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InBiology

Somebody stole this poor lizard's legs!

May 7, 2008By

Dr. Mobusu here. I’m sure that many of you have the same problem I do, random people try to steal your legs for use on cyborgs, Frankenstein-style monsters, or for an army of bodyless legs that will kick their way into world power. As a mad scientist, I have many tools at my disposal to protect my legs from any and all who try to take them. However, many creatures in the animal kingdom do not have such skills. A big example is the snake, as well as some skinks. And now a new victim has been found! This Bachia lizard has lost his legs in an attempt to by like the snake. That’s what happens when you watch Boa vs. Python too many times!

Bachia
Bachia2

And I’m definitely not using the legs from this lizard and the lungs from this frog to make some sort of supermonster. So don’t get any ideas. But stay away from the Seattle sewers for a few years.

Legless lizard found in Brazil may be new species

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent Tue Apr 29, 12:17 PM ET

OSLO (Reuters) – Scientists have discovered a legless lizard, a toad and a dwarf woodpecker among 14 species believed to be new to science in central Brazil, a wildlife conservation group said on Tuesday.

A four-week expedition to the Cerrado region, a wooded savannah under threat from the expansion of farming, found eight apparently unknown types of fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, a mammal and a bird, Conservation International said.

“The lizard, of the Bachia genus, resembles a snake due to its lack of legs and pointed snout, which help it move across the predominantly sandy soil,” U.S.-based Conservation International, a non-profit group, said in a statement.

Susan Bruce, a spokeswoman for Conservation International, said the lizard was about 15-20 cm (6-8 inches) long. Other legless lizards around the world include ones related to geckos in Australia or slow worms in Europe.

The lizard was found during the expedition to the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station, a 716,000 hectare (1.77 million acre) protected area in the Cerrado.

Other suspected new species include a dwarf woodpecker and horned toad. Conservation International seeks to preserve biodiversity and argues that human societies can live in harmony with nature.

“Protected areas such as the Ecological Station are home to some of the last remaining healthy ecosystems in a region increasingly threatened by urban growth and mechanized agriculture,” said expedition leader Cristiano Nogueira.

The Cerrado region, part of Brazil’s central high plains region that once covered an area half the size of Europe, is being converted to crops and ranch land at twice the rate of the nearby Amazon rainforest, Conservation International said.

The expedition also recorded threatened species such as the three-banded armadillo, the marsh deer and hyacinth macaw among more than 440 species documented in the expedition comprising 26 researchers. — (Editing by Giles Elgood)

InBiology

My Starfish Outbreak Threatens Corals

May 3, 2008By

When a mad scientist is bored, one thing they do is think of things to make massive armies of to unleash upon the populace. And one of the funnest to create is starfish armies. They grow quickly, and you can double the size by just cutting every starfish in half, as each piece regrows into a new member! It is great for taking out your aggressions and building your troops at the same time. And now, my latest starfish army, Starfish Commandos 13, is now being unleashed! This is the first time I’ve used thorns starfish, but they are just as fun as the more common types! Suck it, coral! MuHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Starfish Outbreak Threatens Corals

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2008) — Outbreaks of the notorious crown of thorns starfish now threaten the “coral triangle,” the richest center of coral reef biodiversity on Earth, according to recent surveys by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

The starfish — a predator that feeds on corals by spreading its stomach over them and using digestive enzymes to liquefy tissue — were discovered in large numbers by the researchers in reefs in Halmahera, Indonesia, at the heart of the Coral Triangle, which lies between Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It is considered the genetic fountainhead for coral diversity found on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo and other reefs in the region.

Scientists fear the outbreak is caused by poor water quality and could be an early warning of widespread reef decline.

Recent surveys of Halmahera by the Wildlife Conservation Society and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies confirmed that while Halmahera’s reefs are still 30-50 percent richer than nearby reefs, some areas were almost completely destroyed.

“The main cause of damage to the corals was the Crown of Thorns Starfish,” Dr. Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University. “We witnessed a number of active outbreaks of this coral predator. There was little to suggest that the reefs have been much affected by climate change as yet: the threats appear far more localized.”

