to weights of five adult men put together, which is comparable to a large swordfish. But swordfish eyes are about the size of softballs, about 3 inches in diameter."
It was mathematics. The team measured the sizes of the giant and colossal squids' eyes. They collected data of the water clarity and the light penetration at the depths in which the squid live (300 to 1000 meters). Using the collected data, they mathematically modeled how the eyes would work and see at such depths and how they would function.
They found that the size of the squid's eye allows it to collect more light (think of nocturnal animals, such as owls and aye-ayes).
This ability to detect such light also aids the squid in detecting, very sensitively, changes in contrast' most importantly distant, far-moving objects, such as sperm whales. As their large cetacean predator approaches, it disturbs the biolumiescent organisms surrounding it, causing them to react. The squid's extra-large eye allows it to see the disturbance clearly and act accordingly.
The squids can sense this light-disturbance from 120 meters, or an entire American football field away.
However, the sperm whales echolocation, or sonar system, is far more effective. It would most likely sense the squid long before it sees the disturbance of light.
So then, why does the squid develop such an eye?
"...the squid's basketball-sized eye, and the body to carry it, isn't necessarily for moving out of the whale's detection range, but for planning a well-timed escape."
The theory is still being speculated, but it is certainly a difficult one to "falsify".
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Thursday, March 15, 2012
My First PhotoShop Image
My first Photoshop image!
No, it's not amazing, but it's certainly a start. I am currently involved in a photo grant at my high school. As part of the Bridges program, the other students and I will have our own art exhibit at the town hall.
Very exciting!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
"Leopard Seal Sunset"
National Geographic has attached a critter-cam to the back of a leopard seal. This view of the sunset from this perspective? Stunning.
How Insects 'Remodel' Their Bodies Between Life Stages
"ScienceDaily (Feb. 29, 2012) — It's one of life's special moments: a child finds a fat caterpillar, puts it in a jar with a twig and a few leaves, and awakens one day to find the caterpillar has disappeared and an elegant but apparently lifeless case now hangs from the twig."
How is it that a creature can appear to be a completely different creature multiple times in its lifetime?
"Working with fruit flies rather than butterflies, a team led by Ian and Dianne Duncan of Washington University in St. Louis provides part of the answer in the latest issue of PNAS. Ian Duncan, PhD, is professor of biology in Arts & Sciences; Dianne Duncan is a research associate and director of the Biology Imaging Facility."
Like most insects, fruit flies go through three main phases: the larva, pupae, and adult.
Earlier research has shown that both the larvae and the adults of insect species have similar "signaling systems" patterning them; or "chains of biochemicals that transfer a signal from receptors on the surface of cells to target genes in cell nuclei."
Scientists, however, could not understand how the same systems can both orchestrate the formation of larvae and adults.
Collaborating researchers were able to reveal that a gene expressed only in the pupal stage "redirects signaling systems so that they can activate a different set of target genes than in earlier stages."
The gene itself is controlled by a steroid hormone that turns on a variety of other genes as well.
"So insect metamorphosis, triggered by a hormone, resembles puberty, the human analog of metamorphosis, which is also triggered by hormones."
Scientists, however, could not understand how the same systems can both orchestrate the formation of larvae and adults.
Collaborating researchers were able to reveal that a gene expressed only in the pupal stage "redirects signaling systems so that they can activate a different set of target genes than in earlier stages."
The gene itself is controlled by a steroid hormone that turns on a variety of other genes as well.
"So insect metamorphosis, triggered by a hormone, resembles puberty, the human analog of metamorphosis, which is also triggered by hormones."
Continue reading this article. ScienceDaily expresses the specified details of this phenomenal change that occurs in insects: facts that are far too complicated for me to express without flat-out plagiarizing.
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