Courtesy of Chris Mah at the Echinoblog, piping hot, fresh video (just weeks old) of a new rift community discovered in the Galapagos by NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer (your tax dollars, should you choose to vote for giving them, at work). One commenter pointed out there’s a red glow at about 1:33 that could even be lava. But mostly, enjoy a few minutes of Zen observing your planet’s fellow passengers, blessedly free of obnoxious Discovery channel voice-over.

Yarrrrr . . . there be a By-the-Wind Sailor. Creative Commons Notafly. Click image for license and link.

Hey kiddos, I’ve been busy over at Sci Am and have two new posts up there, in case you missed them:

The Jellyfish that Conquered Land — and Australia

and

Circus of the Spineless #63.5

I have a question for y’alls: would you prefer I switch my old feedburner feed over to the Sci Am feed, so that you don’t have to sign up for a new feed (i.e. my old feed and new feed will give the same content from the new site)? Or would you prefer I keep this feed separate, so you can be updated easily on anything I post here? I don’t anticipate posting here super-often, in case that helps.

Again, my new Sci Am blog is at

blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/

and the new feed is

http://rss.sciam.com/artful-amoeba/feed

Mycetozoa, by Haeckel. A beautiful expression of ameoba-hood.

UPDATE: Feed link was previously incorrect. This has been fixed.

Dear Readers,

It has been  a joy blogging with you here over the last two and a quarter years. But someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse and I have some fantastic news: my blog has been recruited by the new Scientific American blog network, which just launched this morning. Like all creatures, this blog is evolving.

You can find my new blog here and my intro post here, with many more details on my new digs. My new RSS feed will be

http://rss.sciam.com/artful-amoeba/feed

I am not sure if I’ll be able to simply transfer my old RSS feed over to this new one or not, but I’ll keep you updated on this if I find it is so.

Bora Zivkovic, our editor, has written a long post summarizing all the blogs (including mine) on the network (and there are about two dozen individual blogs and about 10 more editorial and group blogs) over at

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/network-central/2011/07/05/welcome-the-scientific-american-blog-network/

The official press release is at:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/pr/release.cfm?site=sciam&date=2011-07-05

Mariette DiChristina’s (Editor-in-Chief) welcome post is on the @ScientificAmerican blog at:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/at-scientific-american/2011/07/05/welcome-to-the-scientific-american-blog-network

I am very excited about this new opportunity and about the fantastic people I’ll be working with over there. My first (and only the first) blog post will be on a schedule and won’t take place for well over a week, so don’t lose heart when you don’t hear from me for a while. I haven’t forgotten about you guys, and I’ll still be doing what I’ve been doing for two years — only in a slightly different place.

I’ll be keeping this website as well, so check back in occasionally for new posts that don’t fit well at Sci Am or that may get reposted here in order to show off art. This is my professional site and home of my portfolio, and it will continue to be so. So head on over to Scientific American, and check out my intro post, feel free to leave a comment there to say hi, and have a look around at the other wonderful bloggers we have lined up. See you soon.

Jennifer

If you’d like to vote in the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Contest, go here. I have two posts in the running, but I particularly like is this one. Voting closes on June 810. Thanks to any of you who vote!

What I did not know about then, and have just discovered, is that this mushroom doesn’t merely lounge around in quiet pools. It stands up to stiff currents, as seen in this amazing video I found at the ASU site.

Both the Nat Geo article and the ASU page contained some other gems. The caption to the glowing mushrooms in the Nat Geo article noted

San Francisco State University’s Dennis Desjardin and colleagues scouted for glow-in-the-dark mushrooms during new moons, in rain forests so dark the researchers often couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces, Desjardin told National Geographic News in 2009.

Ummm  . . . have you seen many of the things that live in rainforests? Walking through them in pitch black sounds like a Herculean feat of will, and hands-down one of the most bad-*** things I have ever heard of any scientist doing (although the guy who set out to sample the stings of every venomous insect and rate them on a scale of pain comes close). I give a Pseudopod Salute to these guys for courage in the line of duty. And it seems to have paid off, too.

But “when you look down at the ground, it’s like looking up at the sky,” Desjardin said. “Every little ‘star’ was a little mushroom—it was just fantastic.”

