This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
'Headless Chicken Monster' to Help Antarctic Conservation Efforts
Enypniasties eximia—a deep-sea swimming sea cucumber scientists have affectionately called the "headless chicken monster"—has been caught on camera for the first time in Antarctic waters thanks to new underwater camera technology developed by Australian researchers.
Footage of the finned sea creature will be used to aid important marine conservation efforts in the Southern Ocean.
"All around the Antarctic there are areas known as 'Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems,' and we're trying to find them so the fishing industry can avoid fishing on them," Australian Antarctic Division's fisheries technician Tim Lamb says in the video below.
The researchers came across the rarely seen organism as part of a project to explore the impact of commercial fishing on the Antarctic toothfish and the Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass), The New York Times reported.
The finding was made with an underwater camera system developed for commercial longline fishing by the Australian Antarctic Division. With a fishing line, the camera was dropped nearly two miles underwater.
"Some of the footage we are getting back from the cameras is breathtaking, including species we have never seen in this part of the world," Dirk Welsford, program leader for the Australian Antarctic Division, said in a press release. "Most importantly, the cameras are providing important information about areas of sea floor that can withstand this type of fishing, and sensitive areas that should be avoided."
The headless chicken monster has been caught on film only once before in the Gulf of Mexico last year. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it spends most of its time on the seafloor, feeding off of surface sediments. Unlike other sea cukes, the headless chicken monster has fins and tentacles to use for swimming or evading a predator. Its other common name is "Spanish dancer."
"From a research point of view, it's very interesting, because no one has seen that species that far south before," Welsford told The New York Times. He added that the discovery of the animal in the Southern Ocean helps scientists understand the species' distribution, and how it might be affected by climate change.
The Australian researchers will present this latest finding and other collected data to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), an international body managing the Southern Ocean.
Australia is seeking support for the creation of a new East Antarctic Marine Protected Area as well as two other new Marine Protected Areas.
"The Southern Ocean is home to an incredible abundance and variety of marine life, including commercially sought-after species, the harvesting of which must be carefully managed for future generations," Australia's CCAMLR Commissioner Gillian Slocum said in the press release.
Electric vehicle sales took off in 2018, with a record two million units sold around the world, according to a new Deloitte analysis.
What's more, the accounting firm predicts that another 21 million electric cars will be on the road globally over the next decade due to growing market demand for clean transportation, government subsidies, as well as bans on fossil fuel cars.
Sunoco's controversial Mariner East pipeline project in Pennsylvania is beginning 2019 on unstable ground, literally. A sinkhole opened in the suburban development of Lisa Drive in Chester County Sunday, exposing the old Mariner East 1 pipeline built in the 1930s.
Greenland is melting about four times faster than it was in 2003, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found, a discovery with frightening implications for the pace and extent of future sea level rise.
"We're going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future," study lead author and Ohio State University geodynamics professor Dr. Michael Bevis said in a press release. "Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?"
By Marlene Cimons
Most Europeans know the great tit as an adorable, likeable yellow-and-black songbird that shows up to their feeders in the winter. But there may be one thing they don't know. That cute, fluffy bird can be a relentless killer.
The great tit's aggression can emerge in gruesome ways when it feels threatened by the pied flycatcher, a bird that spends most of the year in Africa, but migrates to Europe in the spring to breed. When flycatchers arrive at their European breeding grounds, they head for great tit territory, knowing that great tits—being year-round European residents—know the best nesting sites.
Most people have heard of the Amazon, South America's famed rainforest and hub of biological diversity. Less well known, though no less critical, is the Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland.
Like the Amazon, the Pantanal is ecologically important and imperiled. Located primarily in Brazil, it also stretches into neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay. Covering an area larger than England at more than 70,000 square miles, the massive wetland provides irreplaceable ecosystem services that include the regulation of floodwaters, nutrient renewal, river flow for navigability, groundwater recharge and carbon sequestration. The wetland also supports the economies of the four South American states it covers.
By Brian Mastroianni
Is it hard to motivate yourself to get off the couch and go exercise?
EVs 101: Your Guide to Electric Vehicles
By Patrick Rogers
If you have ever considered making the switch to an environmentally friendly electric vehicle, don't drag your feet. Though EV prices are falling, and states are unveiling more and more public charging stations and plug-in-ready parking spots, the federal government is doing everything it can to slam the brakes on our progress away from gas-burning internal combustion engines. President Trump, likely pressured by his allies in the fossil fuel industry, has threatened to end the federal tax credits that have already helped put hundreds of thousands of EVs on the road—a move bound to harm not only our environment but our economy, too. After all, the manufacturing and sale of EVs, hybrids, and plug-in hybrids supported 197,000 jobs in 2017, according to the most recent U.S. Energy and Employment Report.
What Is Mead, and Is It Good for You?
This week, people across the country are joining environmental leaders to speak out against the nomination of former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to lead the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As Scott Pruitt's hand-picked successor, Wheeler has continued to put polluters over people, most recently by using the last of his agency's funding before it expired in the government shutdown to announce plans to allow power plants to spew toxic mercury and other hazardous pollution into the air.