I think I’m gonna have nightmares…

i09:

Neatorama:

“Scientists have been puzzled over the purpose of the Tiger Moth’s tymbal organ membrane, which is able to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. The consensus is that it serves as a warning to bats, since the moths are able to retain poisons harvested from host plants. Scientists believed the moths who were poisonous were warning the bats, and those that weren’t were faking it anyways.

New experiments by Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University, however, have confirmed another theory: the moths are actually using the fast paced clicking to jam the bats’ echolocation. It is the first evidence of sonar jamming in nature:

Normally, a bat attack starts with relatively intermittent sounds. They then increase in frequency—up to 200 cries per second—as the bat gets closer to the moth “so it knows where the moth is at that critical moment,” Corcoran explains. But his research showed that just as bats were increasing their click frequency, moths “turn on sound production full blast,” clicking at a rate of up to 4,500 times a second. This furious clicking by the moths reversed the bats’ pattern—the frequency of bat sonar decreased, rather than increased, as it approached its prey, suggesting that it lost its target.”

Link

msnbc: “CODY, Wyoming – Wielding his chain saw as a weapon, a former U.S. Marine says he fought off a starving mountain lion that attacked him while he was camping with his wife and two toddlers in northwestern Wyoming.

Dustin Britton, a 32-year-old mechanic and ex-Marine, said he was alone cutting firewood about 100 feet from his campsite in the Shoshone National Forest when he saw the lion staring at him from some bushes.

Britton revved his 18-inch chain saw and tried to back away. But the 100-pound lion followed.”

READ FULL STORY

Neatorama:

Nasty yet fascinating…

i09:

“Here you can see an ant shooting a dose of venom straight into a centipede’s head. The centipede is translucent, so you can actually see the stinger in its brain. And there’s more.

Alex Wild, who took these photographs, is a scientist who researches ants. He also happens to be an extremely talented photographer who always manages to capture both the danger and the beauty of the insect world. While he has a number of gorgeous ant portraits, I think his most stunning work comes in action photos like these, where ants are battling it out with other insects. That ant stinging the centipede, by the way, isn’t killing the centipede. She’s just paralyzing it so that the larvae in her hive can munch on it while it’s still really fresh.

Here you can see a very strange encounter between a fly and an ant that was wandering up a tree. Wild says he saw flies landing on the ants, holding them against the tree for a few seconds, and then flying away. He couldn’t figure out what was going on until he used the magnifying action of his camera lens to get a good look at what the bugs were doing. It turned out the flies were mugging the ants, pinning them down and stealing their food.

Most flies take their attacks on ants far beyond mugging, however. These flies use ants as incubators for their larvae, using a canulated organ called an ovipositor to inject eggs into the ant’s abdomen. Eventually the baby flies eat their way out of the ant’s body, getting a lot of nourishment but killing the insect in the process. In this photo, you can see the fly injecting her eggs into the ant.

If you want to see more of Wild’s exceptionally cool insect photography, including some friendly pictures that do not involve muggings or deadly injections, check out his blog Photo Synthesis.”

Boing Boing:

“From last month’s journal Evolution, a fascinating tale of slave rebellion among ants kidnapped by other ant species and forced to work for the rival colony:

Uh oh…let’s hope they never mutate…

Neatorama:

Not so good news for crustacean lovers.  According to a research from Queen’s University Belfast researchers, crabs not only feel pain, but also remember it.  Professor Bob Elwood and Mirjam Appel, whose study was published in the journal Animal Behavior,  used electric shocks on hermit crabs to determine their response to unpleasant external stimuli.

Wires were attached to shells to deliver the small shocks to the abdomen of the some of the crabs within the shells.

The only crabs to get out of their shells were those which had received shocks, indicating that the experience is unpleasant for them. This shows that central neuronal processing occurs rather than the response merely being a reflex.

Crabs that had been shocked but had remained in their shell appeared to remember the experience of the shock because they quickly moved towards the new shell, investigated it briefly and were more likely to change to the new shell compared to those that had not been shocked.

Professor Elwood said: “There has been a long debate about whether crustaceans including crabs, prawns and lobsters feel pain.

“We know from previous research that they can detect harmful stimuli and withdraw from the source of the stimuli but that could be a simple reflex without the inner ‘feeling’ of unpleasantness that we associate with pain.

“This research demonstrates that it is not a simple reflex but that crabs trade-off their need for a quality shell with the need to avoid the harmful stimulus.

“Such trade-offs are seen in vertebrates in which the response to pain is controlled with respect to other requirements.

Link

Neatorama:

Image: Atlantic Productions

“If you think that Tyrannosaurus rex was the fiercest dinosaur ever, think again: a team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo and other universities found a 50-foot marine reptile dubbed “Predator X” that made T. rex looked like a puppy:

The 147-million-year old monster was 15 metres long, had 30-centimetre-long teeth and had a bite pressure 10 times greater than any animal alive today, said Jørn Hurum, who led the team that uncovered the fossil.

A new species of pliosaur, Predator X was probably an apex predator at the top of the food chain, similar to the modern-day great white shark, said Hurum, a palaeontologist at Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, Norway.”

Link | University of Oslo Press Release

Neatorama: “Oh, look at that – a big snake. Let’s video tape it from tail to
head, just to show our friends on teh InterWeb how docile and harmless
snakes really are.

Wait for it … wait for it …”

i09:

“Robots can already mimic people, dogs, cats and insects. They can even walk on water. Now roboticists at the University of Washington have built
a school of three robotic fish that swim and communicate wirelessly
with one another using sonar signals. So far the fish are swimming
happily in a laboratory tank, but researchers plan to build 20 of the
aqua bots and unleash them in the Puget Sound next year to help track
fish and whale migration, and contaminants in the water.

Robot
fish have been around for a few years (pictured above in the London
Aquarium, from 2005), but the UW invention is a milestone because it’s
the first group of robofish that can school through active
communication. Biological fish form dazzling schools by communicating
through their lateral lines
and in a sense the bots do the same thing, only their communication is
based on sonar. The fish are also equipped with 3-d compasses so they
know where they are in the water, and pressure sensors to keep track of
how deep they dive.

Admittedly they’re not as sexy as their biological cousins, but videos of them swimming here show they make spooky stand-ins for the real thing.”

Source: University of Washington via Discovery News