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Round Ice: Frozen in Time

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  The nematode P. kolymaensis As the world heats up let’s turn to animals that cool down. Roundworms, phylum Nematoda, are an unfamiliar group to most folks. Biology 101 students may remember them, though not necessarily fondly. These are one of the wormy phyla, long and skinny, but they are vastly different from the more well-known earthworms, which are in the phylum Annelida, segmented worms.  A short aside, in the world of animals, there are many wormlike groups: round worms (Nematoda), segmented worms (Annelida), flatworms (Platyhelminthes), peanut worms (Sipuncula), ribbon worms (Nemertea), horsehair worms (Nematomorpha), Acanthocephala worms, and Priapulid worms, to name a few. Being worm-like is a successful body plan. The Nematode species count is more than 40,000, but that number is far lower than the actual number of species on Earth; so many still to be discovered. They are abundant, found everywhere in large numbers. They are so abundant in soil and in us that a bi...
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Rafting

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Histrio histrio, Sargassum fish (NOAA)   A few years back, maybe more than a few years, my friend Rich asked if I wanted to go rafting. He had gotten some tickets for a white-water rafting trip. I had never done such a thing, and, when offered a free ticket, I said yes. It was a great trip. Rafting, eating lunch by the riverside, and then more rafting and some floating in the quiet parts of the river.  Rafting then was all the rage, and I could see why. What fun. When I read the title of a paper in the journal Biological Invasions,  So you think you can raft ?, my answer was the same as the one I gave Rich some years ago: Yes. Then I read the second part of the title,  traits that enable fish to survive and disperse with floating objects .   Although the paper is not about the rafting that first came to mind, it is also not specifically about the fish that second came to mind: the sargassum fish,  Histrio histrio,  which has adapted to floati...
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Invertebrates Sleep

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Transparent octopus larvae showing the brain, the white cloudy stuff between its eyes.  My science-geek book club just finished reading Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. This got me going down the rabbit hole, not of consciousness exactly, but sleep.    Since Octopods are wicked smart, the expectation is that their sleep patterns would be akin to those of vertebrates, most of which are kind of smart, while other lowly  dumb  invertebrates would exhibit different sleep patterns. On the other hand, since sleep is an ancient process, maybe braininess does not influence the pattern.   Jellys and flatworms have sleep-like states and lack a centralized nervous system, suggesting that sleep appeared early in the history of animal life. Thus sleep appears to be a fundamental biological function for all animals; well, maybe not sponges. It’s very hard to tell if a sponge is sleeping. We know some reasons...
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Quiet Oceans

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H. ampullatus , the Northern bottlenose Whale As pointed out in one of the most important papers for marine science in decades (Duarte et al. 2020), during World War I and  II, an unexpected benefit was observed: Fish populations rebounded after fishing boats were withdrawn from the oceans. The hiatus allowed fish stocks to replenish, likely delaying their collapse by decades.  This recovery of marine life demonstrates the resilience within these communities. There is hope for the ocean yet.    Did COVID create a similar situation? It turns out that the slowdown in shipping and ocean traffic generally quieted the oceans. What effects did this quieting have on overall ocean ecosystems?   In areas like the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park in New Zealand, boat traffic almost completely stopped, and underwater noise dropped by about 2/3 within 12 hours . This  reduction expanded the communication ranges of fish and dolphins by up to  65% . Dolphins' calls can trav...
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