The team also saw first-hand evidence of recent blast-fishing, an extremely destructive fishing practice that uses explosives. According to locals this accompanied a break down of law and order following communal violence in 2000-2003. During the same time many reef lagoons were mined of their corals for use in construction, an activity encouraged by the Indonesian military.

“This is clearly a complex human environment and effective management of the marine resources must address the needs of communities. It will also be vitally important to understand the causes of conflict among communities and address them,” says Dr Stuart Campbell, Program Leader for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s’ Marine Program in Indonesia.

The researchers pointed out that there were still healthy populations of certain species — and still time to reverse the damage.

“The good news is that the reef fish assemblages are still in very good shape” said Tasrif Kartawijaya from WCS-IP. “We saw Napoleon wrasse and bumphead parrot fish at almost every site. So these reefs have the capacity to recover if we can address the current threats.”

The Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) announced by six regional governments at the Bali Climate Change Conference recently offers hope for the reefs in the region, the researchers say. However, there are few details of how it will work and no mention of the fundamental role of research in the conservation program.

“We are disappointed research is yet to be fully considered in the CTI. The success of large marine parks, like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, is largely due to the primary role of science plays in understanding what’s going on, so managers can make good decisions,” said Dr Baird.

“It isn’t enough just to document the diversity of the region. Large scale research is required to understand the Coral Triangle ecosystems and work out how best to respond to threats such as poor water quality and overexploitation,” Dr Campbell added.

Adapted from materials provided by Wildlife Conservation Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Godzilla Island Story Arc 10
InBad, Movie Reviews

Godzilla Island – Story Arc 10

May 3, 2008By

Godzilla Island – Story Arc 10


1997

Directed by Shun Mizutani

Dude, this story arc has Fireman Jet Jaguar! Anytime new Jet Jaguars show up, it is a good time! Jet Jaguar rules, and so does Godzilla Island, as the multiple Jet Jaguars prove. This is the tenth story arc, encompassing Episodes 84-93. For those of you hopping on in the middle, the link to Story Arc 1 is here. For those of you who are continuing readers or don’t care about being in order, please read on! This arc has fake suns, scenes similar to Star Wars, and angry flaming heads. Something for everyone. So sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of some monster guys, who live on a tropic isle, and like to eat French fries. Okay, that’s why I’m not on American Idol, but you should still check out this, Story Arc 10, as March of Godzilla Island continues on TarsTarkas.NET!

G-Guard Commander (Jiro Dan) – G-Guard Commander runs the Godzilla Guard unit on Godzilla Island. He’s all alone except for sassy robot Lucas, so of course he’s bored out of his skull normally. He seems to have been stationed there because it’s a low-priority assignment they could dump someone who can’t work under pressure, because that’s exactly what he is. Luckily Torema shows up to save his pants. I do not know if he has a name but it may be Oji.
Torema (Maimi Okuwa) – A mysterious young girl who shows up one day on Godzilla Island right when the dastardly Xiliens begin to attack. She repels the attack, joins the G-Guard, and begins her fight against Zaguresu the Xilien because Xiliens destroyed her home planet (I think that’s what happened – she may have been from future Earth.) Has psychic powers and her own spaceship called the Panatolute.
Zaguresu (Naoko Aizawa) – Evil Xilien woman who invades Earth using giant monsters and her giant Independence Day/V rip-off spaceship. Enjoys laughing evilly while contemplating the latest diabolical schemes. Follows the Xilien leader Giant Emperor’s orders, because that’s what they do on Planet X. Sheep! Her spaceship is named the Vabaruda.
Lucas (Kenichiro Shimamura) – Annoying robot, Godzilla Island-style! Makes sarcastic remarks, and seems to be even mean at times. An annoying Kenny kid in floating metal sphere form. He must be destroyed! Translates from monster language to Japanese.
Narrator – (Yutaka Aoyama) – He’s not a character but the guy who recaps the previous episode in the beginning of the episode. That means thirty seconds of each three minute episode is Narrator recounting events, padding running time beyond levels I want to think about. He’s a typical Japanese male announcer, amazingly excited and epic about even the most mundane things.
Giant Dark Emperor (???) – Giant flaming head who commands the Xiliens and Planet X. Do not look behind the curtain. The great and powerful Giant Emperor commands you, and can hear your sarcastic backtalk! Still, being a flaming head in space has got to be pretty boring.

