Scallops travel by opening and closing their shells but the direction they move seems counterintuitive. They don’t lead with their hinges. Instead the open edge goes first as they use their eyes to guide themselves.
Scallops’ eyes look like bright beads at the shells’ front edge.
This spiky ball, a pufferfish, is so toxic that if eaten it can kill 30 adult humans.
There are more than 260 species of pufferfish in two families, almost all of which are toxic: Diodontidae and Tetraodontidae. The spiky ones are aptly called porcupinefish.
They don’t swim fast so their main defense is to blow up into an unappetizing ball. When fully extended their buoyancy changes and they involuntarily roll onto their backs, exposing their white bellies. In this position they can still swim with tiny fins.
How do pufferfish blow themselves up? Why are they toxic? Who eats them? This video explains it all.
And though they are spiky, they somehow they manage to look cute.
An awesome pufferfish expanding its body after sensing a threat.
When a thunderstorm approaches at the beach or a swimming pool, the lifeguards tell everyone to get out of the water. Lightning often strikes water and anyone in it can be electrocuted.
Fish live in water so why don’t they die from lightning? The National Weather Service explains:
Before a lightning strike, a charge builds up along the water’s surface. When lightning strikes, most of electrical discharge occurs near the water’s surface. Most fish swim below the surface and are unaffected.
This NWS animation shows the positive charge building on the surface and the negatively charged lightning strike spreading horizontally. Fish swim below it all.
Interestingly in the US, the most dangerous activity during lightning is fishing; beaches are second. We thought golf was the worst but it is far down on the list.
Some salamanders are easy to find, some are rarely seen, and some, like the green salamander, are so rare that they’re listed as Near Threatened. It was quite a surprise to find anything, let alone green salamanders, thriving in the remnants of mountaintop removal in Virginia in 2016.
The green salamander (Aneides aeneus), native from Alabama to Pennsylvania, is a habitat specialist that lives in the dark furrows of naturally moist rock outcrops on cliffs in the Alleghenies and Cumberland Plateau.
In April 2016 when Dr. Wally Smith of University of Virginia Wise County decided to look for salamanders at an old mountaintop removal site, he didn’t expect to find anything in the half-acre remnant of rocks and trees left by the mining company. He was stunned and overjoyed to find a green salamander.
Working with Kevin Hamed of Virginia Highlands Community College, Smith surveyed more mountaintop removal sites. There’s a lot from choose from in Wise County, Virginia.
Unsurprisingly, hillsides and rock walls that had been directly carved up or deforested didn’t hold any salamanders. But around 70 percent of the surviving natural outcrops did—often in surprisingly healthy numbers. As long as the old crevasses and tree-cover were present, the species showed up, regardless of the racket and disturbance nearby. “The salamanders in these pockets seem to be doing pretty well,” Smith said. “They’re abundant, they’re reproducing, which are signs that the populations are still hanging on.”
The discovery led to more questions so Smith and Hamed expanded their search and, with the help of locals and landowners, found 70 locations with salamanders including …
… a motherload of salamanders in the municipal park of a local city. “Usually if you’re lucky, you find one or two a day. There, we were finding 70 to 100 per hour,” said Smith.
How did green salamanders get to these sites? Is each site a remnant “island” population or do the groups interchange with populations elsewhere? The study continues.
Have you heard ducks quacking deep in the woods lately? The sound comes from a soggy wooded place or puddle or tiny pond and there is no duck in sight.
Nature is playing an April Fool’s joke. Those aren’t ducks or chickens. Those are male wood frogs calling to attract females. If you could see what they were doing you’d find …
Wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) gather together in large leks to mate. In these leks, males are much more common than females, typically outnumbering females by at least two to one. The males arrive first, and begin calling and wrestling with each other. As female wood frogs arrive at the ponds, they swim toward the center of the lek. Multiple males grab them, clinging to each female until one male wins out. This particular mating behavior, in which the male clings to the female, is known as amplexus. The females will typically each lay a single egg clutch consisting of about 400-1,200 eggs.
The sun set at 7:27pm, the sky flamed and dimmed. It was barely glowing twenty minutes later when we heard the first “peent.”
On dry Spring nights male American woodcocks (Scolopax minor) gather in shrubby fields to mate with females who intend to nest there. Within the hour after sunset or in the hour before sunrise, they let the ladies know they’re available by stomping around in the dark calling “peent, peent, peent.” After some peenting each male flings himself into the sky climbing hundreds of feet before circling back down. While ascending his wings make a twittering sound, while descending his wings chirp. You can tell what he’s doing by listening in the dark. He lands where he started and does it again.
On Wednesday the moon was almost full and the woodcocks were very active. We heard at least six of them!
Waxing moon over Upper Field, North Park, 16 March 2022, 8:01p (photo by Kate St. John)
The spring peepers at Eagles Nest parking area were active, too.
Spring peeper calling in the Ozarks (photo by Justin Meissen via Wikimedia Commons)Spring peepers at North Park, 16 March 2022 (recorded by Kate St. John)
Woodcocks will continue their sky dance in April and early May but if you want two audio treats at once, go out in March by the light of the moon.
(sunset and moon photos + sound of spring peepers by Kate St. John. Woodcock and peeper photos from Wikimedia Commons. Woodcock audio from Xeno Canto)
What looks like a glowing pincushion (above) or piece of plastic in the tweet below is an animal called a nudibranch. It’s not pronounced the way it’s spelled. The “ch” is a “k.” This is a “NEW-dih-brank.”
Nudibranchs are sea slugs whose name means “naked gills” though some of them have no gills at all. From a video at DeepMarineScenes I learned that nudibranchs are …
3000+ species of sea slugs similar to snails but without any shells inside or out,
Found from the poles to the tropics, most often in shallow tropical waters,
Carnivores that eat sponges, corals, anemones, etc.
Range in size from 1/4 inch to 1 foot long,
Use smell and feel to get around. Their eyes sense only light and dark.
Brightly colored from the toxic things they eat.
Toxic themselves. Their color warns off predators.
Their only real predators are other nudibranchs. Yow!
Unlike us, however, lobsters are biologically immortal. They don’t slow down, they don’t get frail, they don’t die of old age. Lobsters never get old.
Their lack of aging is described in this vintage article from 2014, written at a time that was stressful for my family but turned out happy in the end.
Coquina clams (Donax variabilis) are tiny saltwater molluscs found on sandy beaches from Virginia to Texas. Their variable colors are beautiful and at only 3/4 inch long they are just the right size for collecting. I usually find an empty half shell rather than two joined like butterfly wings (above).
Since I only pay attention to empty shells I never thought about where they live and how they get there until I saw this video. Watch two coquina clams disappear in the sand.
I find it very peaceful to watch coquina clams slipping into the sand where the ocean meets the land. Video from July 2021 near St. Augustine, Florida. pic.twitter.com/wWtp6rhxvE
