Biggest Spider Fossil Now Has a Mate — But It's Complicated

The largest known fossil spiders (left: male, right: female) belong to a newly described species.

A few years ago, scientists uncovered the largest-ever fossil of spider: a female representative of a never-before-seen species that was buried in volcanic ash during the age of the dinosaurs.

Now the researchers say they have found an adult male spider to match, but the discovery complicates the original interpretation of the species. The scientists have proposed a new genus — Mongolarachne — to describe the extinct creature.

When researchers first found the female spider in northern China, they named it Nephila jurassica, putting it in the Nephila genus of golden silk orb-weavers, which still exist today and have been known to ensnare birds and bats in their huge wheel-shaped webs.

"It was so much like the modern golden orb weaver," said Paul Selden, a paleontologist with the University of Kansas. "We couldn't find any reason not to put it in the same genus of the modern ones."

With soft, squishy bodies, spiders don't typically turn up in the fossil record, but several hundred have been found in the volcanic deposits at the Daohugou fossil beds in Inner Mongolia, Selden said.

Volcanic ash is famous for preserving more ephemeral pieces of the past, from bodies buried in their death poses at Pompeii to 2.7-billion-year-old raindrop impressions found in South Africa. Researchers think these spiders were likely swept to the bottom of a sub-tropical lake and covered in fine ash after a volcano blew its lid.

Unlike insects, spiders are typically pretty good at staying away from water, Selden explained.

"It would take something like a volcanic eruption to blow them into the bottom of the lake and bury them," Selden told LiveScience. "That's the sort of scenario we imagine."

And in that volcanic rock layer at Daohugou, the researchers found another spider that looked remarkably similar to Nephila jurassica, except it was male. There were several clues in the newfound fossil, however, that suggest this ancient arachnid just doesn't fit the bill for Nephila.

First of all, the male was remarkably quite similar in size to the female, with a body that measures 0.65 inches (1.65 centimeters) long and a first leg stretching 2.29 inches (5.82 cm).

"This is rather strange," Selden said. "In the modern orb weavers, there is quite a lot of sexual dimorphism," with a huge female and a tiny male.

Compared with Nephila male spiders, this newfound fossilized male had more primitive-looking pedipalps — the sex appendages between a spider's jaws and first legs that it uses to transfer sperm to the female. And it had a more feathery hairstyle: The fossil was preserved so well that Selden could look at imprints of the spider's hair under an electron microscope. Instead of one or two scales along each bristle, Selsen said he saw evidence that this spider had "spirals of hairlets" along the strands covering its body.

The researchers think the fossilized spiders may actually be more closely related to spiders in theDeinopoidea genus, also called ogre-faced spiders. Arachnids in this group are considered orbicularians. They also make orb-shaped webs, but their silk is more "woolly," Selden said, with a stickiness that's more like Velcro than glue.

Revising their original labeling of the giant fossilized female spider, the researchers created a new genus and species name for the pair: Mongolarachne jurassica. Selden and colleagues also created a branch for Mongolarachne on a phylogenic tree, placing it quite close to the stem where orbicularians originate.

The study was published online Dec. 7 in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Algae to Biofuels in 60 minutes

Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

December 17, 2013 

• Process simplifies transformation of algae to oil, water and usable byproducts

• Download Original Image
  Algae Slurry

 1 of 6 

RICHLAND, Wash. – Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journalAlgal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae.

While algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel, and several companies have produced algae-based fuels on a research scale, the fuel is projected to be expensive. The PNNL technology harnesses algae's energy potential efficiently and incorporates a number of methods to reduce the cost of producing algae fuel.

"Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research. "We believe that the process we've created will help make algae biofuels much more economical."

PNNL scientists and engineers simplified the production of crude oil from algae by combining several chemical steps into one continuous process. The most important cost-saving step is that the process works with wet algae. Most current processes require the algae to be dried — a process that takes a lot of energy and is expensive. The new process works with an algae slurry that contains as much as 80 to 90 percent water.

"Not having to dry the algae is a big win in this process; that cuts the cost a great deal," said Elliott. "Then there are bonuses, like being able to extract usable gas from the water and then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more algae, which further reduces costs."