Different monster feature in each episode, so we’ll keep track of them in each story arc. The complete Godzilla Island Daikaiju List is located here. We’ll also list any new monster match-ups that weren’t in any film but now exist thanks to this series, such as Kamacuras fighting Megalon or something. The R2 Japanese DVD release is unsubtitled, so most of what is going on will be educated guesses thanks to our limited Japanese speaking ability. But here at TarsTarkas.NET we don’t need no stinking subtitles!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

InBiology, Science

Parasitic plants returning to go after you!

May 1, 2008By

Parasitic plants exist to leech on regular plants who just want to be green and make oxygen. When modified genetically, they can create great fun as they are unleashed upon orchids or used to control your genetically modified predator plants. Not many people study them, so they are a great way to make invasions with very few scientists who will work against you. It’s all about exploiting the rare. Here is the story for those of you who want the “official” information:
parasite plant

Scientist rediscovers rare plant unseen since 1985

By CHERYL WITTENAUER, Associated Press Writer Thu May 1, 3:39 AM ET

ST. LOUIS – A scientist with the Missouri Botanical Garden has rediscovered and identified a rare parasitic plant that hasn’t been seen by botanists in more than 20 years.

A single specimen of the plant was found in Mexico in 1985, but the plant wasn’t seen again until St. Louis botanist George Yatskievych and a colleague found it in a pine oak forest in Mexico’s mountains.

The plant, which he is identifying and naming for the first time, is not a classic beauty. The odd, orange-brown, fleshy-stemmed plant — which will have the formal Latin name for the “little hermit of Mexico” — has a pine cone-shaped dense cluster of flowers and juicy celery-like stalks.

But to Yatskievych, it’s “weird and wonderful.”

“I’ve always been interested in plants that don’t conform to our preconceived notion of what a plant should be,” he said. “Beauty is in the beholder’s eye and this plant is wonderful in so many ways.

“You can’t call it ugly, but on the other hand, I recognize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”

Wayt Thomas, scientist at the New York Botanical Garden, was looking for other plants in Mexico when he encountered a single specimen of the plant in 1985.

He cut a piece of it, and kept a dried, pressed specimen at his institution. He sent queries and photos of it to fellow botanists, but no one recognized or claimed it, he said, not even the late Larry Heckard who was the leading North American expert on parasitic plants. It went unrecognized because parasitic plants, when dried, don’t maintain their color and structure well.

“It sat around for a long, long time,” Thomas said.

But by luck, he met an Austrian botanist who referred him to Yatskievych, who is writing text for the encyclopedic “Flora of North America,” on the very family of flowers he believed the Mexican plant was in. Plants in the family Orobanchaceae attach as parasites on the roots of host plants.

Photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight and water to create energy in the form of sugar, is hard work, Yatskievych said, and these parasitic plants have developed a way to “steal their food” and hence survive in habitats that otherwise might be inhospitable.

When Yatskievych received Thomas’ specimen in 2005, his response was, “What the heck is this?” He traveled to Guerrero, Mexico, the following year to meet with the same guide who helped Thomas two decades earlier.

The original site of the plant, near an old camping spot in the mountains west of Acapulco, had been destroyed. But days of searching finally led them to a 60-foot tree that was host to the parasitic plant. Starting as a cancer on the side of the underground root, it grew into a fleshy stem that had pushed 18 inches through rocky soil so it could flower. Yatskievych said his reaction was one of “overriding relief.” He traveled to Mexico again in 2007 to gather information on the host tree and see the plant’s fruits.

In the hierarchy of plant classification, a “species” is a collection of individuals, and “genus” is a collection of species. A collection of “genera” is a “family.”

The “little hermit” is both a new species and a new genus because it is so unusual and distinct that it cannot be included in any of the existing genera in the plant family Orobanchaceae. No other populations have been found in the host tree’s zone which spans from central Mexico to Costa Rica.

That could change in time, when Yatskievych’s research is published in the next year.

Thomas said the find is significant because there’s no field guide for the world of plants. He said describing a new genus is quite rare.

