Animals and Transportation, aquatic department

Last week we saw snakes and a ferret travelling by train and a penguin overcoming its flightless nature via airline. And while last week's monkeys used their car as a toy rather than a means of transportation, we've seen bears and dogs try to drive cars more than once.

Is no form of transportation safe from animals? Apparently not, since we've recently seen a rash of sea life getting on boats.

In Texas, some fisherman who were after nothing more than red snapper ending up coming home with a 375 pound mako shark that jumped into their boat. The shark, perhaps having second thoughts about its choice of conveyance, thrashed around so wildly that they were unable to help it back into the water, and it died.

Although the men had no permit to catch sharks, officials reasonably concluded that no offense is committed when a shark commits suicide using your boat.

A more serious case occurred a few days earlier when an eagle ray jumped into a boat on the Florida Keys. This fish seemed more intent on murder than suicide: it landed on a woman passenger and slammed her against the deck repeatedly.

The ray was reportedly 8 feet across and probably 300 pounds, and the other passengers thought the woman was going to die. It wouldn't have been the first time - a woman died of head injuries in a similar incident in 2008.

Nearby wildlife officers heard the commotion and rushed to the boat - "shoes were getting thrown off the boat, towels were going everywhere," one told CNN. But by the time they got there, the victim had freed herself, completely uninjured. So their only contribution? Helping the culprit escape back into the water. Thanks, guys - good to know whose side you're on.


The only kind of shark that belongs on a boat by Flickr user MV Jantzen.

Turning the tables on a bad animal

As we've seen on this blog again and again, some people never learn. Macaques cause havoc wherever they live - just to name a few, we've seen it in South Africa, in Singapore, in Japan, and even in places in India where they are considered gods.

And still, a town in Thailand persists with a traditional yearly festival that provides a huge monkey buffet.

But one organization that's concerned about invasive species has an idea to turn the tables on bad animal behavior.

Accoding to REEF, the Red Lionfish is the first non-native marine fish to successfully invade Atlantic waters. They're thriving in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and the East Coast of the United States, where they reproduce year-round, and have no predators.

But REEF says there's a simple solution to the latter problem:

"It's absolutely good eating -- a delicacy. It's delicately flavored white meat, very buttery," Lad Akins, director of special projects for Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), told Reuters.

The lionfish has got nasty, venomous spines, but once they're removed (or cooked, if you like to live on the edge), it's perfectly safe to eat.

And if you're not sure of the best way to prepare it, REEF is not going let you get away with that excuse: they've just released The Lionfish Cookbook. Do your part by buying your copy here.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Aquatic bad behavior briefs

From new research out of Australia:

Small fish are at risk of being bullied to death by big ones as coral reef resources are hit by climate change.

From Practical Fishkeeping:

Giant Penis-eating Worm found in aquarium.

Do I even need to add anything to that headline?

(Or this one: Embarassing sexual complaint hits people poisoned by fish. Shouldn't it be less, well, disturbing to read a magazine called Practical Fishkeeping?)

Don't scroll down any farther unless you want to see a picture of an even bigger, four-foot long specimen of the penis-eating worm that devastated an aquarium in Cornwall.

















Fish fight, above, by Flickr user James Donavon.

Bug got your tongue?

We don't usually cover the world of parasites on this blog. Certainly, living inside another animal's body without permission is, at minimum, rude. But parasites are so disgusting, really, they seem like an easy mark.

However, a creature that's been going round the internet lately takes rude parasitism to such a level that I cannot ignore it. It is so disgusting that I'm putting the photo at the bottom of this post so if you're squeamish, I warn you, don't scroll down.

The creature is an isopod, which is normally a kind of crustacean that's inoffensive and sometimes even cute. Those roly-poly potato bugs are isopods:

And isn't this T-shirt illustration of the more awful giant isopod funny?


