A brand-new plant species—Ovicula biradiata—was just discovered in Big Bend National Park, Texas. Not only is it a new species, but it belongs to an entirely new genus in the daisy family!
📸: Photo by NPS/D. Manley, NPS/C. Hoyt. Research by National Park Service botanists.
their eyes on on the sides of the widest part of their body, so they actually have a full 360 degrees of vision in all directions! they have a field of binocular vision both in front of and partially behind them.
kind of like a horse, if a horse was shaped like a wet pencil.
Similar in size to the very largest modern manatees, about 4-4.5m long (~13-14'10"), it has traditionally been classified as an early member of the manatee lineage – but a study in 2022 suggested it may instead represent a much earlier stem of the sirenian evolutionary tree, with its ancestors potentially having diverged around 34 million years ago.
It had unusually thickened bones in its skull, especially around the roof of its mouth, which would have given its jaws a very strong chewing force. Isotope analysis of its teeth show it was part of a marine algae-based food web, unlike the seagrass-based diets of other sirenians, so it may have been specialized to feed on a much tougher diet. Possibly it was eating something like calcareous algae, or more speculatively it might even have been crunching on hard-shelled algae-consuming marine invertebrates.
Big news - we’ve been awarded £544,558.76 of funding to plant 4.2 ha of seagrass meadow in the Scottish Highlands across three years!
🌱 🌱 This project follows extensive baseline and investigative surveys, as well as small seagrass translocation trials undertaken in 2024, supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) that’s managed by NatureScot. The delivery of planting 4.2 hectares of intertidal seagrass meadow over three years will be supported by the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF), an initiative supported by the Scottish Government’s Marine Scotland Directorate, NatureScot and Crown Estate Scotland.
🌊 The vision of Wilder Firths (Linneachan nas Fhiadhaiche), formerly known as Cromarty Seascape, is for the firths surrounding the Black Isle to be home to a resilient mosaic of biogenic habitats that support diverse and thriving ecosystems. Central to achieving and sustaining this vision are local communities that are connected to and invested in their coastal environment.
🦪 Historically overlooked in the area, seagrass meadows are one of the focus habitats of Wilder Firths alongside native oyster (Ostrea edulis) reefs. Seagrass species in the area are dwarf eelgrass (Nanozostera noltei), common eelgrass (Zostera marina) and beaked tasselweed (Ruppia maritima). Common eelgrass encompasses variants that are found either inter-tidally or sub-tidally whereas dwarf eelgrass and beaked tasselweed are only found in the intertidal zone.
🔎 As well as collecting and planting seed with other members of the local community, our team will trial more experimental approaches such as transplanting seagrass with sediment (coring) and mechanised seed collection and planting. Small scale trials of intertidal seagrass coring, a method previously used by Restoration Forth, indicate that the method could be an effective way to restore seagrass meadows when compared with other methods such as seeding or transplanting bare root seagrass plants.
💪 Want to be part of the team delivering this project? We’re hiring a Seagrass Officer and a Community & Funding Officer. There’s still time to apply! Applications close midnight on the 7th of March. Learn more here: https://www.mossy.earth/jobs?utm_sour…
Agersø cattle (pronounced kinda like ayersoe (more specifically like ˈæˀjʌsøˀ)) is a medieval breed from Denmark. They were thought to have gone extinct in the 1950s, but in 1990 a heritage breed enthusiast named Stig Benzon discovered a tiny population on the island of Agersø, owned by a hermit named Lars Peter Nielsen:
Lars informed Stig that these cattle had been isolated on his family farm since the 1700s. And they were discovered just in time, as 3 years later Lars had to retire due to a double leg amputation, and all his cattle would've been sent to slaughter if not for Stig.
In 2004 the cattle were genetically analyzed, and they were found to have 9 unique alleles, found in no other European breed, proving that they were actually a holdover from the 1700s!
Today their population sits at about 150, all of whom live a semi-free life of luxury at Stig Benzon's heritage farm.
The ability to recognize individual humans is often associated with mammals and birds, yet research suggests that some fish are also capable of this cognitive feat. While diving in the Mediterranean Sea, a team of scientists observed something intriguing: every field season, they were followed by groups of local fish known as pargo or dorado, stealing food intended to reward other fish in their experiments.
In controlled experiments, wild saddled sea bream (Oblada melanura) and black sea bream (Spondyliosoma cantharus), were trained to follow a human diver to obtain a food reward. Remarkably, they can differentiate between dozens of individuals with high success rates, even when superficial features such as colour or brightness are altered. This suggests that their recognition is based on specific patterns rather than simple visual cues. Similar capabilities have been observed in cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus), which adjust their behaviour depending on whether they recognize a familiar diver, implying that this skill might have adaptive benefits in natural environments.
-Maëlan Tomasek (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior), one of the study’s authors, next to a wild fish. The researchers found that wild fish start to follow humans for food and are able to identify individual divers by their clothing.
If fish in the wild can recognize individual humans, the implications extend beyond academic curiosity. Species frequently interacting with humans—such as those in ecotourism settings or research projects—may learn to associate specific individuals with positive or negative experiences. This has been observed in sharks, where some individuals appear to recognize divers who regularly feed or tag them, approaching more readily or avoiding interactions depending on past encounters. Understanding these cognitive abilities could inform conservation strategies by highlighting the impact of repeated human interactions on fish behaviour.
Despite these insights, much remains unknown about how fish process facial recognition and whether this ability is widespread across different taxa. Future research will need to examine whether this recognition occurs naturally in the wild without training and how it influences social interactions within fish populations. As we continue to challenge outdated assumptions about fish intelligence, it becomes increasingly clear that their cognitive world is far more complex than previously thought.
Just how giant is the giant armadillo (Priodontes maximus)? Unlike other armadillos—which can roll up to defend themselves from foes—this animal’s size prevents it from hiding inside its carapace. Instead, it relies on bulk to deter predators. This South American species can reach lengths of 3.9 ft (1.2 m) and weights of more than 110 lbs (50 kg)! Primarily nocturnal, it spends much of its time in underground burrows. Its diet consists primarily of termites and ants, though it has been known to feed on small vertebrates, worms, and even carrion.
Photo: luiz_alberto_santos, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist
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