Life is Everywhere

-FUPPETS- loves hearing about new discoveries of life and of living organisms in areas where none was to be expected. It appears ever more likely that life, once established, will spread itself to the furthest ecological niches available.
Take, for example, the Antarctic ice shelves. Humans have never before explored the underside of these things, and never expected to find living creatures at such depth and cold and pressure. Scientists from NASA drilled a hole 200 meters down into an Antarctic ice shelf (the McMurdo ice shelf) and sent a camera down to take images of the underside of these ancient ice structures. They were very surprised to see, in one of the images, a small, orange arthropod. Check it.

Scientists also found a jellyfish living under the ice shelf. This is just one of a series of discoveries in the last decades that show that life, even complex-multi-cellular life, can exist in places where we would never have thought. This makes a case for the possibility that life of some sort could exist yet on some bizarre ecosystem under the surface or Mars for example, or under one of the frozen moons of Jupiter. Life is pervasive.

The hole is an 8 inch hole and the site is about 12 miles from the open ocean. The arthropod, technically a Lyssianasid amphipod, is very distantly related to the shrimp humans enjoy. Here is a video showing he little orange bastard in action.

The Ocean Holds Vast Wonders & Freaked-Out Fish!

The oceans of our Planet Earth are enormous, covering nearly 3/4 of our planet's surface, and 4-5 miles deep in places. It is a scientific truth that we know more about the surface of our Moon than we do about what lies in our oceans. The vast amount of undocumented marine life alone is mind boggling. Among these animals is the barreleye fish. Check it out.

Do you see it's "forehead?" It is a crystal clear "bubble," much like the cockpits of many helicopters! Insane! You can see right into it's brain! Researchers have catalogued this fish but had never noticed the clear dome, due to the poor state of the specimens brought up in fishing nets.

Inside the fish windshield, rounded lenses that top the tubular eyes shine green in the photographer's light. (Two dots over the mouth are not eyes but olfactory structures.) Seeing the fish alive finally solved the question of how they cope with the restricted vision of the tubular eyes. The eyes can move to look overhead or forward. - ( Susan Milius - Science News )

Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have used a remotely operated vehicle to investigate living specimens and capture the image above and movie below. Amazing. The wonders of nature will never cease.

Giant Deep-Sea Single-Celled Organisms! (Part 2)

In a previous post, -FUPPETS- described what could be the weirdest new creature ever discovered, the Bahamian Gromia, or "sea grape." It is fully one inch in diameter, making it the largest known single-celled organism.
Science News' website has a new story detailing these organisms and their discovery.

The above image is of a Bahamian Gromia, zoomed up. It seems these are found in relatively sterile undersea environments, and that there are lots and lots of them. The big mind-fuck is that these creatures move, and the tracks they make look very very similar to ancient fossilized tracks from the ancient Earth, tracks once though to belong solely to multi-celled organisms.

"At first, we assumed they were snails, because they had trails," said Sönke
Johnsen, an associate professor of biology at Duke University. But after sucking
up a few with the tools aboard the NOAA research submarine Johnson-Sea-Link and having a look, they figured the soft, nondescript blobs were simply some kind of elaborate poop. "We called them doo-doo balls," Johnsen said.
"We watched the video over and over," Johnsen said. The trails couldn't be the result of currents because they went in several directions at the same spot, and sometimes they even changed course. And they weren't the result of rolling downhill. In fact, one trail was found that went down into a small depression and came back up the other side.
"We argued about it forever," Johnsen said. "These things can't possibly be moving!" But they are, at a rate too slow to be captured on the sub's video. Johnsen guesses they move maybe an inch a day or less.

Squid "Cousin" Filmed For The First Time

In the video below from CNN.com, you can see what is one of the strangest large animals to be discovered in the past few decades. It appears to be a relative of a squid, but it has "elbows" and long tentacles that hang down quite a long way. In the video Anderson Cooper is discussing the animal with some idiot.