There was a lot of mystery surrounding a disease which was rampaging through European Salmon farms, a disease which was wasting their hearts and muscles. Finally, through the use of Genome sleuthing, the mystery has been solved.

The disease is caused by a previously unknown virus. This identification does not mean that there is now also a cure for the disease, however it is a great step forward into solving the problem. Now that scientists have pinned down the disease and the genome, it is only a matter of time before a cure will be found.

“It’s a new virus. And with this information now in hand, we can make vaccines,” explained director of Columbia Univerity’s Center for Infection and Immunity, Ian Lipkin.

A couple of years ago, some Norwegion fisheries got into touch with Lipkin and asked for his aid in discovering what was going on in their Norwegion Salmon farms. They wanted to know what was causing the HSMI (Heart and Skeletal Muscle inflammation), the scientific name for an affliction which was identified in 1999 on one of their farms.

The fish which are infected are physically stunted, and have muscles so weak that they often have trouble swimming about, or even circulating blood around their bodies. This disease often results in death, so there is a great cause or concern. The reason there is so much concern is that the original outbreak was followed by 417 other in Norway and the United Kingdom, and every year there are more reports of the disease.. What is even more disturbing is that there have been reports of wild salmon being infected, which means that salmon which escape the farm are infecting the already low numbers of wild stocks. If something is not done to fix this problem, it could quite possibly spiral out of control, and have a devastating effect on not only local ecosystems but on the entire salmon market as we know it. “If the potential hosts are in close proximity, it goes through them like wildfire,” said Lipkin.

Lipkin and his team, which have already had great success in identifying mystery viruses, rigorously examined samples taken from infected salmon pens. They were looking for the DNA sequences which resemble sequences found in other viruses, and hopefully finding the HSMI-causing sequence. Lipkin compared the grueling process akin to solving a Sunday paper crossword. The researchers eventually found what they were looking for, and dubbed the virus piscine reovirus, or PRV. The virus was unveiled and explained in the issue of Public Library of Science one, published on the 9th of July.

Some viruses which are rather similar have been discovered on poultry farms, and cause muscle and heart disease in chickens. “Analogies between commercial poultry production and Atlantic salmon aquaculture may be informative,” The researchers wrote in the article. “Both poultry production and aquaculture confine animals at high density in conditions that are conducive to transmission of infectious agents.”

The results from these investigations might just be useful when the Obama administration comes up with its national policy for regulating aquaculture.

The sea holds many mysteries for us, one of which was the mating habits of the deep sea squid. This mystery has now been unraveled, as scientists have discovered a male squid with a humongous elongated penis.

The male squid’s penis is almost as long as its entire body, making it one of the oceans’ studliest creatures…

With this discovery, it really comes as no surprise to learn how the male deep-sea squid impregnates females of the species. He simply uses his well hung penis to shoot out blobs of sperm, which then make their way into the female’s body.

This discovery may also shed some light on just exactly why these giant squid mate in the depths of the ocean.

Dr. Alexander Arkhipkin, a deep-water fisheries expert of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department, has explained how he and his team made this momentous discovery, “The mature male squid was caught during a deep-water research cruise on the Patagonian slope. We took the animal from the catch, and it was moribund with arms and tentacles still moving, and chromatophores on the skin contracting and expanding. When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment, we witnessed an unusual event. The penis of the squid, which had extended only slightly over the mantle margin, suddenly started to erect, and elongated quickly to 67cm total length, almost the same length as the whole animal.”

This sudden arousal of the deep-sea squid specimen really took the scientific team by surprise, however, it did help us solve the age old mystery of just how exactly deep-sea squid procreate.

All cephlapods are hard put to actually “get down to business” as their bodies are comprised of a closed hood-type feature, which forms a cephalopods body and head.

The creatures utilize this hood-type feature to move about in the water, and they need to ventilate to breathe, to top it off, they also hide their sexual organs inside this structure!

Shallow water cephalopods got around this problem by developing an arm to go about the task.

Their penises are short and produce smaller blobs of sperm, and then one of their available appendages is then used to transfer this sperm into receptacles located on the female of the species.

The actual location of these receptacles varies, and is either on their skin, or internal.

However, the deep-water male squid have a much more direct method, which was just injecting the sperm right into the waiting female. This was the giant mystery, as up until now, the general assumption was that these deep-sea squid had penis sizes comparable to other squid.

