Dragons do spit fire!

Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate

As if the Komodo Dragon could not get any more fascinating (and terrifying), some scientists are claiming that they are poisonous:

...a provocative paper to be published this week, an international team of scientists argues that the Komodo dragon is even more impressive. They claim that the lizards use a potent venom to bring down their victims...

The fact that these lizards can bring down large prey, such as pigs and water buffalo, has been attributed to their highly infectious bite. After biting a large animal, all the lizard would have to do is play a morbid waiting game. The prey would stagger off, later to keel over sick, then succumb to infection. However, some scientists have always questioned that scenario. Recently, an examination of the heads of several Dragons that died in captivity was revealing:

...The researchers found the second set of glands in the Komodo dragon heads, and inside they found venomlike proteins. Tests showed that one protein keeps blood from clotting. Another one relaxes blood vessel walls...

These scientists are claiming that this one-two punch--rapid blood loss and drop in blood pressure--is what causes prey to collapse soon after a bite. But some scientists are not so sure, as one points out:

"...I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you’d be somewhat still and quiet for a bit,” he said, “at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you...”

Heh! Point well taken. I think the jury is still out as to whether this Dragon spits fire.

No Trespassing: Violators will be eaten

Komodo dragons kill Indonesian fisherman

I don't mean to make light of a personal tragedy, but these animals have killed a number of people (mostly tourists) over the years:

(CNN) -- An Indonesian fisherman has been killed by Komodo dragons after he was attacked while trespassing on a remote island in search of fruit, officials said Tuesday.

The article mentions a particularly hair-raising account of stranded scuba divers who had to fend off the reptiles before they were rescued.

Mythical creature questions authority

A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors

Anyone having any doubt about the power of myth has not met the "grass-mud horse". This mythical creature has caused a sensation in China, presenting a headache for the country's heavy handed internet censors:

...A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more...The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that. It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet...

Oh Grass Mud Horse, we could have used you during the Bush years!

It Came From La Brea

Los Angeles Tar Yields Mammoth’s Skeleton

Another creature has emerged from the famous La Brea Tar Pits. This time, it's a rather complete Mammoth:

...LOS ANGELES — The excavation for a parking garage near the La Brea tar pits here has yielded the site’s first intact mammoth skeleton as well as a trove of other bones that could double the size of the site’s already large collection of fossils from the last ice age...

Tree Lobsters make great pets

Tree Lobsters!!
BugGirl has an amazing item about the rediscovery of "Tree Lobsters", a previously thought-to-be-extinct species of Phasmid (that's 'walking sticks' to all you non-bug geeks people out there). The original article is in German.

BugGirl humorously suggest maybe people should develop a taste for these critters, therefore insuring their survival via farming. Yum! But captive breeding has worked for certain invertebrates, such as tarantulas and tree snails. Thankfully, there is group now formed, TheFriendsOfThePhasmid, that's focusing on the survival of these fascinating insects.

Critters of the Night

A Taste for Blood

Great article about creatures that survive by drinking blood and a recent book ("Dark Banquet") by Bill Shutt. It starts in the office of a friend of mine, Lou Sorkin:

...With his soft voice and friar’s manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that...He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation’s homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America’s leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony — very personal...

Lou keeps a jar full of bedbugs that he feeds with his own bug. As described in the article, the jar is capped with a fine meshed screen fine enough to keep the infects entrapped, but open enough to allow them to poke their beaks through to feed. Lou, being a dedicated entomologist offers them his arm.

Shutt points out features that blood drinking organisms have in common:

...the hatpin teeth, the natural clot busters and pain deadeners...Blood feeders must also be stealthy and wily and good at escaping the swats and fury of their often much larger hosts...

As blood is a poor source of nutrition, most vampiric animals are arthropods, who can subsist on small meals.

There's a lot on the famous and legendary vampire bats in the article, but perhaps the most nightmarish beast is the Candiru fish of the Amazon. If you're visiting the Amazon--whatever you do--don't pee in a stream:

...The only other vertebrates known to subsist solely on blood are certain types of candiru, a poorly studied but floridly feared group of inchlong catfish found in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. A hematophagous candiru’s usual modus is to parasitize a larger catfish, infiltrating the host’s gill slits, grasping onto the flesh inside, rupturing blood vessels, pumping out the blood with its highly mobile jaws and then, after a minute or two, darting out again. Yet for at least a century, the fish have been reputed to target the human urethra as well, supposedly enticed by the scent of urine: fish, after all, urinate through their gills. Despite the antiquity and persistence of the legend, there is only one confirmed case, from 1997, of a candiru making its way into a human urethra, where it probably had no time for a blood meal before suffocating to death...

Ouch!

(Image: Temple of the Fluke Man)

Aliens: just add water

Hardygrades: Space survival

Tardigrades (aka: 'water bears' or 'moss animals')are the coolest animals. There ability to resist one of the plagues of corporeal life--namely dying--boarders on science fiction:

...Most living things cannot survive in space, though a few hardy bacteria and some lichen can do so for a while. Now, however, an animal has been found that can venture outside without a space suit. Ingemar Jonsson at Kristianstad University in Sweden, and his colleagues, have managed to send tardigrades, a small invertebrate animal less than 1mm long, out into space and back again...They exposed some to the vacuum of space. After these animals had been brought back and rehydrated, scientists found no difference in their survival and reproduction rates compared with tardigrades that had stayed back at home...

There's lots of good Tardigrade links out there. My fav tells you how to collect them. You do need a low-power microscope, 30-40 is a good mag. You'll be really able to study them at about 100x.

World Rat Day

Rat lovers gather for rodent holiday

Darn! I missed it:

...A group of Salem, Mass., rodent enthusiasts have marked World Rat Day with a gathering that included rat beauty contests...

Calling all Kiwis

New Zealand Builds a Nest Big Enough to Save Kiwis
Progress being made in New Zealand to save the various species of Kiwis:

...There are five species of kiwi, a smaller nocturnal relative of New Zealand’s now-extinct moa, and, more distantly, the emu and the ostrich. All kiwi species are listed on the country’s endangered species list. But two of them, the Rowi and Haast Tokoeka, are down to fewer than 300 birds, earning them a place on New Zealand’s “nationally critical” list, its most extreme category of endangered species...

Fortunately, New Zealand has the right attitude:

...So New Zealand’s government agencies have partnered with local communities, nonprofit groups like Save the Kiwi and commercial operations like the Willowbank reserve, to tackle the problem by trying to protect the birds until they have a better chance of defending themselves...

Captive breading and egg collection are risky policies, but for the Kiwi they have resutled in progress:

...Eggs are taken from kiwi nests in the wild and incubated in places like Willowbank. The newly hatched chicks are then taken to protected areas, many of them on isolated islands off the coast without predators, for about a year until they are big enough to fend for themselves. Then they are returned to the place their egg was found.After a slow start, Operation Nest Egg is picking up momentum. Its success rate is rising, and similar programs are starting throughout the country...Mr. McLennan is cautiously optimistic that Operation Nest Egg will stem the kiwis’ decline...“Because the rates of decline are relatively low at 2 to 5 percent, you don’t have to add many birds back into the population to make it break even,” he said...