And to celebrate this milestone, I now present you the fabulous solution to a mystery we all pondered last year. Remember the Unidentified Feathery Object (aka the Ninja Seaweed)? Well, I just saw a video post on the Echinoblog today (which also includes video of the infamous sea pig!) that explains everything. Though it be still ninja, that’s no seaweed. It’s a space station! Wait. . . let me check my notes . . .

Ahem. For your viewing pleasure, I present . . . the hairy sea cucumber!

Hmmm. . . hairy sea cucumbers. I see nothing suggestive in that name at all. Nope.

It’s also quite apparent no one taught these sea cucumbers table manners. I mean, come on: shoving your whole tentacle into your mouth at once and slowly licking it clean? Sakes alive!

Sea cucumbers (even hairy ones) are echinoderms, which means they’re most closely related to sea stars, brittle stars, basket stars, and sea urchins. This sea cucumber is clearly a filter feeder, catching tiny animals and plants on its tentacles, though I can’t seem to find out if it uses glue, or stinging cells, or poison, or dumb luck. For the sea cucumber (aka holothurian) family . . . er, . . tree, see here. Follow “Holothuroidea” down to see the different sorts. And just for the record, I’d never heard of hairy sea cucumbers either.

Apparently, in addition to all things jelly, I’m fascinated by all things blobby. You’ll note the restraint I used in not posting anything about that blob they found floating off the coast of Alaska last summer. It seemed obvious right from the start that that was simply your run-of-the mill algal bloom. These blobs, on the other hand, would quite mystify me without  the help of a reassuring National Geographic narrator.

I’m pretty sure this is the same stuff that builds up in the water you leave the dishes in the sink too long. Is it just me or did you also half-expect to see an eyeball or two floating around in one of those things?

It seems like this may be some sort of biofilm, which is a very sexy subject in the world of biology right now. Biofilms are essentially thin coats of bacteria and bacterial slime (technically known as extracellular polymeric substance, or EPS) on teeth, stream cobbles, catheters, lawyers, etc. (just kidding lawyers! Don’t sue!)  These things are apparently everywhere — even on the thin skin of water at the surface of the ocean — and this way of life represents an up-till-now severely underappreciated bacterial lifestyle. 99 percent of bacteria may live in biofilms.

And yet  these don’t seem like classic biofilms as they aren’t tightly packed or adhered to a surface. They seem to be somewhere in the no-man’s-land between a biofilm and marine snow, the slow rain of decaying microbial matter that eventually coats the ocean floor. Both marine snow and mucilages incorporate much more than just bacteria — like crustaceans, plankton and viruses. For whatever reason the marine snow in the northeastern Mediterranean is piling up faster than the life in the water column or on the sea floor can take it out. Which seems odd, because in the deep sea, the locals will quickly consume anything that isn’t ballistic-grade plastic, and I’m pretty sure they have their R&D departments working on that too.

Whatever they are, they are unusual, and probably prospering by climate change. I love weird manifestations of life, but there is good-weird and there is bad-weird. The kind of weird that smothers fish and spreads E. coli is definitely bad-weird.

For the PLoS paper that inspired this video, click here.

The sort of habitat our mystery creature lives in, and the submersible that has tried to find it. DSV Alvin sets a lander basket with tube cores on the bottom. Note the encroaching darkness. Think of yourself living in that environment -- a soft mud bottom, and nothing but miles and miles of cold, inky blackness, as far as the eye can't see. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

There are a few creatures on Earth we knew as fossils before we met face to face. Take the coelacanth. Scientists were shocked to discover a very much alive specimen of this be-lobe-finned fish hauled from the depths off South Africa in 1938. Prior to the discovery of this bit of rather irrefutable evidence, scientists believed the fish went the way of the dinosaurs (literally) at the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years prior. Although not the first, Paleodictyon is probably the only member of this fossils-first group that was briefly considered to be evidence of some sort of alien deep sea race (hellooooo, Abyss) before it was connected to its fossil ancestors, essentially unchanged after 500 million years.

According to the article, scientists have suggested the hexagonal tubes they have found may be bacteria farms, worm burrows (or both), or the trace fossils of decayed compressed sponges that have long ago been scavanged. The paper even suggests such a sponge may have ties to the Ediacaran fauna, a class of bizarre creatures that preceeded the Cambrian Explosion. There’s one other candidate for Paleodictyon‘s identiy: a xenophyophore. They are the subject for another blog post, but the short, short version is that they’re gigantic single-celled organisms big enough to fit in the palm of your hand, which (like slime molds!) are multinucleate and feed by engulfment using pseudopodia, and (unlike slime molds) inhabit casings they put together with odd things lying around, including (sometimes) their own feces. In spite of being startlingly obscure, these things are apparently quite abundant on certain parts of the ocean floor. Still, this possibility doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill as no xenophyophore crunchy bits have ever been found in the hexagonal holes.

