0 Giant Pink Slugs Found In Lost World

Relics: The pink slug, above, eats mould and moss. Photo: Supplied

 

One will really amaze you, the other just eats his mates

High in the mists that shroud Mount Kaputar, near Narrabri in north-western NSW, scientists have discovered a secret world.

By day it is an isolated pocket of snow gums, wrapped in straggling native vines.

People tend to focus on the cute and cuddly bird and mammal species like koalas. But these little invertebrates drive whole ecosystems. 

But on rainy nights, it is the domain of giant, fluorescent pink slugs - up to 20 centimetres long - and carnivorous, cannibal land snails that roam the mountaintop in search of their vegetarian victims.

''It's just one of those magical places, especially when you are up there on a cool, misty morning,'' said Michael Murphy, a national parks ranger for 20 years, whose beat covers the mountain top.

The cannibal snail dines on other vegetarian snails. Photo: Supplied

''It's a tiny island of alpine forest, hundreds of kilometres away from anything else like it. The slugs, for example, are buried in the leaf mould during the day, but sometimes at night they come out in their hundreds and feed off the mould and moss on the trees. They are amazing, unreal-looking creatures.''

Locals had long reported seeing bizarre pink slugs after rainfall in the area, but it was only
very recently that taxonomists confirmed the slugs, Triboniophorus aff. graeffei, as well as several of the snail species - which prey on other vegetarian land snails - were unique to the mountaintop

They are a relic of the era when much of eastern Australia was damp rainforest, and probably would have long since vanished, if a volcano had not erupted at Mount Kaputar about 17 million years ago.

The result of that eruption is a high-altitude haven for invertebrates and plant species that have been isolated for millions of years, after Australia dried out and the rainforests receded.

 Their heritage can be traced back to Gondwana - when Australia's landmass was connected to others in one vast continent - via relatives that survive in pockets of New Zealand, New Caledonia and South Africa. 

Jurassic park, almost: Where the slugs appear now.

 But the Mount Kaputar creatures are genetically distinct, restricted to an area of about 10 kilometres by 10 kilometres on their own mountaintop. The NSW Scientific Committee has been persuaded by evidence of the area's uniqueness, and has just made a preliminary determination to list the site as an ''endangered ecological community'' - granting it one of the highest level of protection from intrusion and development.
''These species have evolved from lowland ancestors and have been isolated in an otherwise snail-hostile environment as conditions began to dry,'' the committee's report said. As a result, they are ''acutely susceptible'' to human-induced climate change. Temperatures a degree or two higher would dry out their mountaintop.
''I'm a big believer in invertebrates,'' Mr Murphy said. ''People tend to focus on the cute and cuddly bird and mammal species like koalas. But these little behind-the-scenes invertebrates really drive whole ecosystems.''  The Age

Detail: Giant Pink Slugs Found In Lost World

0 A Hummingbird Nest

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Detail: A Hummingbird Nest

0 Scientists Revive 400 Year-Old Frozen Plants

 

Frozen mosses that were buried under glaciers 400 years ago have now been regrown. Surprisingly, the hardy "bryophytes" required no special techniques to regenerate. That means they might be candidates for colonizing extreme environments — even in space.

During the Little Ice Age, which occured between the 16th and 19th centuries, massive glaciers moved in and covered various regions in the Northern Hemisphere. These glaciers slowly retreated throughout the 20th century, and the rate of ice melt has sharply accelerated since 2004.

The substantial glacial retreat is now revealing beautifully preserved vegetative communities, says Catherine La Farge, a bryophyte botanist at the University of Alberta. "It's kind of like a blanket being pulled back, allowing you to see what the Little Ice Age was like."

Bryophytes are non-vascular plants, such as mosses, hornworts and liverworts, that don't produce flowers or seeds; instead, they reproduce asexually using spores. Additionally, they can experience clonal growth and produce a new plant from fragmented vegetative tissue that has fallen off the primary plant. Though they're not the preferred food source for herbivores, they're still an important part of the ecosystem, providing homes for micro-flora and fauna. For example, in the frigid, dry arctic, cyanobacteria and fungi utilize moss cushions as their habitat, while the seeds of vascular plants that fall into moss beds can germinate using the moisture trapped there.

As part of an environmental project looking at the effects of pollution in the arctic, La Farge and her colleagues took a trip in 2007 to Sverdrup Pass, a mountain pass in central Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, to study the diversity of bryophytes in the area. While there, they saw extensive populations of bryophytes and vascular plants coming out of the nearby receding Teardrop Glacier.

The Teardrop Glacier, with puny human for scale.

 "We walked up to the glacier and looked at the populations of bryophytes," La Farge tells io9. "They looked blackened, but they were blackened with a green tint." The exhumed plants appeared to be regrowing, despite being for frozen for presumably hundreds of years, so the researchers collected samples and took them back to their lab for further examination.

Radio carbon dating confirmed that the bryophytes were entombed in the glacier during the Little Ice Age some 400 years ago. And when the team looked at their samples under microscopes, they saw that the plants were indeed experiencing new lateral branch development or stem regeneration. They then decided to take fragments of the plants and test their capacity for regrowth.

The team ground up stem and leaf tissue, sowed it on potting soil and watered it frequently. Using this simple technique, they were able to grow 11 cultures from seven specimens, which represented four different species (Aulacomnium turgidum, Distichium capillaceum, Encalypta procera and Syntrichia ruralis).

