When Wood Turns Into Glitter

Stunning Footage of Sperm Whales Attempting to Communicate With Freedivers Using Clicking Noises

First images of creatures from Antarctic depths revealed

Photos by Christian Åslund / Greenpeace

Sharks – like this sandbar shark in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary – have several adaptations that make them excellent predators. 

Specialized organs called ampullae of Lorenzini help sharks sense electric fields in the water generated by other fish. Their eyes, too, are specially adapted: all shark eyes have a tapetum lucidum, a layer of mirrored crystals located behind the retina, allowing them to see in in low light conditions and up to ten times better than humans in clear water. 

Despite these adaptations, sandbar sharks and other sharks typically pose little threat to humans. We’re more dangerous to them than they are to us! 

(Photo: Nick Zachar/NOAA) 

[Image description: A black-and-white photo of a sandbar shark.]

Bioluminescent Dinoflagellates

(source)

It’s the biologists turn

Having recently shared images from the Nikon Small World (see http://bit.ly/2xQdOHd) and the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2017 awards (see http://bit.ly/2ipNvkn), here are some photos from the Royal Society of Biology’s 2017 Photographer of the Year and Young Photographer of the Year competitions in a week of the year that seems to have all these events announcing their honours more or less simultaneously.

Keep reading

Phytoplankton: An overview of the small, plant-like organisms that make the world go round. 

http://becausephytoplankton.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-are-phytoplankton.html?spref=tw

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Aqua/MODIS via Flickr

A mariachi band playing at my host dad’s mom’s 86th birthday party.