What about you, readers? What do you think Paleodictyon nodosum is? If you think you know the answer, write it on the side of a Deep Flight Super Falcon High Performance Winged Submersible with carbon fiber pressure hull, dual cockpit flight controls, heads-up instrumentation, and laser “collision avoidance feeler beams”, and mail it to Jennifer Frazer, General Delivery, Boulder, CO 80301. Or put it in the comments below (boooo-ring!). Creative answers encouraged!

The background here is that a North Carolina construction company was hired by the city of Raleigh to inspect its sewer lines. They used a flexible periscope to snake their way in and capture video. I’m sure they never expected what they were about to find. This one is not for the faint of heart, kids. Brace yourself and hit play.

Speculation on the identity of these masses has ranged from bryozoans to annelid worms and slime molds to space aliens.

One thing I can say for sure is this is NOT a slime mold. No slime mold is capable of moving that quickly. To see slime molds move, you’d have to time lapse the heck out of a video. This is also not what I’d call slime mold habitat. They like water, but not THAT much water. They tend to prefer a nice soil/dead wood wrap, easy on the sunlight.

Several experts queried by both Deep Sea News (where I found this gem) and ABC News (lots of good reporting here) seem to be agreeing that this is, in fact, a colony of Tubifex tubifex, or sludge worms. Here’s DSN:

Enter stage right Dr. Timothy S. Wood who is an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association.  I sent along the video and this was his reponse…

Thanks for the video – I had not see it before. No, these are not bryozoans!  They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting. Interesting video.

So, for the record, here are what individual Tubifex worms can look like:

Matthias Tilly/Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Sludge worms are annelid worms, just like tube worms, which means they have . . . wait for it . . . *human-like blood*! Combined with their filamentous form, and synchronous contractions, it really does add up to give these clusters the appearance of a pulsating heart. Or something. If you watch the video carefully (don’t have anything to eat first), you can see the individual worms snaking around in that mass.

According to the all-knowing, all-seeing Wikipedia, T. tubifex lives in lakes and rivers ingesting bacteria and other organic debris. Identifying them is difficult, though, because, inconveniently enough, they dissolve the reproductive organs we use to identify them when they’re finished mating.  “[Barry White music in background] Oh honey . . . come on over here and give me some OH WHY DO I EVEN TRY!?” In addition, their physical appearance changes based on water quality, which might explain their, well, extraterrestrial appearance in the above video.

And perhaps not unexpectedly, fish apparently find these guys delicious. Sludge worms: they’re what for dinner. Now with 95% more meaty slime! Hey, don’t knock ’em. They’ll put scales on your chest.

For one last wormy treat, here is a video of the little guys fully submersed in the lab:

So, I ask you: space aliens or sludge worms? You decide.

Back in May, I saw a call by a group of skeptics I belong to for talks at their annual meeting, the Colorado Skepticamp. The talks could be on any sort of skepticism OR on any discipline of science. One of my aims is to speak publicly and frequently on the sorts of things I blog about here, so I jumped at the chance. My idea was to do a quick survey of life on Earth hitting all the major groups in less than 30 minutes, so I called it (with apologies to Mel Brooks), “Life on Earth: The Short, Short Version.” So here you go — My 23 Minutes of Fame.

There are two versions. One has better sound:

And this version has higher resolution:

I made a few mistakes for which I hope you’ll forgive me. . . all I can say is this was my first time giving this presentation and it’s hard when your mouth is moving faster than your brain. I have noted them below. If, after watching it, any of you are interested in having me/hiring me as a speaker, I’d be happy to make it longer or shorter or elaborate on any taxon that interests you. : )

