50+ Ways to Die in a Cave

Snakes, why is it always snakes? Hey, that's no. 44!

To be precise, it's 52 Ways to Die in a Cave by author James M. Tabor.  Personal favorites:

30. Animals eat rope (easy, just cover the rope in poison!)
29. Chemical contamination of rope (doh!)
32. Hair caught in rappel rack (ow.)
42. Asphyxiation by methane, carbon dioxide, blast fumes, etc. (Death by blast fumes! \m/ )
45. Struck by lightning while in cave stream (really? that can happen?)
27. Rappel into pit without ascent gear (this is a metaphor for a lot of things actually)
18. Rope cut by falling rock (that's just so unfair)

...and #52 (drum roll, please!)....

Stuck in crevice!  (how perfectly banal)

And then there's a disturbingly great amount of ways to die by whatever crappy gear you've brought along that failed to secure/protect you. Great.

Via Boing Boing.

Zombie Ants Controlled by Fungal Overlord!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Huh? This story is too weird for me to even attempt to summarize, so I'll just go straight to the MSNBC highlight:

In a bizarre parasitic death sentence, a fungus turns carpenter ants into the walking dead and gets them to die in a spot that's perfect for the fungus to grow and reproduce.

...and...

Once infected by the fungus, an ant is compelled to climb down from the canopy to the low leaves, where it clamps down with its mandibles just before it dies.

"The fungus accurately manipulates the infected ants into dying where the parasite prefers to be, by making the ants travel a long way during the last hours of their lives," said study leader David P. Hughes of Harvard University.

Yeah, just plain weird, right? Anyway, to learn more about the evil fungus and it's insectoid automatons, read on...

Now if only we could get the fungus to get rid of these bugs, I'd feel safer!

Newly Discovered "Megapiranha" May Be Evolutionary Step Between Nice Fish, Evil-er Ones

A newly discovered fossil of a previously unknown species of piranha, dubbed "megapiranha" (scary!) is being examined as the step between modern piranhas and a related, much larger species called pacu. The megapiranha is 3-foot in length (again, scary!) and holds clues in the formation of its teeth. From MSNBC:

Present-day piranhas have a single row of triangular teeth, like the blade on a saw, explained the researchers. Pacu have two rows of square teeth, presumably for crushing fruits and seeds.

"In modern piranhas, the teeth are arranged in a single file," said Wasila Dahdul, a visiting scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. "But in the relatives of piranhas — which tend to be herbivorous fishes — the teeth are in two rows."

The new fossil shows an intermediate pattern: teeth in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the two rows in pacu were compressed to form a single row in piranhas. "It almost looks like the teeth are migrating from the second row into the first row," said John Lundberg, curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and a co-author of a study of the jawbone.

Read more...

Missing Link (to Lemurs?) Found!

Well, it appears the true missing link has been discovered--in Germany of all places. This is a surprise to be sure since most pre-homosapien fossils are found in North or East Africa. No matter, the real surprise is perhaps that we're more related to lemurs than we thought, which if you weren't aware, only hail from one place on Earth--Madagascar.

From National Geographic

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Ida, properly known as Darwinius masillae, has a unique anatomy. The lemur-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs.

"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study.

Read more...

Ida has her own website too.

New Antarctic Creatures Discovered

Sea monsters, sea "squirts," and translucent octopi oh my! Yes, Antarctica truly is the final frontier on this small blue-green world. I've long wondered what lies beneath the ice that covers the forgotten continent. Well below the waves, an iridescent octopus flutters in the frigid depths:


Live Science has a nice in-depth article....

Captains Cousteau and Nemo would be proud!