However, it appears that not all squid are created equal, and unlike their small penis bearing brethren, they have developed a huge cannon for the job of impregnating the females.

The squid uses his impressive member to actually reach inside the female, and inject the sperm directly to where it needs to go, to prevent it from being washed away.

However, how the sperm actually gets to the female’s reproductive organs, is still shrouded in mystery.

We tend to think about corals as stationary animals, almost plants, but they do have a free-swimming stage when they are very young. A team of scientist working in the Caribbean Sea has now found that during this stage, the tiny corals find their way to suitable homes by listening to the distinctive sounds produced by reef dwelling animals.

The big question is now if the increasing noise pollution of the ocean brought on by human activities will affect the corals’ ability to find suitable spots for colonization. If free-swimming corals do not find a spot soon enough they die, and promptly being able to locate a fitting surface is therefore of outmost importance for them. Numerous human endeavours pollute the sea with various sounds, from boating and shipping to drilling, pile driving and seismic testing.

A few years back, Dr Steve Simpson, Senior Researcher in the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, was able to show that reef fish utilize sound to locate coral reefs in the ocean. The Carmabi Foundation Team working in Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles wanted to see if this was true for corals as well, and therefore set up a ‘choice chamber’.

A choice chamber is a device where small invertebrates, such as corals, are given the option to choose between two or more different conditions. The Carmabi choice chamber was filled with coral larvae belonging to the species Montastraea faveolata, the main reef building coral in the Caribbean Sea. The scientist then played recordings of a coral reef, and the corals turned out to very much favour moving in the direction of the sound.

Free-swimming corals are tiny and look a bit like miniscule hairy eggs. How they manage to detect sounds remains unknown.

“At close range sound stirs up water molecules, and this could waggle tiny hair cells on the surface of the larvae, providing vital directional information for baby corals,” said Dr Simpson.

The results of the study, which was headed by Dr Mark Vermeij, has been published in PLoS ONE.

http://www.plosone.org/home.action

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010660

The research was funded through a fellowship to Dr Simpson by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, UK) and by the National Science Foundation and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (USA).

More information can be found at

The huge oarfish has been filmed by scientists operating a tiny submarine by remote. This may be the first time this fish is filmed, or even seen, in its natural environment. The species might have been caught on camera at a depth of 765 meters during a research mission off the coast of western African in 2007, but marine experts haven’t been able to positively identify the creature in that video.

Oarfish are large, elongated fishes belonging to the family Regalecidae. The family contains four species of which the largest one is the famous King of Herrings (Regalecus glesne), listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest bony fish alive today. The largest known King of Herring was 17 metres (56 ft) in lenght.

Normally, this deep-dweller is only encountered when dead ones are washed ashore or when dying specimens are brought up to the surface by fishermen.

The research crew was therefore happily surprised when an oarfish suddenly showed up in front of their camera.

“We saw this bright vertical shiny thing, I said ‘are they lowering more riser?’ as it looked like they were lowering a huge pipe,” said Mark Benfield from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA, one of the scientists working at the Serpent Project in the Gulf of Mexico.”We zoomed in a little bit and we said ‘that’s not a riser that’s a fish!’ As we approached it retreated downwards swimming tail first in a vertical orientation as the ROV followed. What was interesting about the fish was its swimming behaviour. It moved by undulating its dorsal fin in waves that propelled it backwards at quite a good speed.”

Early estimates measure the fish at between 5m and 10m in length, which roughly equals 16-33 feet.

The Serpent Project is a collaboration between marine researchers and energy companies such as Petrobras, Chevron and Shell and involves the use of remotely operated vehicles (ROV’s) to explore depths to which it would be extremely dangerous to send a human. Responsible for the project is the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, USA.

The King of Herrings is believed to be the creature behind the ancient myths about gigantic sea serpents. It has a prominent dorsal fin, almost like the continous spikes of a fairytale dragon.

A recent study has unveiled that the King demoiselle (Chrysiptera rex) is actually three different species that recently diverged from each other.  (picture)

“This work, along with others, is starting to show that there is a lot more biodiversity in the oceans then we previously thought,” said Joshua Drew, a marine conservation biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and a member of the demoiselle study. “We really are in a situation where we are losing things before we even know they exist.”