Errata/Clarifications

• I mentioned that Hennig changed the way we do taxonomy by suggesting evolution as our grounds for classification. What I forgot to mention is the way that evolutionary history has now become largely judged by DNA and not always so much by what the organisms look like, where they live, etc. The byzantine circular taxonomic trees I presented were created using DNA sequences – and molecular taxonomy now dominates classification (it’s not always the last word, but it’s almost always the opening sentence). But for all of our scientific efforts, judging the true evolutionary history — especially when different pieces of evidence conflict — can still be a bit of an art.
• The slide where I show some differences between bacteria and archaea shows a few of the differences between these groups, but there are many more. Don’t think by any means that these are the only two. I mentioned this earlier but not at this point.
• Flu viruses are in Orthomyxoviridae, not Paramyxoviridae. It’s the taxon directly above the one I point at. I was in the right neighborhood but again, the mouth was moving too fast for the brain. This is what happens when you try to cram life on Earth into 23 minutes.
• Operculum is Latin for a little lid or a cover, not Greek for cap. I knew what I meant, I just didn’t say it right.
• Moss spores are haploid, not diploid. Meiosis occurs in the the sporangium in the top of the sporophyte.
• I seem to imply all cup fungi shoot their spores in a cloud but that’s not accurate. Many cup fungi don’t. Even the ones that do may not if they’re not in the mood. In this respect, they aren’t so different from. . . er . . . never mind.
• I got a little confused on jellyfish but remembered soon after the talk what the problem is: jellyfish do not have alternation of generations in the same sense plants do. Both forms are diploid (the sperm and egg fuse before dividing further), but they do alternate between sexual and asexual organisms.
• And finally, I looked it up and Venus’s Girdles are indeed bioluminescent at night. Sorry.

Muchas gracias to Mile High Skeptics for making generously recording and sharing my lecture!

According to wikipedia, jerboae are “jumping desert rodents” from North Africa and Asia.  Tasty and bite-sized desert rodents, too, I’d wager. Perfect for kebabs . . .

The jerboa, together with kangaroo rats of North America and hopping mice of Australia, are a great example of convergent evolution. This often happens when organisms from very different lineages evolve to fill similar niches, like whales and fish, or fungi and oomycetes (water molds — an oomycete, for example, caused the Irish Potato Famine).

Two mammal posts in one week! Never thought that would happen. I must be going soft.

I love the smell of cyanide in the morning. Smells like . . . Desmoxytes.

Because nothing says, “Don’t Eat Me!” quite like a neon pink millipede (unless you’re two, in which case it says, “All You Can Eat Candy Buffet!”), I give you: The Pink Cyanide Millipede.

In addition to its easily pronounceable Thai (Mangkorn chomphoo) and Latin (Desmoxytes purpurosea) names, it features a pleasing almond aroma (courtesy of the cyanide it’s oozing).  Pink millipede saté sticks, anyone?

To see more bizarre animals either discovered or more fully investigated in the last few years (including our old friend the barreleye fish and the can’t-miss flesh-eating ghost slug), check out this gallery of bizarre animals over at New Scientist. You’ll be glad you did!

This is what 600 million years of relentless predation will do for ya, folks.

Nothing to see here. These aren’t the . . . whatevers . . . we’re looking for. Move along.

Guesses on the identity of this bad boy over at DSN ranged from some sort of cnidarian (like a soft coral or anemone) to a sea cucumber or even some sort of fancy sea turtle extra-option package. Your guess is as good as mine. Anyone here want to take a (groan) poke?

But lucky for you, it started raining! And guess what, it’s raining genes! (Cue The Weather Girls) Which is great news, because your species is all female and hasn’t had sex in 100 million years. Hallelujah!

Scanning electron micrographs showing morphological variation of bdelloid rotifers and their jaws. We're going to need a bigger microscope (apologies to Roy Scheider and Peter Benchley). Photo by Diego Fontaneto, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Click photo for link.

As described in this little article over at discovermagazine.com, without a way to exchange and recombine genetic information, many animal species tend to degenerate and disappear over time (thus the joy of sex) because they lack efficient ways to generate novelty that can help them adapt to changing environments. That’s OK — when you’re a bdelloid rotifer, you can do it Hoover style: just vacuum up whatever stray DNA happens to be in your environment, including the genes of whatever it was you might have recently had for dinner (note to self: glad am not bdelloid rotifer). Plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and who knows? — you might even get lucky. You might manage to incorporate some variant versions of your own species’s genes, thus escaping the cruel grind of creeping genetic obsolescence.

Coming soon: Part 2: So what is a bdelloid rotifer anyway?

The blog includes this clip:

If there was ever a fish that belonged on Futurama . . . this is it. The see-through head apparently protects the fish’s eyes from the stinging sea creatures it steals its food from. I knew there was a reason I keep a pair of safety goggles in my kitchen; you never know when the soup will shoot a nematocyst-covered stinging tentacle your way . . . see Better Off Dead.

But then on Monday, DSN posted a new link to — amazingly — a Colbert Report clip about the fish. Just so you know, Colbert’s reaction is pretty much how I feel about all the crazy organisms I’ll be writing about on this blog. To wit:

If this clip won’t load, you can find the DSN version here.

Oh, and just for the record, the fish’s latin name, Macropinna microstoma, roughly translates to “Big wing little mouth”.