RARE SIGHTING OF GIANT PHANTOM JELLY FISH OFF THE COAST OF ARGENTINA

OOOH this BBC website has video of the swimming phantom!

BBC NEWS : RARE SIGNTING PHANTOM JELLY OFF ARGENTINA

Excerpt:

A rare phantom jellyfish has been spotted by scientists exploring the deep sea near Argentina.

Stygiomedusa gigantea, more commonly known as the giant phantom jellyfish, was filmed 250 metres below the surface in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Scientists from the Schmidt Ocean Institute documented the creature, which can grow up to 1m (3.3ft) in diameter, with their arms reaching up to 10m (33ft) long.

Their four arms, which look like long pink ribbons, are not stinging tentacles. Instead the jellyfish use them to catch their prey of fish and plankton, according to the institute.

The team also discovered 28 potential new species including corals, sea urchins, and sea anemones.

THE DINOSAUR SEA MONSTERS : BBC EDUCATION CLICK ON THE CREATURE!

BBC UK : DINOSAURS and SEA MONSTERS  Gotta go to the site and click on the images! Now some look familiar - like the turtle - but others do not and are definitely in the DINOSAUR category. 

Here's one of them! :  A giant predator so big it would dwarf today's sperm whale, an AQUATIC REPTILE!

Liopleurodon was the mightiest aquatic predator of all time. Its 25 metre long body would have cruised silently through the shallow seas of the late Jurassic, propelled by its flapping flippers.

Liopleurodon was a hunter. Its long jaws and rows of needle-sharp teeth would have made marine crocodiles, the giant fish Leedsichthys, ichthyosaurs and even other pliosaurs vulnerable to attack.

Liopleurodon's nose allowed it to smell underwater. This allowed Liopleurodon to smell its prey from some distance away. Despite needing to breath air, Liopleurodon spent its entire life at sea and was unable to leave the water. Consequently, it would have given birth to its young alive and may have visited shallower water to breed....

SPERM WHALES ARE IN CONSTANT COMMUNICATION WITH EACH OTHER EVEN AS THEY HUNT

BBC COM : SPERM WHALE PHONETICS check out the video too!

EXCERPT: Sperm whales live in multi-level, matrilineal societies - groups of daughters, mothers and grandmothers – while the males roam the oceans, visiting the groups to breed. They are known for their complex social behavior and group decision - making, which requires sophisticated communication. For example, they are able to adapt their behavior as a group when protecting themselves from predators like orcas or humans.

Sperm whales communicate with each other using rhythmic sequences of clicks, called codas. It was previously thought that sperm whales had just 21 coda types. However, after studying almost 9,000 recordings, the Ceti researchers identified 156 distinct codas. They also noticed the basic building blocks of these codas which they describe as a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" – much like phonemes, the units of sound in human language which combine to form words.

...........................Pratyusha Sharma, a PhD student at MIT and lead author of the study, describes the "fine-grain changes" in vocalisations the AI identified. Each coda consists of between three and 40 rapid-fire clicks. The sperm whales were found to vary the overall speed, or the "tempo", of the codas, as well as to speed up and slow down during the delivery of a coda, in other words, making it "rubato". Sometimes they added an extra click at the end of a coda, akin, says Sharma, to "ornamentation" in music. These subtle variations, she says, suggest sperm whale vocalisations could carry a much much richer amount of information than previously thought. 

SEA TURTLES CAN TALK! GABRIEL JORGEWICH-COHEN'S RESEARCH PROVES IT and THE ORIGIN OF VOCALIZATION IN ANIMALS

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN : CHATTY TURTLES and THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMAL VOCALIZATION 

Listen to the clicks and grunts at this link.

Excerpt:  Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen:  I did fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon with a researcher that published one of these first papers showing that turtles can communicate acoustically, and that inspired me.  So I went back home, and I got a piece of equipment, and I started recording my own pets.  And I discovered that they were producing sounds as well, and the species I had were not known to produce sounds......

DOLPHINS TRICK FISH WITH MUD NETS - ORGANIZED BEHAVIOR

THEY PLAN and COOPERATE

BEAKED WHALE DIVE CHAMPION - SATELLITE TAGS USED TO RECORD DIVES

BBC SCIENCE : BEAKED WHALE IS DIVE CHAMP  by Jonathan Amos

EXCERPT:

"Satellite tags attached to these animals, swimming off the coast of California, recorded a dive to nearly 3km below the ocean surface, and one that lasted 137 minutes.

This performance exceeds that for any southern elephant seal, which is also known to be an extreme breath-holder.

The Cuvier's record-breaking dives are reported in the journal Plos One.

Erin Falcone is a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective in Washington State, US, which led the research project.

She told BBC News that beaked whales had very high levels of the myoglobin protein in their muscles, to the point where the tissues appeared almost black.

This functions like haemoglobin in the blood, allowing the whales to store much higher levels of oxygen, and thus breathe less frequently while remaining active."

OCEANIC WHITE TIP SHARKS STUDY : BAHAMAS

BBC NATURE : OCEANIC WHITE TIP SHARK RETURNING HOME TO BAHAMAS

EXCERPT:  "They are opportunistic predators with powerful jaws and as such are considered one of the more dangerous sharks to humans, although the number of unprovoked attacks on people is small...
"Of all the sharks that live in the open ocean they're the ones that have really declined a lot in the last few decades," said Dr Demian Chapman of Stony Brook University, New York, US, who led the study.

"They've gone from being one of the most abundant large vertebrates on the planet to being considered quite endangered."