WOW. Witnessing for the first time a few hours of profound biological beauty sounds like it could well make up for the seriously high sphincter factor of this study. Like when Edith Widder turned off the dive lights on her autonomous diving suit 880 feet below the Santa Barbara Channel, or when I jumped into the North Pacific at night in shark-infested waters to see the nightly ascent of the bizarre pelagic biota. Sometimes, the payoff is worth the bone-quaking fear.

In the ASU description of the dentally-well-endowed but reproductively less blessed T. rex leech, known for teeth “that the leech uses to saw into the tissues of mammals’ orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas,” (oh dear LORD) according to Nat Geo, was casually dropped this detail

This T. rex leech was discovered feeding from the nasal mucous membrane of a little girl in Perú.

Eeeeeeeeeee! Nat Geo did not mention it was a human parasite too!

And finally, in the caption for the Darwin’s Bark Spider at ASU, hidden amongst some other more or less routine description of a spider that spins gigantic webs was this

This orb-weaving spider builds the largest orb-style webs that are known to science.  Webs of this species have been found spanning rivers, streams and lakes with “bridgelines” reaching up to 25m in length and total web size reaching up to 2.8m².  The silk spun by these spiders has an average toughness of 250MJ/m³ with the highest measured at 520MJ/ m³.  This makes it, “the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times stronger than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar” and more than two times stronger than any other known spider silk. The unusual behaviors of this new species will allow us to understand size dimorphism, mate guarding, and self castration (among others).

Wait . . . what was that last one?

As usual, Three Quarks Daily is having their annual science blogging contest, judged this year by physics babe (and yes, I know I’m perpetuating stereotypes here) Lisa Randall. I’m not very good at self-promotion. But as Ed Yong recently admonished, it’s important to enter science writing contests, and this one happens to require a little self promotion.

You can nominate one and only one blog post in the contest, and if you choose to do so, it must be a post written between May 22, 2010 and midnight on May 31, 2011 (the deadline for entries). If you choose to nominate me, you can select anything you like, but here are a few of my favorites. This is also a great opportunity to catch some of my favorite posts that you might have missed over the last year:

• Rock Instar Parking: Wyoming
• The Fungus and Virus that Rot Bee Brains
• Excuse Me, Sir, There’s a Moss-Animal in my Lake (Sci Am Guest Blog)
• Earth’s Real Lost World — and its Imminent Entry
• Mosses that Move and the Rocks They Reveal
• Bombardier Beetles, Bee Purple, and the Sirens of the Night (I have nominated this one, so it is covered)

One nomination for one post is sufficient, so if you see in the comments at 3QD your favorite post already entered, it’s taken care of for now. You can nominate another post (by me or anyone else) instead if you wish. But having too many posts nominated might split the vote, so if you don’t feel so moved, please don’t feel you need to nominate. Once the nominations are in, there will be a voting stage to cull the top 20 entries.  I’ll let you know when that happens, should you like to vote for me. Danke schoen!

Can *you* ooze blood from your skin without the help of a friendly hemorrhagic fever virus? Didn't think so. This red fluid isn't actually blood, but I have no idea what it is. Hydnellum peckii -- "Strawberries and Cream" -- in the mountains of central Colorado near Winter Park. Author's photo.

So . . . you like what you’ve heard about fungi and want to learn more. And you live in the general Frontal Range area. Then have I got some opportunities for you: next Monday I will be giving the same lecture I gave in March at the Colorado Mycological Society (“The Many Ways to be a Fungus (in Colorado)”) for the Pikes Peak Mycological Society in Colorado Springs. See here if you’d like to come — the meeting is free.

Then, this August, I’ll be once again teaching “Wild Mushrooms” for the Boulder County Nature Association. It’s an evening lecture in Boulder followed by two field trips on Saturday mornings two weeks apart. Lots of fun will be had by all. $80, or $70 if you’re a BCNA member — find out more here.

Most readers of this blog are probably biophiles of one sort or another, but it takes a special sort of passion (or lunacy) to start a blog on a subject in your spare time and write about it for hours on end without any expectation of renumeration. Yet I have done it now for over two years.