The researchers note that these bryophytes aren't the oldest frozen plants to be regenerated — that title goes to a 32,000-year-old Silene stenophylla specimen. However, S. stenophylla's regrowth was far more complicated, requiring scientists to extract placental tissue from seeds, carefully clone the tissue and then grow them on specialized, nutrient-rich media.

La Farge hopes that the work will stimulate renewed interest in bryophytes, which aren't widely studied by botanists. "I think the whole biological system of bryophytes has not really been understood well," she says. But from her study and others, it appears that bryophytes are able to shut down during desiccation and revive when conditions improve. The plants regenerative powers are partly due to their cells' ability to dedifferentiate (lose their specialized function) and return to a stem-cell-like state, allowing them to then become any type of plant cell.

The results of the study suggest that landscapes exposed by retreating ice should no longer be thought of as being barren of land plants. Bryophytes likely play an important role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems, the researchers write in their study.

The retreating glacier reveals frozen bryophytes.

 "These guys are really adept in extreme environments," La Farge says, adding that the research's implications go beyond just Little Ice Age ecosystems. By further studying bryophyte regeneration, scientists can get a better understanding of "basic life systems," including, perhaps, how to promote biological development in extraterrestrial environments, such as Mars.

Scientists have already taken moss up into space to see how it grows in a micro-gravitational environment. "Maybe astronauts would want to take bryophytes to other planets to see if they would grow and how they could modify extraterrestrial landscapes," La Farge says.

The research was published in the journal PNAS.  io9

Detail: Scientists Revive 400 Year-Old Frozen Plants

0 What Happened To The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic?

Image: United States Coast Guard

  Exactly one hundred years ago Sunday, an ocean liner struck a block of ice and sank in the North Atlantic. The story of the ocean liner has been told hundreds of times. This story is about the block of ice.
The photos you see up top and down on the left are quite possibly the only known photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic. Understandably, nobody had bothered to snap any photographs while the ship was actually sinking, so it’s impossible to make an absolutely confirmed positive identification. But both photographs feature the telltale sign of a collision with a ship, and likely a recent one at that: a streak of red paint.


The photo up top was taken by the chief steward of the German ocean liner SS Prinz Adalbert, which on Apr. 15 was sailing through the North Atlantic mere miles away from where the Titanic had sunk the night before. At the time, the chief steward hadn’t yet learned of the Titanic‘s fate, so he wasn’t even on the lookout for icebergs. He simply spotted a streak of red paint along the iceberg’s base, which most likely meant a ship had collided with it in the last 12 hours.
This next photo was taken by a Captain De Carteret of the Minia, one of a few cable ships — vessels ordinarily used to lay deep sea cables, such as those for telecommunications — sent to the site of the shipwreck to recover corpses and debris. The captain claimed this was the only iceberg in the area, and the red paint was again a clear sign that a ship had recently struck it. There’s some disagreement over whether this was the only iceberg in the area, but it certainly seems likely that something had hit it, and the odds are good that that something was the Titanic.

Image: United States Coast Guard

 If you were to trace the story of the Titanic to its earliest human origins, you couldn’t really go much further back than 1907, when the White Star Lines first drew up plans to build the three largest ocean liners the world had even seen: Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic, which was later renamed Britannic and sank in the Mediterranean during World War I. From conception to sinking, the Titanic really only lasted about five years, although obviously its memory has endured far longer.
But by comparison, the iceberg began its slow journey to the North Atlantic over three thousand years ago. Again, we can only guess at the exact details, but the story likely began with snowfall on the western coast of Greenland somewhere around 1,000 BCE. After a few months, this snow has been turned into a more compacted form called firn, which then over subsequent decades is compressed into dense ice by the weight of newer snow on top of it.
The frozen water in these glaciers is slowly forced further westward toward the sea. When they finally reach the coast of the Arctic Ocean, the lapping tides break off chunks of the ice, and icebergs are calved from the glacier, some 30 centuries after their source water was first deposited. The iceberg that sank the Titanic began its journey as a rough contemporary of King Tutankhamun, entire civilizations rising and falling while it made its slow march to infamy.

Image: Russell Huff and Konrad Steffen/CIRES/University of Colorado/NASA

But once all that’s done, the iceberg’s life was a short one. We know that because the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, rather than the Arctic, which means the currents must have taken it far south of where it was calved. Starting on the Greenland coast, it would have moved from Baffin Bay to the Davis Strait and then onto the Labrador Sea and, at last, the Atlantic.
The Titanic iceberg was one of the lucky ones, so to speak, as the vast, vast majority of icebergs melt long before they reach that far south. Of the 15,000 to 30,000 icebergs calved each years by the Greenland glaciers, probably only about 1 percent of them ever make it all the way to the Atlantic. On Apr. 15, 1912, the iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
The water temperature on the night of the Titanic sinking was thought to be about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, just below freezing. Such a temperature was of course lethally cold for all those passengers who had been forced to take to the open water to escape the sinking ship.
But such temperatures are far too warm to sustain icebergs for very long. The average life expectancy of an iceberg in the North Atlantic is only about two to three years from calving to melting. That means it likely broke off from Greenland in 1910 or 1911, and was gone forever by the end of 1912 or sometime in 1913. In all likelihood, the iceberg that sank the Titanic didn’t even endure to the outbreak of World War I, a lost splash of freshwater mixed in imperceptibly with the rest of the North Atlantic. WIRED

Detail: What Happened To The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic?

0 Good Morning!

Detail: Good Morning!

0 Butterfly On Purple Flowers

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Detail: Butterfly On Purple Flowers