So You Want to Be A Marine Biologist: Deep Sea News Edition. If this comic makes you laugh, perhaps you should become a marine biologist. Note the lack of dolphins. ARRRRR ME HEARTIES!!!! So ye want t’ be a pirate, t’ sail the open sea searching for booty – what? You said a marine biologist? Oh. And let me just get this out of the way – being a marine biologist is not about pulling golf balls out of whale blowholes or hugging dolphins.
No, marine biologists cannot hug the dolphins. There are bad reasons and good reasons to become a marine biologist. The following advice is aimed at undergraduates, and is my personal opinion and should by no means be taken as the One True Way. You have to have a solid, traditional science background to be a marine biologist. Assuming you want to be a marine BIOLOGIST, take lots of biology! So, marine biology is about learning how the amazing animals and ecosystems of the ocean work, but how exactly do we do that? You might notice that many of the things on this list involve talking to your professors. Wanna Be a Marine Biologist? Here’s How. “Oh my God!
You study dolphins… How cool…!” I can’t begin to say how many times I’ve heard this. It seems what I do is something many people dream about. The adventurous, romantic life of a marine biologist, out in the elements, investigating the lives of these magnificent creatures in the freedom of the vast ocean…I am fortunate indeed, and I wouldn’t exchange my life and career for anything. But people don’t often realize what goes into the job. For every hour I log at sea, there are probably at least five to spend in the lab back on land.
The work is as long and hard as it’s rewarding, both on and off the water, but the many hours passed hunched over a desk as the clock ticks late into the night, analyzing, writing, correcting, rewriting, are where the less committed tend to weed themselves out of the vocation… (Excerpted from my book Dolphin Confidential: Confessions of a Field Biologist) Here is my token of advice for the aspiring marine biologists out there. First Steps Next Steps. This Jay Is Evolving in a Very, Very Weird Way. The scrub jays of California’s Santa Cruz Island really love a good peanut. “It’s like crack to them,” says Katie Langin, a biologist at Colorado State University who probably knows these birds better than anyone else. Working with Scott Morrison of the Nature Conservancy, Langin started visiting the peaks and valleys of this wild island in 2007, baiting jays with nuts to trap and tag them for her dissertation.
Before she came along, what researchers knew about the island scrub jay came from observations in just a handful of places. Much of this rock is inaccessible, but Langin had a helicopter. As she gathered more and more data on different populations of the birds around the island, Langin had a revelation: The birds, members of one single species, had split into two varieties in different habitats. Island scrub jays living in oak forests have shorter bills, good for cracking acorns. This is very, very weird. I Say Species, You Say Specious Those with peanut allergies need not apply. Why elephants never forget - Alex Gendler. How do elephants communicate? The website Elephant Voices allows you access to elephant vocalizations of all types. Plug in your earphones and have a listen! While on this site check out Echo of the elephants, one of the longest studied matriarchs of any elephant group in the world. You can also watch her story on PBS Nature. Learn about the Amboseli Trust for Elephants set up by scientist Cynthia Moss.
For more about elephant communication, follow the research of Cornell scientist Michael Pardo: Do Asian elephant calls have grammar-like elements? Standing tall, head waggling, ear spreading and periscope sniff? Elephants use sticks to scratch their backs? Elephants have been shown to have emotions. Now you know some things about elephants. ScienceTake | How Dogs Drink - Video. Battle Of The Bats. The different ways animals breath in one cool animated graphic. Can you detect the stealth animals hiding in all these pictures? When They Brought These Wolves Into The Park, They Had No Idea This Would Happen. When They Brought These Wolves Into The Park, They Had No Idea This Would Happen.
"What is the Evidence for Evolution?" Zoo Jobs: Meet Small Mammal Biologist at National Zoo. Evolution’s Baby Steps. If you explore our genealogy back beyond about 370 million years ago, it gets fishy. Our ancestors back then were aquatic vertebrates that breathed through gills and swam with fins. Over the next twenty million years or so, our fishy ancestors were transformed into land-walking animals known as tetrapods (Latin for “four feet”). The hardest evidence–both literally and figuratively–that we have for this transition comes from the fossil record. Over the past century, paleontologists have slowly but steadily unearthed species belong to our lineage, splitting off early in the evolution of the tetrapod body.
As a result, we can see the skeletons of fish with some–but not all–of the traits that let tetrapods move around on land. (I wrote about the history of this search in my book At the Water’s Edge; for more information, I’d suggest Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, who discovered Tiktaalik, one of the most important fossils on the tetrapod lineage.) Updated reconstruction of Tiktaalik. Ferrets: Man’s Other Best Friend | The Thoughtful Animal, Scientific American Blog Network. Lizard “Sees” With Its Skin For Automatic Camouflage. What an Elephant Knows About You from Your Voice — NOVA Next. Elephants never cease to surprise us. The elephant brain has three times as many neurons as our own (257 billion compared to our 86 billion). They are empathetic, comforting one another in times of crisis. They understand human gestures, and they suffer psychologically and socially after traumatic events. Now, we can add another to the list—elephants can tell humans apart merely by hearing our voices.