While a few other groups have tested similar processes to create biofuel from wet algae, most of that work is done one batch at a time. The PNNL system runs continuously, processing about 1.5 liters of algae slurry in the research reactor per hour. While that doesn't seem like much, it's much closer to the type of continuous system required for large-scale commercial production.

The PNNL system also eliminates another step required in today's most common algae-processing method: the need for complex processing with solvents like hexane to extract the energy-rich oils from the rest of the algae. Instead, the PNNL team works with the whole algae, subjecting it to very hot water under high pressure to tear apart the substance, converting most of the biomass into liquid and gas fuels.

The system runs at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit) at a pressure of around 3,000 PSI, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification. Elliott says such a high-pressure system is not easy or cheap to build, which is one drawback to the technology, though the cost savings on the back end more than makes up for the investment.

"It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher," said Elliott. "In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing it much, much faster."

The products of the process are:

• Crude oil, which can be converted to aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. In the team's experiments, generally more than 50 percent of the algae's carbon is converted to energy in crude oil — sometimes as much as 70 percent.
• Clean water, which can be re-used to grow more algae.
• Fuel gas, which can be burned to make electricity or cleaned to make natural gas for vehicle fuel in the form of compressed natural gas.
• Nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — the key nutrients for growing algae.

Elliott has worked on hydrothermal technology for nearly 40 years, applying it to a variety of substances, including wood chips and other substances. Because of the mix of earthy materials in his laboratory, and the constant chemical processing, he jokes that his laboratory sometimes smells "like a mix of dirty socks, rotten eggs and wood smoke" — an accurate assessment.

Genifuel Corp. has worked closely with Elliott's team since 2008, licensing the technology and working initially with PNNL through DOE's Technology Assistance Program to assess the technology.

"This has really been a fruitful collaboration for both Genifuel and PNNL," said James Oyler, president of Genifuel. "The hydrothermal liquefaction process that PNNL developed for biomass makes the conversion of algae to biofuel much more economical. Genifuel has been a partner to improve the technology and make it feasible for use in a commercial system.

"It's a formidable challenge, to make a biofuel that is cost-competitive with established petroleum-based fuels," Oyler added. "This is a huge step in the right direction."

The recent work is part of DOE's National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels & Bioproducts, or NAABB. This project was funded with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Both PNNL and Genifuel have been partners in the NAABB program.

In addition to Elliott, authors of the paper include Todd R. Hart, Andrew J. Schmidt, Gary G. Neuenschwander, Leslie J. Rotness, Mariefel V. Olarte, Alan H. Zacher, Karl O. Albrecht, Richard T. Hallen and Johnathan E. Holladay, all at PNNL.

---

Reference: Douglas C. Elliott, Todd R. Hart, Andrew J. Schmidt, Gary G. Neuenschwander, Leslie J. Rotness, Mariefel V. Olarte, Alan H. Zacher, Karl O. Albrecht, Richard T. Hallen and Johnathan E. Holladay, Process development for hydrothermal liquefaction of algae feedstocks in a continuous-flow reactor, Algal Research, Sept. 29, 2013, DOI: 10.1016/j.algal.2013.08.005.

Bacterial Competition In Lab Shows Evolution Never Stops

The plate on the left contains about equal numbers of colonies of two different bacteria. After the bacteria compete and evolve, the lighter ones have taken the lead in the plate on the right.  

Evolution is relentless process that seems to keep going and going, even when creatures live in a stable, unchanging world.

That's the latest surprise from a unique experiment that's been underway for more than a quarter-century.

Evolution is so important for biology, medicine and a general understanding of our world that scientists want to understand it as fully as possible. That's why, in 1988, biologist Richard Lenski took a dozen glass flasks and added identical bacteria to each of them. Those 12 populations have been evolving ever since, letting scientists watch evolution in real time.

Michigan State's Richard Lenski pulls cultures of bacteria from a lab freezer.