The plant is at risk of extinction as roads, logging and conversion to pasture destroy its habitat, Yatskievych said.

Yatskievych plans to present his findings this summer at a joint conference of the Botanical Society of America and the Canadian Botanical Society meeting in Vancouver, B.C.

__

InDinosaurs and other extinct, Science

Crocodile-like Skull on fish eating dinosaur Baryonyx walkeri

May 1, 2008By

Scientists are using computers model dinosaur anatomical questions such as the function and strength of jaws. This is easier than traveling back in time to get first hand data or doing dinosaur cloning techniques, but as I, Dr. Mobusu, am a perfectionist I would only do first hand data collection. This is good for amateurs or academia professionals who have to maintain a squeaky clean image and can’t violate the laws of nature willy-nilly. Thus, mad scientists like I am the go-to guys for the best information on dinosaurs or anything else that seems impossible to get. Keep that in mind.

Baryonyx walkeri was discovered in 1983. It has been dated to the Barremian period of Early Cretaceous Period, around 125 million years ago.
A rare example of a piscivorous (fish-eating) dinosaur with specialized adaptions like a long, narrow snout with lots of teeth

Baryonyx

A similar dinosaur is Suchomimus tenerensis, who lived 110 to 120 million years ago, during the middle portion of the Cretaceous period in Africa.
Suchomimus

Unusual Fish-eating Dinosaur Had Crocodile-like Skull

ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — An unusual dinosaur has been shown to have a skull that functioned like a fish-eating crocodile, despite looking like a dinosaur. It also possessed two huge hand claws, perhaps used as grappling hooks to lift fish from the water.

Dr Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol, UK, used computer modelling techniques — more commonly used to discover how a car bonnet buckles during a crash — to show that while Baryonyx was eating, its skull bent and stretched in the same way as the skull of the Indian fish-eating gharial — a crocodile with long, narrow jaws.

Dr Rayfield said: “On excavation, partially digested fish scales and teeth, and a dinosaur bone were found in the stomach region of the animal, demonstrating that at least some of the time this dinosaur ate fish. Moreover, it had a very unusual skull that looked part-dinosaur and part-crocodile, so we wanted to establish which it was more similar to, structurally and functionally — a dinosaur or a crocodile.

“We used an engineering technique called finite element analysis that reconstructs stress and strain in a structure when loaded. The Baryonyx skull bones were CT-scanned by a colleague at Ohio University, USA, and digitally reconstructed so we could view the internal anatomy of the skull. We then analysed digital models of the snouts of a Baryonyx, a theropod dinosaur, an alligator, and a fish-eating gharial, to see how each snout stressed during feeding. We then compared them to each other.”

The results showed that the eating behaviour of Baryonyx was markedly different from that of a typical meat-eating theropod dinosaur or an alligator, and most similar to the fish-eating gharial. Since the bulk of the gharial diet consists of fish, Rayfield’s study suggests that this was also the case for Baryonyx back in the Cretaceous.

Dr Angela Milner from the Natural History Museum, who first described the dinosaur and is co-author on the paper, said: “I thought originally it might be a fish-eater and Emily’s analysis, which was done at the Natural History Museum, has demonstrated that to be the case.

“The CT-data revealed that although Baryonyx and the gharial have independently evolved to feed in a similar manner, through quirks of their evolutionary history their skulls are shaped in a slightly different way in order to achieve the same function. This shows us that in some cases there is more than one evolutionary solution to the same problem.”

The unusual skull of Baryonyx is very elongate, with a curved or sinuous jaw margin as seen in large crocodiles and alligators. It also had stout conical teeth, rather than the blade-like serrated ones in meat-eating dinosaurs, and a striking bulbous jaw tip (or ‘nose’) that bore a rosette of teeth, more commonly seen today in slender-jawed fish eating crocodilians such as the Indian fish-eating gharial.

The dinosaur in question, Baryonyx walkeri, was discovered near Dorking in Surrey, UK in 1983 by an amateur collector, William Walker, and named after him in 1986 by Alan Charig and Angela Milner. It is an early Cretaceous dinosaur, around 125 million years old, and belongs to a family called spinosaurs.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Bristol, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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