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Showing results for tags 'Marine Biology'.
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If you give typically solitary octopuses the drug MDMA, they, like people who've taken the party drug, act more social, Gizmodo reports. A pair of researchers noticed through a phylogenetic analysis that despite a separation of more than 500 million years of evolution and differences in brain organization, humans and octopuses have similar SLC6A4 genes. In addition, as the duo from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine report in Current Biology this week, they found that the MDMA binding site in the serotonin transporter (SERT, encoded by SLC6A4) was conserved. They dosed a handful of octopuses with low levels of MDMA and watched to see whether they then chose to spend more time with a novel object, another octopus, or alone. They report that when octopuses were given MDMA, they were more likely to spend time with another octopus than when they were untreated. Additionally, paper co-author Gül Dölen from Hopkins tells Gizmodo that one animal, on a low dose, "looked like it was doing water ballet," and was interested in sounds and smells. "It's not just quantitatively more time, but qualitative," Dölen says at Quartz of the time the dosed octopus wanted to spend with the other. "They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage. This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently."
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- Marine Biology
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A single drop of rain, falling onto the roof of the Baseball Hall of Fame just above the bust of Mickey Mantle, will end up in the Chesapeake Bay. That's how vast the Chesapeake Bay Watershed is. For those who don't know the precise definition, a "watershed" can be visualized as the trough where a single drop of rain will travel (in theory). A tourist discarding a cigarette butt on the grounds of the Hall of Fame is harming the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab. -
The blobfish is *not* an ugly creature; in its native habitat, it's actually a formidable-looking specimen - it is we who have made it "ugly" by taking it away from its high-pressure home, and allowing its gelatinous body to swell up and expand into the "blob" that we call it - it you took ourselves, and put us in a helium environment, we, too, would look like what the police call a "floater" - in other words, we'd be pretty damned ugly. I've always been fascinated by deep-sea marine life, wondering how it can possibly survive, even thrive, at such extreme levels of pressure, cold, and darkness - witness the glorious ventworm which is our unofficial mascot. *Why* is it our unofficial mascot? I have no idea. Now, the Tasmanian Devil, that is *ugly*, both in cartoons: and in real life. Fierce little bugger, this one is: And if you think it's cute, try petting it.
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- Oceanography
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