Day after day — including holidays and weekends — workers in Lenski's lab at Michigan State University in East Lansing feed and care for the E. coli bacteria. The bacteria eat and divide again and again. The original microbes have produced more than 50,000 generations over the last 25 years.

Random mutations have allowed them to get fitter, meaning they reproduce faster. "In evolutionary biology, fitness is this representation of the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce," says Lenski. He explains that all else being equal, organisms that reproduce more quickly will have an advantage when competing with those that reproduce more slowly.

Early on, Lenski predicted his bacteria would adapt and adapt but eventually hit a wall — that they would reach a peak level of fitness they couldn't improve on.

"Evolutionary biologists have long thought of evolution as a process that continues indefinitely because the world is constantly changing," says Lenski. But his bacteria live in an unchanging world — their glass bottles stay at a steady temperature and they constantly are fed the same food.

It turns out, though, that the bacteria haven't stopped evolving, and it looks like they never will, according to a report Lenski's group has now published in the journal Science.

Lenski, along with colleagues Michael Wiser and Noah Ribeck, dug into a freezer that holds samples of the bacteria that were taken every few months over the course of the whole experiment. The researchers can pull out, say, the 10,000th or 40,000th generation and bring these frozen bacteria back to life.

"We can actually compete organisms that lived at different points in time, so we can compete the evolved bacteria head to head against their ancestors," says Lenski.

What they've found is that the bacteria just keep getting fitter and fitter and fitter. The pace of improvement is slowing down, but shows no sign of stopping.

In their tests, the original ancestor doubles its population in about an hour, says Lenski, but the 50,000th generation can do that in around 40 minutes. And the researchers calculate that future generations will reproduce even faster. "We predicted that in about a million years, their doubling time might be on the order of about 20 minutes," says Lenski.

He says some bacteria can actually achieve that, in environments more rich in nutrients than the flasks in his lab, so it doesn't seem like a crazy, ridiculous prediction.

Still, that would be a lot of change for creatures living in an unchanging world, and it offers a new insight on how evolution can just keep on going and going.

Does Lenski think his long-term experiment will still be around in million years, to test his predictions? "I doubt it," he says.

But he would love to see it last another 25 years, at least. "I think it's still got a lot to teach us about how evolution works under these very idealized but very transparent conditions," says Lenski, who eventually plans to pass the experiment on to a younger scientist.

Ancient Seawater Found in the Chesapeake Bay

Seawater discovered near the Chesapeake Bay is up to 150 million years old

Not only is the Chesapeake Bay so enormous it can be seen from space, it essentially came from outer space.

An asteroid or huge chunk of ice slammed into Earth about 35 million years ago, splashing into the Early Cretaceous North Atlantic, sending tsunamis as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains and leaving a 56-mile-wide hole at the mouth of what is now the bay.

But a newly published research paper written by U.S. Geological Survey scientists shows that wasn’t the end of it. While drilling holes in southern Virginia to study the impact crater, the scientists discovered “the oldest large body of ancient seawater in the world,” a survivor of that long-gone sea, resting about a half-mile underground near the bay, according to the USGS.

Gas bubbles in groundwater flowing from the open drill-stem casing during the drilling project. Very high helium concentrations were used to help identify the saline water’s origin as Early Cretaceous North Atlantic sea water. Credit: Herbert Pierce

“What we essentially discovered was trapped water that’s twice the salinity of [modern] seawater,” said Ward Sanford, a USGS hydrologist. “In our attempt to find out the origin, we found it was Early Cretaceous seawater. It’s really water that’s from the North Atlantic.”

The findings showing that the water is probably between 100 million and 150 million years old were published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater was discovered in 1999 by a tandem of USGS and Virginia Department of Environmental Quality scientists.

They theorized that a huge rock or chunk of ice slammed into an ancient ocean, sending enormous pieces of debris skyward and forcing monster tsunamis hundreds of miles inland.

Over centuries, the crater became hidden under 400 to 1,200 feet of sand, silt and clay, hampering its discovery for decades.

“It’s the largest crater discovered so far in the United States, and it’s one of only a few oceanic impact craters that have been documented worldwide,” USGS hydrologist David Powars said at the time.