A new study shows that elephants can differentiate between human voices based subtle acoustic cues. A new study by Karen McComb and Graeme Shannon of the University of Sussex demonstrates that elephants can tell the difference between the voices of two different ethnic groups—the agriculturalist Kamba and the cattle-herding Maasai. Here’s Ed Yong, writing at Not Exactly Rocket Science: The team recorded 20 Maasai and 15 Kamba saying “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming” in their respective languages.
Elephants Get the Point of Pointing — NOVA Next. A toddler lifts a finger, pointing at a piece of food she wants that’s across the dinner table. The simple act of pointing is one of the first gestures we use to communicate with others, but for other animals, the action doesn’t imply much, if anything. Aside from some domesticated species, most animals—even our closest relatives, like chimpanzees—don’t understand what it means to point at something. Now, though, University of St. Andrews biologist Richard W. Byrne has preliminary evidence to suggest that elephants might understanding human pointing.
The study, which involved only 11 elephants, is just a brief entry in the long history of human-elephant interaction. Here’s Carl Zimmer, writing for The New York Times: In the mid-2000s, Dr. A new study indicates that elephants might be capable of understanding human pointing. For two months, Ms. The Man Who Rewrote the Tree of Life — NOVA Next. Carl Woese may be the greatest scientist you’ve never heard of. “Woese is to biology what Einstein is to physics,” says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A physicist-turned-microbiologist, Woese specialized in the fundamental molecules of life—nucleic acids—but his ambitions were hardly microscopic.
He wanted to create a family tree of all life on Earth. Woese certainly wasn’t the first person with this ambition. The desire to classify every living thing is ageless. The Ancient Greeks and Romans worked to develop a system of classifying life. The Jewish people, in writing the Book of Genesis, set Adam to the task of naming all the animals in the Garden of Eden. Carl Woese in his later years What Woese was proposing wasn’t to replace Linnaean classification, but to refine it. Just as outward appearances aren’t the best way to determine family relations, Woese believed that morphology and metabolism were inadequate classifiers for life on Earth.
In Darwin’s Footsteps. Lizard Evolution Virtual Lab. Animals that amaze | Playlist. How Do Rats Communicate? Wild rats, who live in colonies, and pet rats, who enjoy the company of other rats, are naturally social creatures. They are happier and more playful when kept in same gender pairs or groups, or in communities made up of spayed and neutered rats of both genders. Rats like being with people, and people appreciate the affectionate, adventurous, curious and intelligent nature of these little creatures.
Each rat has a unique personality, along with individual likes and dislikes, which are expressed in a variety of ways. Meeting Strangers When introducing rats who do not know each other, you might notice them puffing up their fur, fighting, pinning each other down, pushing each other onto their backs, humping, grooming and squeaking. Grooming Mothers groom baby rats as a way to bond and as part of maternal care. Author Maura Wolf's published online articles focus on women, children, parenting, pets and mental health. David Gallo: Underwater astonishments.
Sara Lewis: The loves and lies of fireflies. More similar than we know: When animals go mad. A golden retriever chases his tail every morning for hours on end. In the evening he compulsively licks his paws till they’re bare and oozy. When he’s given Prozac, he calms down and stops injuring himself … After the death of her mate, a scarlet macaw plucks out every last one of her feathers and doesn’t stop until she’s befriended by a cockatoo … A tabby cat who grew listless and stopped eating after his favorite human went off to college is cheered by the arrival of the family’s new pet rabbit, whom he likes to follow around the house.
Is the dog obsessive-compulsive? The parrot struggling with trichotillomania? The cat, once depressed, now recovered? Making sense of animal emotional states and behavior, especially when they are doing things that seem abnormal, has always involved a certain amount of projection. Looking at instances of purported animal madness is like holding up a mirror to the history of mental illness in people. 1. 2. 4. Amazing Cicada life cycle - Sir David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth - BBC wildlife. Caring for Cuttlefish. Cuttlefish Remember What, Where and When They Ate. You and I both have the ability to travel back in time… at least in our minds. For example, I can remember that last Monday, I was at my desk, writing a post about stomachless animals.
You too have a seemingly endless catalogue of the whats, wheres and whens of your life. This ability to remember the what, where and when of our past experiences is known as “episodic memory”. The term was first coined in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, who thought that such memories depended on language and were unique to humans. He was wrong. Since then, the episodic-like memory club has grown to include the great apes, rats, hummingbirds, and pigeons. Like octopuses and squid, cuttlefish are cephalopods—a group of animals known for their amazing colour-changing skin and sophisticated intelligence.
