BBC page, includes video (probably not visible outside UK)

Adam Smith’s fantastic Plesiosaur site

Adam Smith podcast on is Nessie a Plesiosaur and other (more serious) things:

Dealing with wild animals is difficult. This video tells the amusing/sad story of an arctic seal, which was found – very lost – off the coast of Africa, was brought to the UK, fed, then eventually released from the north coast of Scotland, pointed in the right direction. What happened next?

Parrotfish are major grazers of the algae that grow on coral reefs. Protecting them from over-fishing may be decisive for the survival of reefs in the Caribbean. Sea urchins can also do the trick. That’s the take-home message of a Nature article, most of which consists are rather hard to follow mathematical modelling – ecology is not all (or even at all) about tree hugging! There are some very tough sums involved!

BBC article (includes loadsavideos of parrotfish doing stuff); Nature article (not for the faint-hearted or those without a subscription).

There are no insects that spend their whole life cycle under the surface of the sea, and very few that spend even part of their life on or in the sea. Why not? This student-built website takes you through the various hypotheses (salinity, competitive exclusion etc) and provides you with lots of thought-provoking ideas. NB You can’t jump to the end and get “the answer”, for two reasons – a) there isn’t one and b) you have to collect the letters of a password by going through each hypothesis!

Super pictures of life on coral reef in Australia.

Go back in time 510 Myr, shortly before a mudslide trapped and preserved an amazing array of soft-bodied fauna in a shallow sea in what is now called the Burgess Shale. This video – an extract from a 5-minute long show from the Field Museum in Chicago – shows some of the key bizarre organisms (including Wiwixia, Marella and Anomalocaris) that are characteristic of the Cambrian Explosion. The video is quite long and is in Quicktime format. As the students who have seen it in the Evolution of Animals lectures will know, it’s well worth the wait!

A female bonnethead shark (part of the hammerhead family) gave birth to a pup (yes, some sharks are viviparous – this was very important for realising that mammals have eggs. Read my book!). What was interesting is that she had not been in contact with a male – it was a case of parthenogenesis, unusual in such a large animal. Original article in Biological Letters (open access), BBC news item.

A rare soft-shelled turtle – one of the largest turtles in the world – has been observed in Cambodia. I’ve never seen anything like it…..

And – completely unrelated - this piece about turtle navigation from Current Biology (open access).

Amazing discoveries of fantastic new animals deep in the freezing sea around Antarctica. Described in this article in Nature (subscription needed to get past abstract), and in these pieces from The Independent and the BBC. Pictures here.

Images from the Antarctic survey show new animals colonizing the sea bed after a huge part of the ice shelf had calved a massive iceberg. Article from The Independent providing background to the images.