The bay crater is shallower and smaller than another off the coast of Mexico, which most scientists believe caused the extinction of dinosaurs, Powars said.

Five years after the Chesapeake crater’s discovery, Sanford’s USGS team started drilling at Cape Charles, Va., under a $1.5 million grant from the International Continental Drilling Program to study how the earth’s crust absorbed the blow. “We weren’t looking for ancient seawater,” he said.

As the team drilled a half-mile from the surface, it encountered standing water. They first thought it was salty water that occasionally shows up at coastal drill sites. Saltwater is found underground all over the world all the time, often because of huge salt deposits in the ground.

In this case, “we didn’t hit any salt while drilling” at the Cape Charles site, a mile from the bay, Sanford said.

So researchers considered the possibility of boiling, when a meteor impact is so forceful that it heats water and increases its salinity. But after further tests, the boiling theory also didn’t make sense.

Results from more testing showed the water was twice as salty as today’s ocean water. When they analyzed its chemistry, they found high levels of chlorides and bromides, the fingerprint of sea­water from another time, Sanford said.

More tests and digging through research established that the chemistry was consistent with the “vast halite deposits created during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Basins,” the research paper said.

In other words, the groundwater at Cape Charles, about 220 miles south of the District, had the same salinity as the long-gone Early Cretaceous North Atlantic. When the meteor or whatever it was struck North America and disfigured the landscape, “the ancient seawater was preserved like a prehistoric fly in amber,” the USGS said in a statement.

“This was a surprising site discovery,” Sanford said. “This was not something we were looking for or even expected.”

It wasn’t the first time teams drilling for oil or geologic studies have come across deep groundwater with strangely high salinity, said Jerad Bales, acting USGS associate director for water.

Bales said numerous theories had been offered to help explain those findings. “But, up to this point, no one thought that this was North Atlantic ocean water that had essentially been in place for about 100 million years,” Bales said.

The USGS said the discovery would help scientists to better understand the hydrology of the area, at the very least.

Fourteen years ago, when the crater itself was found, Bales made a prescient statement. He said the discovery would help explain a few strange features in the region, including earthquakes around the crater’s perimeter, a higher rate of sea-level rise around Norfolk and “salty groundwater.”

New Tyrannosaur Discovered in Southern Utah

Paleontologists on Wednesday unveiled a new dinosaur discovered four years ago in southern Utah that proves that giant tyrant dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex were around 10 million years earlier than previously believed.

A full skeletal replica of the carnivore — the equivalent of the great uncle of the T. rex — was on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah alongside a 3-D model of the head and a large painted mural of the dinosaur roaming a shoreline.

It was the public's first glimpse at the new species, which researchers named Lythronax argestes (LY'-throw-nax ar-GES'-tees). The first part of the name means "king of gore," and the second part is derived from poet Homer's southwest wind.

The fossils were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in November 2009, and a team of paleontologists spent the past four years digging them up and traveling the world to confirm they were a new species.

Paleontologists believe the dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period on a landmass in the flooded central region of North America.

The discovery offers valuable new insight into the evolution of the ferocious tyrannosaurs that have been made famous in movies and captured the awe of school children and adults alike, said Thomas Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland department of geology.

This photo released by the Natural History Museum of Utah shows the fossilized skeleton of a newly-d …

"This shows that these big, banana-tooth bruisers go back to the very first days of the giant tyrant dinosaurs," said Holtz, who reviewed the findings. "This one is the first example of these kind of dinosaurs being the ruler of the land."

The new dinosaur likely was a bit smaller than the Tyrannosaurus rex but was otherwise similar, said Mark Loewen, a University of Utah paleontologist who co-authored a journal article about the discovery with fellow University of Utah paleontologist Randall Irmis.

It was 24 feet long and 8 feet tall at the hip, and was covered in scales and feathers, Loewen said. Asked what the carnivorous dinosaur ate, Loewen responded: "Whatever it wants."

"That skull is designed for grabbing something, shaking it to death and tearing it apart," he said.