They are also soft-bodied and nutritious, which puts them on the menu of virtually every major group of ocean predator. She tested them an hour later. Schematic of cuttlefish experiment. Naked Mole Rats: The Animal Kingdom's Most Functional Dysfunctional Family. The naked mole rat lives as bees or ants do — in a colony with a queen and soldiers. Naked mole rats are very cute, in a very ugly way. "They have very little hair, no fur, some whiskers, some hair between their toes, like hobbits, and actually some hair inside of their mouth, which keeps their mouth nice and clean while they dig because they dig with their teeth, says David Kessler with the Smithsonian's National Zoo. "They're virtually blind 'cause they spend their entire lives underground, their skin is very thin and wrinkly, and almost translucent.
" The teeth are gruesome, frankly. They stick out through the lips, the top pair coming out just below the nostrils. Naked mole rats can chew through concrete and bite through a human hand. They are fleshy and pinkish gray. And they helped solve a mystery that dated back to Darwin's day. The mystery of the hive When Darwin published his seminal work "The Origin of Species," he devoted a chapter to problems with the theory. Enter the mole rat. What Is It About Bees And Hexagons? : Krulwich Wonders... Solved!
A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins here, with this beehive. Look at the honeycomb in the photo and ask yourself: (I know you've been wondering this all your life, but have been too shy to ask out loud ... ) Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon? iStockphoto.com Bees, after all, could build honeycombs from rectangles or squares or triangles ... Robert Krulwich/NPR But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. And not just your basic six-sided hexagon. Well, this is a very old question. I like this idea — that below the flux, the chaos of everyday life there might be elegant reasons for what we see. The Essential Honeycomb Honeycombs, we all know, store honey. So how to build it? If you start this way, what will your next cell look like? And the third cell, once again, will have to be designed to fit the first two.
But that's not the bee way. So a "squiggle cell plan" creates idle bees. OK, that explains why honeycomb cells are same-sized. The improbable—but true—evolutionary tale of flatfishes — NOVA Next. Every summer there’s a snowfall in the sea. Instead of drifting down, it falls up, and rather than flakes of ice, it’s made of innumerable diaphanous eggs that rise from the bottom of the ocean to the surface. There, they hatch into baby flatfish, each no larger than a pinhead. For the first few weeks of life, they look and act like typical fish fry, swimming upright through sun-dappled waters, darting after plankton. Soon enough, though, these young flatfish lose all semblance of normalcy during one of the most difficult puberties of any animal on the planet.
You think pimples and prom were awkward? Please. Flatfish eyes begin in a symmetrical position before migrating to one side. As a larval flatfish begins its passage into adulthood, it does not merely experience uneven growth spurts and mood swings. At the same period in our lives when the slightest blemish seems like a calamity, the flatfish is preparing to lose half of its face. Finned Freaks Evolution’s Exemplars. My Life as a Turkey Full Episode Online | Nature. Common ancestor of all mammals revealed. A tiny, furry-tailed creature is the most complete picture yet as to what the ancestor of mice, elephants, lions, tigers, bears, whales, bats and humans once looked like, researchers say.
These new findings also suggest this forerunner of most mammals appeared shortly after the catastrophe that ended the age of dinosaurs, scientists added. "Species like rodents and primates did not share the Earth with nonavian dinosaurs, but arose from a common ancestor — a small, insect-eating, scampering animal — shortly after the dinosaurs' demise," said researcher Maureen O'Leary at Stony Brook University in New York. The study was so thorough that the team, made up of 23 scientists from around the world, was able tospeculate on the appearance of this hypothetical ancestor inside and out, from its brain and inner ear bones to its ovaries and even what its sperm may have looked like (it sported a head and tail like modern-day sperm cells do).
The roots of placentals Mammal morphology bank. Researchers Find That Dolphins Call Each Other By 'Name' : The Two-Way. BBC Nature - In pictures: Arizona's jumping spiders. Scientists Resurrect Bonkers Extinct Frog That Gives Birth Through Its Mouth. Leatherback Sea Turtles, Leatherback Sea Turtle Pictures, Leatherback Sea Turtle Facts. How do animals see in the dark? Bison-Loving Billionaires Rile Ranchers With Land Grab in American West. Big-Mouthed Toucans Key To Forest Evolution. The Chemistry of Kibble.
Understanding penguin response to climate and ecosystem change. New Baby Olinguito Photos from the field! Get That &%$@ Thing Away From Me: Why Humans Hate Bugs. 'You're Invisible, But I'll Eat You Anyway.' Secrets Of Snow-Diving Foxes : Krulwich Wonders... Snail Facts and Information. Bumblebee attacks spider to defend another bumblebee trapped on her web. The Strangest Defence Mechanisms In The Animal Kingdom. Ed Yong: Suicidal crickets, zombie roaches and other parasite tales. Paul Nicklen: Tales of ice-bound wonderlands. Rats regret their decisions, study finds | The Rundown. Study Suggests Rats Capable Of Feeling Regret Over Poor Choices. First-person point of view video recorded by a wild polar bear. 16 Amazing Facts You Didn’t Know About Your Dog.
Tool-Using Animals. Picture of the Week: Munk's Devil Ray. Conan’s Umwelt: How a Dog Sniffs.