Swimming Whiskery Tongues

I always thought that catfish looked a little silly with their moustaches and whiskers. But then again, it was by their whiskers and moustaches that I recognized them anyway. So I should say they look 'distinguised'. Yeah.



Ok, when I say the word tastebud, which body part automatically pops into your head? The tongue, of course. But hey, believe or not, the catfish has tastebuds all over its body! There are tastebuds on their fins, back, belly, sides, and even on their tail. It's like a huge, swimming tongue with whiskers:
















Ok ok, I confess, that's actually a cow's tongue, with drawn whiskers and fins and all. I was just trying ellaborate a point.

The highest concentration of tastebuds found outside the mouth, are just below the whiskers. Apparently there are many volcanos near the area, if looked under a microscope. And each, mini volcano is a tastebud. Pretty cool eh?

Anyway, the tastebuds on the body do serve a function. They help detect food by detecting chemicals, then the fish will be able to locate it by using it's whiskers as little "feelers", before the tastebuds in the mouth examine it to see whether the food's tasty or not.

On the estimate, a 6 inched catfish has about 6 million tastebuds on the average. Man, imagine those Mekong Catfish!















I'm guessing what... Gazillions of trillions of zillions?! And man, you won't need a microscope to check out the volcanic tastebuds. Heh.

*pooh!* What's that smell?

And you thought herring were common fish-and-chips fish?? Think again! They're extremely special creatures- they communicate by farting-a study suggests!

Marine biologists have known that herrings have excellent hearing, but they never knew what it was used for. And then they discovered that the fish actually make small, high-frequency noises at night, by releasing air from their anuses!

Wheeeheeee... Imagine, if we communicated like that: *prupp pruup pruuuuuuup* *I love you*

Really, amazing fish. In fact, I know some one who would make a very socialble herring. ;-)

Leeches

Leeches.

Say that word aloud and you get the idea of a leech.

L-E-E-C-H. What pops into your head? A blood-sucking, slimy, dancing, drunk, black worm, correct?

Exactly what it is.


Leeches are segmented worms or anelids, cousins of the earthworms. The wonderful part about leeches is they have suckers at both ends. They are sanguivorous, which means they feed on blood of other animals.

A leech detects its prey by sensing movement and light. To imagine the way it moves, just think of a flexible tube with two plumber suckers at each end, dancing like a slinky down the stairs.


















The usual jungle leeches you find on rainy days in Malaysian forests (the jawless leeches or Rhyncobdellida) don't have jaws to bite, instead, they have this needle-like protusion called a proboscis (like butterflies for nectar), which they inject into one of our skin pores, and happily begin to drink. They inject an anti-coagulant hirudin, which floods the wounded pore, helping the leech to relax and allow the blood to be ingested.

According to www.austmus.gov.au/factsheet/leeches :
There may also be a delayed irritation and itching after a bite. There appears to be no support for the theory that mouthparts left behind after forced removal of the leech causes this reaction. Can leeches transmit disease? There is no evidence to suggest that they do.

Leeches have been known over the centuries to be used for medical purposes. In fact, pharmacies nowadays supply leeches to hospitals and clinics! They put leeches on the body part which has been infected, and in a very literal sense, the leech will suck out all the bad blood.

Shown here below is the process of decompression for a woman who had forearm hematoma. And which the leeches helped return her arm to its normal state, all pink and flexible.

Figs

Figs, some of us might have heard of figs from the Bible, or more specifically the Gospels. Some excerpts of Bible passages which used fig trees.

Luke 13:6-7
6Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree, planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it, but did not find any. 7So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, 'For three years now I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven't found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?'

Matthew 21:18-20
The Fig Tree Withers 18Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. 19Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, "May you never bear fruit again!" Immediately the tree withered.
20When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. "How did the fig tree wither so quickly?" they asked.


Before I went to Israel the only figs I've tasted were the kind in eaten in the Old Testament, 'cakes of figs'. This kind, my auntie brings back from Pakistan. They look like this:

It's called a cake of figs only when it's like this: (they're all threaded through the middle with a weaved rope)

They became coins by being squished and pressed down, when actually they originally looked so fresh and succulent like this green one:

The Figgy Truth

Well I suppose you know for a fruit to become a fruit, it has polinated, usually by insects. Well the fig tree is polinated by wasps. But this form of mutualism is different from most, the wasps lays its eggs inside the fruit, getting a place to lay its eggs. And in turn, it polinates the fig tree.