The King demoiselle comes in a wide range of colours and patterns, but this alone is not enough to consider it several species. There are plenty of examples of fish that look very dissimilar from each other while still belonging to the same species.

However, what Dews’ colleagues discovered while doing field research in Southeast Asia was that the differences in appearance seemed to be linked to distinct geographical regions. In order to find out more, they decided to ship about a dozen King demoiselle samples to Drew, collected from three separate populations in Indonesia, the Philippines and the South China Sea.

In his laboratory, Drew analyzed the genetic composition of the samples, focusing on three different genes – one that has evolved slowly and two that have changed quickly over the years. What Drew found out was highly interesting: the two fast changing genes differed in the three geographical groups, but not the one slow changing one. This indicates that from an evolutionary perspective, the three groups diverged from each other quite recently.

“That means that this little fish we thought was broadly distributed has a mosaic of individual populations and each one is genetically distinct,” Drew explained. “That highlights how little we really know about how biodiversity on Earth is distributed.”

Earlier, scientists assumed that it was difficult for distinct populations of reef fish to form if they had small larvae easily caught by currents. It seemed reasonable to presume that larvae from many different geographical locations would intermingle with each other throughout the sea. New data, obtained from studies like the King demoiselle one, do however suggest that larvae often settle close to its point of origin.

The King demoiselle study will be published in the journal Coral Reefs.

http://springerlink.metapress.com/content/100407/?p=32f929fa7f60452da6d63226ec8898a6&pi=0

A transparent goldfish that reveals its inner organs has been developed by a joint research team of Mie University and Nagoya University in Japan.

The aim of the project was to create a transparent fish that makes it possible for researchers to study blood constituents and organ behaviour without having to dissect the animal. Unlike ordinary goldfish variants, this type has therefore been made really big and can weigh up to 1 kg. Up until now, the transparent fish of choice for researchers have been the see-through zebrafish, but this tiny fish only weigh abut 3 grams and is therefore much more difficult to study than the 1 kg goldfish.

The translucent goldfish was developed in just three years by repeatedly letting selected pale goldfish specimens mate with each other.

“Pale-colored goldfish have little commercial value, but their negative value has turned into a positive,” said Mie University Associate Professor Yutaka Tamaru.

The creation of a transparent goldfish was announced Wednesday last week at the annual meeting of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan.

Female scissortail sergants allow potential mates to fertilize a small batch off eggs and then monitor their parenting skills to decide if they are good enough to deserve a full clutch.

When studying filial cannibalism* in scissortail sergeants, ecologist Andrea Manica** of the University of Cambridge noticed that some females approached a male’s nest, deposited a small amount of eggs, and then left.

This aroused his curiosity and he decided to provide the males with ceramic tiles to use as nest sites. Once a female has deposited a small clutch on a ceramic tile, Manica either left the eggs alone or rotated the tiles to move the eggs.

The tiles that were left alone turned out to be popular; two-thirds of the females returned to deposit a full clutch of eggs later. The tiles that had been rotated by Manica were much less desirable and only a quarter of the females returned to lay a new batch.

Overall, this method of testing potential fathers seems to be rather rare in the population researched by Manica. Out of 421 females, only 7.4 percent laid test eggs before depositing a full batch. Manica also noticed that the method was used mainly at the onset of the breeding cycle. Later in the cycle, the amount of eggs already inside a nest seemed to suffice as indicator.

“The female fish probably use these test eggs when they don’t have much to go by. As a strategy, to me it makes lots of sense. There are probably lots of other species that do that,” said Manica.

The Scissortail sergant (Abudefduf sexfasciatus) is a large damselfish native to coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific. Also known as the Striptailed damselfish, it can be recognized on its black striped tail and sides. In this species, the eggs are cared for by the male fish who must not only resist the urge to eat his own offspring but also be brave and skilled enough to protect them from being eaten by other predators.

The study has been published in Animal Behaviour.
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622782/description#description

* Filial cannibalism is when an adult eats the young of its own species. In many species of fish, adults won’t hesitate to eat even their own immediate offspring.

** http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/manica.html

Altough the use of nanoparticles have become a symbol of modern technology, they actually have a long history and were for instance utilized by 9^th century Mesopotamian artisans to create a shimmering effect on pots. Today, nanoparticles are a popular addition to products such as food and cosmetics and one million tonnes of silica nanoparticles alone are used by manufacturers each year. A large proportion of these enter the sewage system, but at present we hardly know anything about what happens to them during sewage treatment or their potential effects on the environment once the treated waste water is released into the wild.