(buy the shirt here)

OK, we're just postponing the inevitable, a creature which the BBC describes as "A rare parasite which burrows into host fish before eating and replacing their tongues with itself."

Yes, it EATS the TONGUE of the living fish and then LIVES there in place of it. And the marine biologist who found a specimen off the Jersey coast calls it:

"Really quite large, really quite hideous - if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought 'that's a bit of a nasty beast'.

This inexcusable behavior yields the situation in the following photo (and don't say I didn't warn you):


By the way, Americans, don't feel like you're safe because this was found in Britain (where earlier specimens were found in fish bought in fish markets, quite a lovely surprise at dinnertime no doubt.) In fact, the reason British biologists were so excited about this find is that normal habitat of this creature is the coast of California.


Roly-poly pillbug from Wikipedia; despite searching, I'm unable to credit the horrific photo of the tongue-eating monster, possibly because no one wants to admit being responsible for such a hideous, awful thing.

It's OK, sharks: you're ruthless killing machines after all

If you were saddened by the post last week that dealt a blow to our metaphors involving sloths and pigs, this might make you feel better.

Sharks have a reputation as ruthless killing machines. But experts will gladly ruin the fun by telling you that this reputation is vastly exagerrated: that the majority of species are small and harmless, that many more sharks are killed by humans every year than vice-versa, blah blah shark-hugging blah.

But here's some good news. In a triumph of interdisciplinary research, a recent study not only confirms our stereotype, but gives it a new twist: it shows that great white sharks stalk their prey in the same way as human serial killers.

Research linking sharks and serial killers began when the late Canadian shark scientist R Aidan Martin read about geographic profiling, which tries to find criminals by looking for patterns in where they strike.

He contacted Rossmo, a pioneer in that field of investigation, and they applied the methods of tracking down criminals to researching shark strategy.

In the latest study, Martin and Hammerschlag watched sharks from sunrise to sunset, applied geographic profiling and found patterns of stalking, Hammerschlag said.

And who would know better than a veteran cop?

"They both have the same objective, which is to find a target or prey or victim," co-author D. Kim Rossmo, a professor of criminal justice at Texas State University-San Marcos, said.

"They have to lurk. They want to be efficient in their search," Rossmo, who was a police officer in Canada for more than 21 years, said.

Photo from Flickr user Harrymoon and thanks for the link to Sir Pilkington-Smythe's Twitter.

There's a double standard in everything...

...even cannibalistic parenting.

Eating one's offspring seems to be actually rather common in the animal kingdom.
There must be a reason for this behavior, or it wouldn't have evolved. But it's an interesting mystery because if the point of reproducing is to pass on your genes, it seems just a bit counterproductive.

A couple of recent studies of this phenomenon show that even in the animal kingdom, when it comes to child care, men don't have to work nearly as hard to be considered great for pitching in with the child care.

One study looked at sand gobies, a species of fish where dad provides all the care. Sounds enlightened, right? Not so fast:

"Overall, dad does a pretty good job of taking care of the eggs, except for one thing — he tends to eat about a third of them," said researcher Hope Klug, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. "Based on previous work in this species, we know that the males aren't just doing this because they're hungry — even when they have excess food, they continue to eat a really large number of their own eggs."

There are many theories about offspring cannibalism that aren't too bad - for example, getting rid of defective or inferior young - but in this case, researchers concluded that the males's goal is to get back to partying:

The scientists found the males preferred to eat larger eggs — which take longer to hatch — from the second female they spawned with. They conjecture the fish do so to cut down on the amount of time spent caring for their young, thereby enabling the dads to reenter the mating game sooner.

Sand goby dads have to care for thousands of eggs "until they hatch — about one to two weeks — and during this time he isn't able to attract any new females," Klug explained.

In contrast, another study showed that rattlesnake mothers eat their babies because they're exhausted and starving after giving birth - and they only consume the ones that are already dead.

Isn't it always the way?

Goby photo by Flickr user Preview_H.