The fossils were found by a seasonal paleontologist technician for the Bureau of Land Management who climbed up two cliffs and stopped at the base of a third in the national monument.

This image released by the Natural History Museum of Utah shows a model of a newly-discovered dinosa …

"I realized I was standing with bone all around me," said Scott Richardson, who called his boss, Alan Titus, to let him know about the fossils.

Loewen and others spent three years traveling the world to compare the fossils to other dinosaurs to be absolutely sure it was a new species. The findings are being published in the journal PLOS One.

The fossils were found in a southern Utah rock formation that also has produced the oldest-known triceratops, named "Diabloceratops," and other dome-headed and armored dinosaurs.

There are about 1 million acres of cretaceous rocks that could be holding other new species of dinosaurs, said Titus, the BLM paleontologist who oversees the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Only about 10 percent of the rock formation has been scoured, he said. Twelve other new dinosaurs found there are waiting to be named.

"We are just getting started," Titus said. "We have a really big sandbox to play in."

Holtz said the finding is a testament to the bounty of fossils lying in the earth in North America. He predicts more discoveries in Utah.

"It shows we don't have to go to Egypt or Mongolia or China to find new dinosaurs," Holtz said. "It's just a matter of getting the field teams out."

Recent Rash of Wildlife Deaths

West Coast Starfish Turning to 'Goo' Is Latest in Mass Wildlife Deaths

Marine biologists have reported widespread starfish die-offs along the West Coast, precipitated by a disease that causes their arms to fall off and the creatures to disintegrate and turn to "goo."

"Sea star wasting disease," has been flushing out a vast number of a particular five-legged species from tide pools, even wiping out up to 95 percent of the population, the AP reported. Along the western coastline stretching from southeast Alaska to Santa Barbara, the Pisaster ochraceus starfish, also known as the purple sea star or ochre starfish, are dying of the disease which causes white, abscess-like lesions to form and spread across their bodies.

Wasting disease has been reported before in southern California in 1983-84, but it remained localized then. The starfish population die-off is the latest in a series of mass animal deaths to occur this year.

Giant Oarfish Wash up in California

Not one, but two giant sea serpent-like oarfish washed up on the beaches of southern California last month. The first discovery was made by a snorkeling marine scientist who wrestled the dead 18-foot monster (with help) to shore near Catalina, while the second so-called "discovery of a lifetime" was made in less than a week. The second oarfish measured at 13.5 feet, and was found washed up on a beach in Oceanside Harbor by bewildered beachgoers.

Test on the bizarrre fish failed to determine a cause of death. The terrifying-looking and toothless oarfish is also known as a ribbon fish, possessing bony, silvery bodies and bright redcrested
heads. They are thought to have spawned ancient folk tales about sea serpents.

Bees Turn Up in Parking Lot

More than 25,000 dead bees were found scattered across a parking lot in Wilsonville, Ore., in June this year, amid rapidly declining honeybee populations across North America. The cause of the deaths was later determined by the Department of Agriculture to have been related to an insecticide used on trees to kill aphids.

Across the U.S., mass bee die-offs have been attributed to colony collapse disorder, in which bees abruptly exit the hive and do not return. Beekeepers have reported losing up to 90 percent of their bee colonies since 2006, but still have no idea what causes the disorder, although one theory is that the bees are committing a type of "altruistic suicide" to save their nest-mates from dying of disease.

Manatees Threatened by Algae

So far, 2013 has been the deadliest year yet for Mantees off the Florida coast. A bloom of toxic algae that draws out essential oxygen from the water has killed at least 769 of the blubbery, seal-like mammals. The algae, also known as red-tide, settles on the sea grass that manatees feed on, which when eaten, can cause central nervous system problems, including seizures and difficulty lifting the head to breathe, eventually leading to death.

This year's number of manatee deaths was nearly double of that seen in 2012, which was then reported at around 392. Manatees are a protected species and have been highly affected by urban coastal development, and constantly face the danger of being struck by boats.