Why? A feeling, and the burning desire to share it with others. At its heart, my love of life on Earth is a love of shape, form, color, texture, and mechanism (which is why I put such an emphasis on good, large photos, diagrams, and art at this blog) — of the sort that’s put into overdrive by art like Haeckel’s drawings of ascomycete fungi at left, and of course, by seeing and understanding the organisms themselves. There’s also a joy that comes from looking at a pine tree and understanding (and being able to visualize) how that sucker works from root to shoot that I imagine is not far off from the feeling aerospace engineers have while drinking in a Saturn V rocket.

In fact, I recently read a description by a meteorologist of his similar feelings that convinced me I am not alone. The following is from the autobiography of meteorologist Richard Reed, who had an aptitude for science and math when he enlisted in the Navy at the outbreak of World War II but no idea what to do with with his life. He was previously planning to become an accountant when he signed up for the Navy forecasting service:

Freshly minted young ensigns Max Edelstein and Alvin Morris, the latter to become a longtime friend after the war, were assigned the job of teaching the trainees the elements of meteorology. To aid their instruction they suggested that we read a popular— and deservedly so—elementary textbook by Blair. I have never forgotten this experience. Once started on the book I could not put it down, staying up that night until I had finished reading it and feeling at the conclusion that I had thoroughly absorbed the material despite my relatively weak scientific background. If there ever was a case of love at first sight for a scientific subject, I experienced it that day (and night). There are those who view unusual ability in math and physics as the key to scientific success and its manifestation in a particular subject as largely a matter of accident. I have never subscribed to this view. The aesthetic feelings aroused in me by weather patterns and the fascination I felt for weather phenomena as physically evolving entities have always seemed to me inborn facets of my being. I cannot picture any other field of study having had the same emotional effect.

If you find something like this in your life, grab it and don’t let go. I once saw a documentary about a jazz musician (I cannot remember which one) who went through the rise to stardom followed by de rigeur drug- and alcohol-induced crash. At the peak of his fame, he had played in an exclusive jazz club. Now that he was penniless, he sat outside it on the curb, playing the same songs he had done before for free. He could not imagine anything else he’d rather do with his time, whether he was being paid or not.

When I watched this, I was in college and struggling with what to do with my life. For four years after I realized I had no desire to be a research scientist after all, I had no clue. If only, I thought, I could find a career I felt about the way that jazz guy did. Something I was so passionate about that I would do it for free. And eleven years later, here I am, blissfully, unemployed-ly, doing what I love and giving it away. I am thinking perhaps that life has now provided me the cosmic kick in the pants to go for it fully — and maybe even get paid.

So in the wake of my recent job loss, I will be embarking on the grand adventure of the freelance lifestyle. I am excited about this change; it is one I’ve been hoping to make for a long time. At the same time, it’s also terrifying. The mortgage, health insurance premiums, and grocery bills must all get paid each month. And so I will continue to look for part-time work. But I have a deep-down feeling that this is the place, and now is the time. In addition to this blog and to magazine, newspaper, and internet work, I am hoping, one day, to also write books that will also help you fall in love with (and laugh a bit about) some of your planet’s lesser-known co-passengers. And I am hoping you will want to read them. : )

Thanks to all who have sent in freelance contacts so far; more are most welcome. And thanks for everyone who’s advised me to seize the moment. Fortune favors the bold, so the Romans said, and so I hope.

Connections -- here's hoping I've got some. Fungal mycelia from a bathroom remodel. Creative Commons Bob Blaylock. Click image for license.

Dear Readers,

I have a bit of sad personal news. I learned today that my day job has been cut due to a budget shortfall. As a result, I am back on the job market. I have six years of experience as a health and environment reporter and science writer, and in 2007 I won a AAAS Science Journalism Award. If you like my work and know of any science writing job possibilities or freelance work that I could do from Colorado, please get in touch with me via the email address on my Portfolio page. Alternatively, you can post a comment if you don’t mind a few hundred other people seeing it. : )

Regardless of these circumstances, I plan to keep this blog up and running. Fortuitously, my post “Bombadier Beetles, Bee Purple, and the Sirens of the Night” was selected by Ed Yong as one of his “Science Writing I Would Pay to Read” posts for this April. If you’d like to make a donation to all the science writers (including me) who were featured this month there, you can do so via a paypal button that says “Support Science Writers” at his blog.

Thanks in advance for any help, advice, or moral support. : )

Jennifer

The Many Ways to Be a Fungus (in Colorado) from Jennifer Frazer on Vimeo.