However, not all the baby wasps make it out alive. *gasps*

Yes, what I meant was, when we eat figs, fresh or dried, we snack up some baby wasps too.

=)

But really, fresh figs are wonderful things.

Don't let this post be a stumbling block towards your fig faith. :

Fishy Sexual Vampirism

This is a deep sea angler fish.

The female, which is the main fish you see, is the size of a tennis ball.

It has big savage teeth, little nasty pin eyes . . . and a rod lure off the top of its head with a glowing tip to coax in stupid prey."

The male, which "looks like a black jellybean with fins", are those things hanging from the female. When a male finds a female, he bites into her side, never letting go. "He drinks her blood, in return for giving her sperm," Dr Norman said.

The flesh of the two fish eventually fuses "and they remain connected, permanently. It's sexual vampirism, with a bit of dwarfism thrown in. They have found females with up to six males attached."

Man..

Talk about what lies beneath..

Cumbre Vieja

tsu·na·mi
A very large ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption.
[Japanese : tsu, port + nami, wave.]






With the recent Aceh Tsunami and the Gulf Coast's Hurricane Katrina, I've decided to post something more "current events"-like. And yes, deadhonest.blogspot.com is capable of that.


Of the coast of Morroco and Western Sahara, lies a group of islands which, are of Spain's. One of them is La Palma and La Palma has a volcano, called Cumbre Vieja.













Cumbre Vieja Volcano,
on La Palma Island.






La Palma is most volcanically active of the Canary Islands in past 500 years, the last being in 1971. The previous eruption in 1949, caused the western half of the volcano ridge to slip a few meters down into the sea, leaving a 2km-long fracture (see picture below).










The next time the volcano erupts, it is very likely to cause a huge chunk of rock (approximately weighing 500 billion tons!) into the sea, a dome of water 900 meters & tens of miles wide would form, only to collapse and rebound.
Then as it slides deeper in to the sea, a mega-tsunami will develop. Within 10 minutes, the mega-tsunami would have moved a distance of almost 250 km.

















The mega-tsunami will totally polish off the Western Sahara coast, Florida & the Carribean will have to brace themselves for waves as high as 50 meters, 8 or 9 hours after the landslide. New York, Boston, Washington DC, Miami and Virginia will be damaged badly too, with 10-25 meters high waves. The waves would hit the coasts of England, Spain, Portugal and France too, in smaller but substantial waves.

And of course, did I mention all this would amount to trillions of dollars in damage repairs. And imagine how many people will perish, suffer and lose hope because of this.

Wow. Talk about our ignorance.

Sources:

• Benfield Hazard Research Discussion: Why the only certainly about the La Palma tsunami is that it WILL happen
• 'Cumbre Vieja, A Potential Tsunami' Research Paper
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Dandy.. *ruff*

When I was young I thought dandruff was some kinda fungus growing on my head.


And I was partly true. Eww.






Dandruff is caused my the shedding of dead scalp skin cells.

On average the scalp skin cells replaces itself about once every month. But if the process decides to speed up, we then get a lot of dandruff, making it more obvious on our shirts.



There are some cases where the metabolic rate is increased and there's replacement every 4 days! This would result in red, think, scalp of dandruff patches. There are referred to as seborrhea (seborrheic dermatitis). Seborrhea has been associated with a type of fungus known as Pityrosporum ovale, which is a flora, a.k.a a plant.






So there, we have plants on our heads!

To Twinkle or Not

I saw a really bright star the other night. My dad, being my very handy know-it-all person, I asked him 'what star is that?'.

'That's not a star! That's Venus.'

And, ooh, I guess I learned something new that night -stars twinkle, planets don't.


This would be because the distance of stars are so great that the starlight is treated as a point source, and is displaced by the many layers of the earth's atmosphere, as it travels through it. The light of the stars are bent, moving in random directions, thus causing the stars to twinkle.

Stars nearer the horizon appear to twinkle more because these the light of these stars need to travel through even more layers of air compared to the stars right above you. I suppose I needn't tell you that if you were in outer space, the stars wouldn't twinkle.

Planets on the other hand, because they are so near to the earth (compared to the stars), hardly ever twinkle, save for extremely turbulent air.

The Night Sky with Stonehenge

Nails

Like to bite your fingernails?



No prob, just swallow them and you'll have an extra boost of that protein that keeps you growing!

