Ecology & Zoology

Integrated pest management (IPM) is a proven, cost-effective strategy to combat pest problems without unnecessary pesticides. By correcting conditions that lead to pest problems and using least-toxic pesticides only when necessary, IPM provides more effective pest control, oftenwithout increasing costs. NRDC is collaborating with the IPM Institute to promote a more effective alternative to conventional pest control services. What is IPM? Integrated Pest Management (IPM) begins with an inspection for signs of pest activity and conditions that may lead to pest infestation. Pests need food,…

I know, I know! This is totally a cop-out blog post. But I've been super busy compiling the latest Circus of the Spineless, which I'm hosting over at my homepage, the Cephalopodiatrist. There's some squiddy goodness there, along with plenty of other bizarre biology, so go check it out!And if you write or read about invertebrates on the web, feel free to submit blog posts (your own or others') to kzelnio at the gmail for future Circuses.

Yikes! It's always interesting to have a reminder that the wild ocean remains wild, and taking a boat to sea is an entirely different matter from taking a car to the store: A Coast Guard statement says they were aboard the 61-foot squid boat Midnight Hour when it began taking on water Tuesday night near Eagle Rock on the northwestern end of the island. Chief Andrew Reyes says four people left the boat in a skiff. Two others went into the water but were picked up by the skiff. A nearby boat then took all six to safety. The boat sank. The report doesn't say why. It was a squid fishing boat…

Newfoundland and Labrador (which is a single Canadian state province, in case any of my readers are as clueless as I was am) claims to have the highest concentration of preserved dead giant squid anywhere in the world. I'm pretty sure that's not true, since they have only 5 specimens and the Center for the Giant Squid in Luarca, Spain, has 23. But five giant squid is still pretty cool, especially when each one has a story to tell, as summarized in The Telegram. My favorite is the giant squid who had to be taken off display because of a fungal infection: Batten attempted to treat the squid’s…

Results from the first study of the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) in forests show that the invasive insect can easily spread from tree-lined city streets to neighboring forests. Successful ALB eradication efforts in Chicago, and ongoing eradication efforts in Boston, New York, and other U.S. cities have focused exclusively on urban street trees and the ongoing ALB infestation in Worcester, Mass., is the only outbreak so far that has allowed the beetle to invade nearby closed-canopy forests.The beetle was first detected in Worcester in 2008 by a citizen and containment efforts now…

So, it's a bit tricky to figure out exactly what this means, but it could be big news for Humboldt squid in Chile--and therefore Humboldt squid everywhere, since the ocean doesn't exactly control immigration. Jumbo squid fishery requested to be artisanal: The Senate presented a draft agreement requiring fisheries authorities to declare fly jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas) fishery as artisanal to prevent overfishing. The project aims to repeal Decree 120, in force since 27 September of 2003, which authorizes the use of this cephalopod in fishmeal production and to declare fly jumbo squid fishing…

A couple of dead giant squid have turned up--almost exactly on opposite sides of the globe! Surely this is some kind of portent? Architeuthis #1 was spotted off the coast of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands: "The animal was in good general condition although some of the tentacles and the eyes were missing. It also showed its original pigmentation," said Rafa Herrero, a documentary maker, to EFE agency. Architeuthis #2 washed ashore on Farewell Spit, on the south island of New Zealand: Paddy Gillooly, of Farewell Spit Tours, said visitors were thrilled to spot the deep-sea creature,…

How many organisms live on this little planet of ours? A pretty straight-forward question. The answer, however, is much more enigmatic. Estimates range from a careful 3 million to a huge 100 million. Now, a new approach, published in PLoS Biology, has yielded another estimate. The new method used resulted in an estimate of 8.7 million (± 1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species, of which 2.2 million (± 0.18 million SE) can be found in the oceans. As about 1.2 million species are catalogued, this would mean that roughly 86% of organisms on earth still await discovery, a number that rises to 91% in…

Miriam over at Deep-Sea News recently posted a lovely write-up on the argonaut, or paper nautilus. This reminded me that I, too, once felt the delight of finding a live argonaut in a manta tow cod end. So I went digging through my grad school archives and found the video I took--on a miniDV tape, which felt so futuristic then and seems so retro now. How times change. Anyway, amateur videographer that I am, I somehow managed to splice the least horrible footage together with a voiceover to create a brief film of the awesomeness that is the argonaut. And no, they are-go-not squid, but I found…

The paper announces, in charmingly thick academese: The titanic baleen whales (Cetacea, Mysticeti) have a bizarre skull morphology, including an elastic mandibular symphysis, which permits dynamic oral cavity expansion during bulk feeding. How this key innovation evolved from the sutured symphysis of archaeocetes has remained unclear. What the author, Fitzgerald, means is this: baleen whales have weird heads. How did they evolve from the less-weird heads of ancestral whales?Then he writes about a new whale fossil, an intermediate step in head weirdness. The extinct Janjucetus hunderi…