"A purple crab stares down the camera in the Philippine island of Palawan in an undated picture. The colorful crustacean, dubbed Insulamon palawanense, is one of four new species in the Insulamon genus described in a recent study."
Eclectic Perambulations in the Noosphere
There are more than 3,000 known species of nudibranch, and new ones are being identified almost daily. They are found throughout the world's oceans, but are most abundant in shallow, tropical waters. Their scientific name, Nudibranchia, means naked gills, and describes the feathery gills and horns that most wear on their backs."
see much more via environmentalgraffiti.com
"It is rare for any species of animal to regularly kill its own in combat.
However, male Dawson's bees, one of the world's largest bee species, are so aggressive that they kill each other en masse in a bid to mate with females.
The bees enter a frenzy of fighting, and by the time their deadly combat is over, every male bee is either killed or has perished."
Ernst Haeckel – philosopher, professor, physician, naturalist, biologist and artist. The pinnacle of his work – Art Forms of Nature - began publication in 1899 and is still an astonishing record of life on earth. When art and science combine, something sublime can come to pass.
via kuriositas.com
Small hermit and soldier crabs in Malaysia and Australia build their home digging deep holes in the sand on a beach. Down in the hole the crabs make sand balls that are pushed to the surface, 2-3 balls at a time, forming a kind of sand ball flower or sand ball galaxy.
Up close you can see the almost perfectly spherical balls that the crabs engineer. They are meticulous in their method, to say the very least.
Just as our own galaxies are separated by space, so it is too with the tiny galaxies that the crabs make - they can extend along the whole reach of the beach.
“Had I known what was in store—the difficult nature of the study and the time I was about to invest—I would have been hard pressed to justify such an intense involvement. But, fortunately, I naively allowed myself to blunder into a two-year commitment that was at once exhausting, often overwhelming, enlightening, and one of the most inspiring and satisfying experiences of my life.”
–Joe Hutto, Illumination in the Flatwoods
Based on his true story, My Life as a Turkey chronicles Hutto’s remarkable and moving experience of raising a group of wild turkey hatchlings to adulthood.