Fingernails, and toenails, are made up of keratin, a certain kind of protein found in our strands of hair. The nails are actually fomed by epithelial cells which grow from the growth plate. During growth they die and the inside of the cells become filled with a hard protein called keratin. It is the keratin that makes our nails hard and tough.

(un)Nutritious Sand Balls

Everyone loves white sandy beaches and bright blue skies. So surely you've seen this before?

Everyone who has been to a beach before would have seen this sight: small tiny balls of sand, sometimes forming a pretty formation.





Pretty formations of sand balls in the sand.








Ever wondered what they are?


The Crustacean Truth:











I always knew the pretty little balls were made by crabs.

And although I didn't know how, I assumed (which is a bad thing to do) that since the balls were always found around the crabholes, perhaps the crabs dug their holes by forming little balls deeper and deeper until there was a hole.

Thankfully, my assumption was correct on that one.

However, surely there had to be another explanation: crabs are tiny creatures, and one definately can't expect them to "throw" the ball of sand out of its burrow THAT FAR (it's at least half a foot)!


The Other Truth:










You see, crabs feed off microscopic material in between the grains of sand.
So after feeding off the stuff in the sand, the crab will roll it up into a ball and toss it over his shoulder. (I'm not sure they have shoulders though.) Thus forming those little balls of sand you see.



The Moral of the Discovery:
So, the next time you're stranded on a white sandy beach, don't suck the sand that have been rolled into balls, the crabs have got all the nutrition out already!

Hazy, blurry days of August

The haze has been terrible here in the Malaysian Peninsular.


The sun, which usually looks like this:














Has been looking rayless and egg yolky:













Driving on the road, with only a hundred meters of visibility feels like going into the mist of the unknown. Just over here it's the haze from Sumatera. We're just trying to make it sound romantic.














A good rain should clear it all away

A tenth of a litre

Ok, this is actually Flubber..
I couldn't find any picture of mucus which would NOT cause you to puke.

So, there.

I've always wondered how much mucus my nostril actually produces on a normal flu day. And to my surprise, I found out that the average person on a really bad flu day only produce about half an ounce of mucus.

How terribly disappointing. I was hoping for like 100 ml or something.

A tenth of a litre of snot just sounds so fascinating.

Snot, snot, snot, ah, fascinating snot!

Sharks

Trivia time.

What are sharks?
a) mammals
b) reptiles
c) fish
d) amphibians

*I won't put birds as an option, because you need to be highly stupid to choose that.

Answer: they're fish! C is the answer.

But then again, sharks aren't your normal kinda fish:

1. they don't have scales
2. they don't have swim bladders
3. some of them, besides being ovoviparous, like reptiles, are also viviparous and oviparous

Nevertheless, sharks are classified as fish.

And there you go.

Vivivi

Contrary to popular belief, not all reptiles lay eggs.

There are three different forms of how different types of reptiles bear their young.

1. oviparous - the mother lays the eggs and then the young hatch, all outside the mother's body
2. ovoviviparous - the eggs are hatched inside the mother's body, before the young come out.
3. viviparous - the mother gives birth to her young. These reptiles nourish their young in the uterus in yolk sacs, unlike mammals do in the uterus in plasenta.
4. Here's a quicktime video on a smooth snake giving birth:

http://www.arkive.org/species/ARK/reptiles/Coronella_austriaca/Coronella_austriaca_09.html?movietype=rpMed

Pretty interesting, I always assumed all reptiles laid eggs, 'cos I don't recall seeing pythons or crocodiles giving birth.

Homalopsines

Homalopsines.

Homalopsines are water snakes who have:

• dorsal-oriented eyes
• valvular nostrils, and
• rear fangs (venomous)

Like this lil fellow here:
(ok, but the fangs don't show.. just imagine them curved backward)

















This is a cerberus rynchops, a dog faced water snake.

Doesn't look like a dog to me at all, if anything a snakey crocodile.


Remember, the word is

HOMALOPSINES

Hooray

I suppose you know a group of lions is called a pride of lions and a group of crows is called a murder of crows.

And I suppose you're feeling pretty proud of yourself now that you knew that a group of lions is called a pride of lions and a group of crows is called a murder of crows.

Hah, but I bet you don't know what a group of frogs and a group of toads are called.











Well,

A group of frogs is called an army of frogs.

&

A group of toads is called a knot of toads.











There. I've got meself a knot of toads on my blog.
Hooray!