Pigs Dumped in Chinese River

When 6,000 pig carcasses were found floating in China's Huangpu River in March, many of Shanghai's 23 million residents who receive their primary water supply from the river, were unnerved. The reports from health officials who later determined that the pigs were infected with a disease known as porcine circovirus, only served to deepen their fears, although the government claimed that the water had not been contaminated and was safe to drink.

It was thought that the pigs had been dumped in a hurry (and on the cheap) because of a recent government crackdown on selling diseased pigs.

Dolphins Die of Virus on East Coast

Hundreds of bottle-nosed dolphin deaths have been reported on the East Coast since July, which scientists are blaming on the outbreak of a dolphin virus similar to measles in humans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tested 33 of the approximate 333 dolphins that had washed ashore since July 1, and found the immune system-suppressing morbillivirus in all but one of them.

The dolphin die-off this year is the highest recorded since a similar scale viral outbreak in 1987 and 1988. As dolphins have very little resistance to the virus, NOAA scientists say they expect that wild populations will continue to die until spring 2014.

Oarfish Offer Chance to Study an Elusive Animal Long Thought a Monster

It was a big day for marine biologists: On Oct. 13, the body of an 18-foot oarfish was dragged from the water onto Santa Catalina Island off the California coast, presenting a rare opportunity for local scientists to study one of the world’s most elusive and awe-inspiring big fish.

Five days later, it was a big day again: Another oarfish washed up 50 miles away, this one 14 feet with six-foot-long ovaries full of eggs.

Pairs of oarfish have appeared within days of each other before, deepening the mystique that surrounds the animal. But the twin discoveries nevertheless sent a wave of excitement through a scientific community more used to reading about oarfish than handling them in the lab.

“These are unpredictable fish,” said Milton Love, a research biologist at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “And it’s hard to study unpredictable fish.”

Oarfish, which are long and eel-like in appearance, can grow to stupendous lengths — though ancient rumors of 55-foot specimens are probably exaggerated — and have inspired tales of sea monsters since ancient times.

Scientists know very little about them because they are “virtually never caught in nets or by hooks, and they’ve only been observed under water a handful of times,” Dr. Love said. “So you’re kind of left with these not random but rare events, and that’s the only way you can study them.”

It is known that oarfish are notoriously bad swimmers; their long bodies remain still while their undulating fins handle most of the propulsion, yet they have apparently learned to avoid nets, Dr. Love said.

Precisely what will be learned from the two newfound fish, which were dissected and divvied up among a handful of research institutions, remains to be seen. “You can only learn so much from a dead fish,” Dr. Love said. But by last week, a coterie of researchers, including a comparative ophthalmologist and a gill expert, were lining up to study them.

Early observations revealed that the second fish, found in Oceanside, was apparently ready to spawn. “There were probably hundreds of thousands of eggs in those ovaries,” said H. J. Walker, the marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who extracted the eggs. Its stomach was nearly empty, supporting the theory that a strong current, possibly the northeast-flowing Kuroshio, had carried it and the other oarfish, a male, away from their preferred environment and food sources.

A variety of parasites, including large larval tapeworms and a spiny-headed worm, were found in the intestines of the male, potentially giving a clue about where these particular oarfish lived and fed. Their species, Regalecus russelii, is most populous in the Western Pacific.

Oarfish fans noted with excitement that the male was missing some of the posterior part of its body, colloquially known as the tail. Tyson Roberts, an ichthyologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute who is widely regarded as the world’s leading oarfish expert, has long hypothesized that oarfish can jettison sections of their bodies below the abdomen, much the way lizards can shed their tails.

As the world’s largest bony fish, oarfish have no known natural predator, so unlike with lizards, any shedding of the body is probably not done in self-defense, Dr. Roberts said. Such behavior is more likely meant to make swimming more efficient, among other reasons. “There may also be energetic benefits in shedding the posterior part of the body if it does not have much survival value, as apparently is the case in oarfishes,” he added.

Even oarfish experts disagree on some basic facts. Most refer to them as deep-sea creatures, contending that they live 500 to 1,000 feet below the surface. Dr. Roberts says that is not so.

