Enypniastes Sea Cucumber

animal images

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                                                                                 This see-through sea cucumber, dubbed Enypniastes (pictured), was spotted at depths of about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) during a 2009 expedition in the northern Gulf of Mexico, scientists say. (See pictures of a deep-sea fish with a transparent head.)

                                                                                 The strange invertebrate creeps forward on its many tentacles while sweeping sediments filled with tiny critters into its mouth. When it's ready to find another feeding ground, the sea cucumber "blooms into a startling curved shape and swims away," CoML team members said in a statement.

Imagining a World Without Lions

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There will never be a time that we will be able to forget lions. Walk ten blocks in most of the world's cities and you'll see a dozen lion statues, small or large, icons of the most symbolic animal on Earth. (See an interactive experience on the Serengeti lion.)

Some of the more famous ones reside in front of the New York Public Library and in Trafalgar Square. On a recent walk around the four-block radius of National Geographic's Washington headquarters, I counted 26.

But will real lions survive in the wild beyond our generation? As someone who has studied the animals for 30 years, I'm not sure. (Read "The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion" in National Geographic magazine.)

In the 1950s, when I was born, the best estimate of the world's lion population was 450,000. Today, studies point to 20,000 to 30,000 lions remaining. We've lost 95 percent of lions in the last 50 years.

The slaughter has a variety of causes: trophy hunting, habitat loss, communities killing lions in retaliation for cattle losses, and poaching, which fuels a bone market in the East built around bogus medicines and special-occasion wine.

The Power of Lions Up Close

Recently, I was kneeling outside my vehicle here—a battered, doorless Land Cruiser—with my camera on the ground, filming a low-angle shot for a National Geographic Channel film about young nomadic male lions. I miscalculated.

Two very large lionesses walked much closer to me than I expected, and at three meters they rippled with power and predatory presence. Massive shoulders moved under tawny skin, ready to grab hold of a passing zebra or buffalo.

Sea Otters Promote Recovery of Seagrass Beds

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Scientists studying the decline and recovery of seagrass beds in one of California's largest estuaries have found that recolonization of the estuary by sea otters was a crucial factor in the seagrass comeback. Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of August 26.
 
Seagrass meadows, which provide coastal protection and important habitat for fish, are declining worldwide, partly because of excessive nutrients entering coastal waters in runoff from farms and urban areas. The nutrients spur the growth of algae on seagrass leaves, which then don't get enough sunlight. In Elkhorn Slough, a major estuary on California's central coast, algal blooms caused by high nutrient levels are a recurring problem. Yet the seagrass beds there have been expanding in recent years.

"When we see seagrass beds recovering, especially in a degraded environment like Elkhorn Slough, people want to know why," said Brent Hughes, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the PNAS study. His coauthors include Tim Tinker, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Kerstin Wasson, research coordinator for the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, who are both adjunct professors of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC.

Hughes and his colleagues documented a remarkable chain reaction that began when sea otters started moving back into Elkhorn Slough in 1984. The sea otters don't directly affect the seagrass, but they do eat enormous amounts of crabs, dramatically reducing the number and size of crabs in the slough. With fewer crabs to prey on them, grazing invertebrates like sea slugs become more abundant and larger. Sea slugs feed on the algae growing on the seagrass leaves, keeping the leaves clean and healthy.

Maulings by Bears: What's Behind the Recent Attacks?

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The recent bear attacks in North America over the past week are unrelated to one another and are not indicative of a trend, experts say.

At least six people in five states have been mauled by black and brown bears recently. The latest incident occurred on Saturday, when a hunter in the remote Alaskan wilderness was attacked by an alleged brown bear, also known as a grizzly bear, and survived more than 36 hours before being rescued by the state's air national guard.

Last Thursday, hikers in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming were attacked by a female grizzly after they got too close to her cubs. One of the men was clawed and bitten on his backside.

Also on Thursday, 12-year-old Abigail Wetherell was attacked by a black bear while out on an evening jog in northern Michigan.

According to news reports, Wetherell initially tried to run away from the bear, but she was chased and knocked down. After trying to escape a second time and failing, she played dead. A neighbor who heard the girl scream eventually scared the animal away, but not before it slashed Wetherell's thigh.

Over the weekend, conservation officers shot and killed a black bear they believed to be the one that attacked Wetherell.

Bear expert John Beecham said it's unclear from the accounts he's read why the animal might have attacked the girl. "It might have been a female [bear] and she had young, or the girl might have just come up on the bear fairly quickly while running through the woods, and it perceived her as a threat and attacked," he said.