It is therefore exciting to hear that a new technique has been developed that may help remove nanoparticles from sewage – or at least the silica ones. If you coat silica nanoparticles in surfactants (detergent-like chemicals that lower the surface tension of a liquid) they clump together and can easily be removed during primary wastewater treatment. Coated nanoparticles interact with other sewage components, forming a solid sludge.

The discovery is the result of the collaborative efforts of scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, ISIS Neutron Source, King’s College London and Oxford University.

“The research shows that the surface chemistry of nanoparticles influences their likely removal during primary sewage treatment,” says Dr Helen Jarvie of Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who took part in the study. “By adding a coating which modifies their surface chemistry, it may be possible to re-route their journey through sewage treatment plants, preventing them from eventually entering the aquatic environment.’

More research is now needed to find out if the technique will work on non-silica nanoparticles.

The research paper has been published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es901399q

The work was funded under the Environmental Nanoscience Initiative (ENI), a programme to investigate the potential environmental effects of nanotechnology. The ENI is a partnership between the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) Environment Agency, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council.

For the first time, a predatory coral has been captured by the camera while eating a jellyfish almost equal to its size. The event occurred in March 2009 during a dive among the Red Sea reefs located near Eilat in Israel, and the photos has now been published in the journal Coral Reefs.

Israeli researchers Omri Bronstein from Tel Aviv University and Gal Dishon from Bar-Ilan University were conducting a survey on reefs when they spotted a mushroom coral sucking in a moon jellyfish.

“During the survey we were amazed to notice some mushroom corals actively feeding on the moon jellyfish,” says Ada Alamaru, a member of the research team who is doing her PhD in marine biology supervised by Prof Yossi Loya at Tel Aviv University. “We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw it.”

Corals are predatory animals but most of them feed on tiny plankton, and corals living close to the surface can also obtain energy by forming symbiotic relationships with photosynthesising algae. While it may be possible for plankton eating corals to ingest miniscule embryonic jellyfish, this is the first time anyone has photographed a coral feasting on adult jelly.

“This is definitely unusual. As far as I know no other coral are reported to feed on jellyfish. However, some sea anemones, which are close relatives of corals, are documented feeding on other jelly species,” Alamaru explains.

The coral in question was a mushroom coral belonging to the species Fungia scruposa while the unfortunate jellyfish was an Aurelia aurita – a type of moon jellyfish. Exactly how the coral managed to capture the jellyfish remains a mystery. The area was subjected to a seasonal bloom of jellyfish brought on by nutrient rich ocean currents.

The amazing eyes found on the mantis shrimp may inspire a new generation of CD:s and DVD:s, according to a new study from the University of Bristol.

Odontodactylus scyllarus, a species of mantis shrimp living on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, has the most complex vision system known to science and can see in twelve colours as opposed to the human eye which only sees in three. As if this wasn’t enough, Odontodactylus scyllarus can also distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

The eyes of this mantis shrimp are equipped with special light-sensitive cells that work like the quarter-wave plates found in CD and DVD players; they can rotate the plane of the oscillations of a light wave as it travels through. Thanks to this feature, the mantis shrimp is capable of converting linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

The design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp’s eye outperforms anything manmade. While the quarter-wave plates found in CD and DVD players tend to work well for one colour of light only, the mantis shrimp can convert light across the whole visible spectrum, i.e. from infra-red to nearly ultra-violet.

“What’s particularly exciting is how beautifully simple it is,” said Dr Roberts, lead author of the article. “This natural mechanism, comprised of cell membranes rolled into tubes, completely outperforms synthetic designs. It could help us make better optical devices in the future using liquid crystals that have been chemically engineered to mimic the properties of the cells in the mantis shrimp’s eye.”

How the mantis shrimp benefits from having this ability remains unknown, but polarization vision is sometimes used by animals to secretly communicate within their own species without catching the attention of predators. Also, it might make it easier for the mantis shrimp to see under water, which would come in handy when hunting for prey.

The research was carried out at the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences in the UK in collaboration with researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA.

The paper was published in Nature Photonics on October 25.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2009.189.html