“Mostly they spend their time quite near the surface, suspended vertically with their heads up, just passively floating,” said Dr. Roberts who championed the idea that there was more than one species of oarfish. He also believes that they have the capacity to change gender. “It may be that all individuals pass through a stage in which they are males and then pass through a stage in which they’re females,” he said.

Just how deep the oarfish resides may become clearer in the coming months as researchers study the eyes of the new specimens, possibly learning whether they are designed to see in the low light of the deep ocean. “There’s not much information on the oarfish eye, which is unusually large,” Dr. Walker said.

At California State University, Fullerton, Misty Paig-Tran, a biomechanist, will use CT scans to make a three-dimensional model of the female specimen, most of which she now possesses (the head will soon be delivered to Dr. Walker). Her preliminary X-rays gave researchers a closer look at the structures that support the dorsal fin, which may help explain the animal’s unusual way of swimming.

Oarfish have been a source of fascination for centuries. With long bodies, toothless jaws and giant red dorsal fins that protrude from their heads, they are often mistaken for monsters. “Most biologists will tell you it probably is the species responsible for the sea serpent legend,” Dr. Walker said.

An ancient Japanese myth holds that washed-up oarfish are a sign of an impending earthquake, a theory that regained popularity after about 20 oarfish beached themselves in Japan before the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In Japan, the oarfish is known as ryugu no tsukai, or “messenger from the sea god’s palace.”

In California, the one-two arrival of the latest oarfish brought feverish speculation that an earthquake was imminent. But researchers said there was little science behind the myth. “If something about tectonic movement is killing these fish, why aren’t the other fish in the environment doing the same thing?” Dr. Love said.

The Catalina specimen might still be under water had Jasmine Santana, 26, a marine science instructor at the Catalina Island Marine Institute, not spotted it about 15 feet down while snorkeling on her day off. “I recognized it because my colleague had shown me pictures of it,” she said. After dragging the fish to land, she and some of her co-workers placed it on ice in a ditch outside the institute.

“We wanted the kids to see it,” said Jeff Chace, a program director at the institute. “We dissected it on the Wednesday after we found it, then packed up all the organs, tissue samples, skin samples and eyeball samples and sent them off to various institutions.” Dr. Chace has put the rest of the carcass in deep freeze until he can find someone who can clean and mount the skeleton.

Yellowstone's Magma Reservoir Gets Bigger

But earthquakes, not eruptions, are Yellowstone's most serious geological risk.

The Castle Geyser at Yellowstone National Park is a dramatic manifestation of a giant magma reservoir — which turns out to be two and a half times larger than previously thought.

MARTIN RIETZE/WESTEND61/CORBIS

The reservoir of molten rock underneath Yellowstone National Park in the United States is at least two and a half times larger than previously thought. Despite this, the scientists who came up with this latest estimate say that the highest risk in the iconic park is not a volcanic eruption but a huge earthquake.

Yellowstone is famous for having a ‘hot spot’ of molten rock that rises from deep within the planet, fuelling the park’s geysers and hot springs¹. Most of the magma resides in a partially molten blob a few kilometres beneath Earth’s surface.

New pictures of this plumbing system show that the reservoir is about 80 kilometres long and 20 kilometres wide, says Robert Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “I don’t know of any other magma body that’s been imaged that’s that big,” he says.

Smith reported the finding on 27 October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado.

Yellowstone lies in the western United States, where the mountain states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho converge. The heart of the park is a caldera — a giant collapsed pit left behind by the last of three huge volcanic eruptions in the past 2.1 million years.

Underground mapping

Jamie Farrell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, mapped the underlying magma reservoir by analysing data from more than 4,500 earthquakes. Seismic waves travel more slowly through molten rock than through solid rock, and seismometers can detect those changes.

The images show that the reservoir resembles a 4,000-cubic-kilometre underground sponge, with 6–8% of it filled with molten rock. It underlies most of the Yellowstone caldera and extends a little beyond it to the northeast.

Above the buried blob — in the topmost 5–10 kilometres of the crust — the rocks are cooler and more brittle, and fracture easily in earthquakes. Yellowstone is known for its swarms of earthquakes — in recent years, the Utah team has discovered tiny quakes that repeat as often as every few seconds². Volcanic fluids build up in the crust and the small earthquakes probably act as relief valves to release the pressure. “It’s a living, breathing, shaking and baking place,” says Smith.

Yellowstone’s last mammoth volcanic eruption took place 640,000 years ago. Since then, some 50 to 60 smaller eruptions have occurred, with the most recent of these about 70,000 years ago. A much more likely risk than volcanoes, says Smith, is posed by earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater like those that have struck the region in modern times. “They are the killer events which we’ve already had,” he says. For instance, the magnitude-7.3 Hebgen Lake earthquake that hit near Yellowstone in 1959 killed 28 people.

This area of the western United States is being stretched and thinned by geological forces, causing the crust to fracture in large quakes. The risk of more of these quakes occurring remains high, says Smith, making them a much bigger problem than any chance of a mammoth eruption.

The work underscores just how much remains to be learned about some of the world's most iconic volcanoes. A second study at the meeting, led by Aaron Pietruszka of the US Geological Survey in Denver, looked at the famous Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. Analyses of isotopes of lead in Kilauea's magma suggest it erupted from two small magma reservoirs just beneath the summmit. Volcanologists knew these two magma bodies were there, but the new work indicates the shallower one is smaller than scientists had thought.

EEEK! Snake! Your Brain Has A Special Corner Just For Them

Illustration by Daniel Horowitz for NPR

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in central Kenya in 1992 when something suddenly caused her to freeze in her tracks. "I stopped just in front of a cobra," she says. "It was raised with its hood spread out."

Isbell, who is at the University of California, Davis, says she has spent the past couple of decades trying to understand how she could have reacted before her conscious brain even had a chance to think — cobra!

"At first I thought it was luck," she says. "But now I'm pretty sure that it's not luck. It's a reflection of 60 million years of evolutionary history working on my visual system."

The answer involves monkeys, the evolution of primate vision and a part of the brain called the pulvinar, which Isbell explains in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the years after her encounter with the cobra, Isbell developed a theory that snakes are a major reason that humans and other primates evolved really good vision.

"We have our forward-facing eyes," she says. "We have our excellent depth perception. We have very good visual acuity, the best in the mammalian world. We have color vision. So there has to be some sort of explanation for it."

Primates in parts of the world with lots of poisonous snakes evolved better vision than primates elsewhere, Isbell found out. It's no accident that lemurs in Madagascar have the worst vision in the primate world, she says. There are no venomous snakes.

But if the primate visual system really evolved to detect snakes, there should be some biological evidence of this in their brains, Isbell thought. So she teamed up with researchers in Japan to study the brains of two macaque monkeys that had probably never seen snakes.

The researchers measured the activity of individual brain cells while showing the monkeys images of snakes, faces, hands and simple geometric shapes. And the researchers found something remarkable in the pulvinar, a part of the brain's visual system that's unique to people, apes and monkeys.

"There are neurons that are very sensitive to snake images and much more sensitive to them than the faces of primates," Isbell says of that brain region. That's surprising, she says, because monkeys and other primates have brains that are highly sensitive to faces.

The finding appears to explain Isbell's experience in Kenya so long ago, when she stopped herself before she even realized she was seeing a cobra. "This part of the visual system appears to be the sort of quicker, automatic visual system that allows us to respond without even being consciously aware of the object that we are responding to," she says.

The finding was not a complete surprise to other researchers who study primates' fear of snakes. "There have been a lot of people suspecting that there must be something like this going on," says Sue Mineka, a clinical psychology professor at Northwestern University.

The new study appears to explain Mineka's own research showing that even monkeys raised in labs where there are no snakes can quickly learn to fear the reptiles. But it's still unclear whether the brain response of the monkeys in this study showed they were truly afraid of snakes or just had an innate ability to recognize the potentially venomous reptiles.

What Isbell's study does suggest is that both monkeys and humans have evolved brains that are well prepared to learn to fear snakes, Mineka says. "It's identifying a possible mechanism because there is a distinct neural signature that could then be associated with threat."