Polar Bears In SunSet

They’re usually pictured against a bright white backdrop but this family of polar bears bathed in a vibrant reds, yellows and oranges as they watched a glorious sunset in Alaska.

The stunning shots capture the moment a female bear and her two cubs enjoyed the last warm rays of the sun at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Kaktovik. The bears can be seen gazing at the vibrant sunset and appear to revel in the tranquil moment as they bask in the array of colors.

Photographer, Sylvain Cordier, spent three weeks following the bears to capture the memorable moment. The 67-year-old from Alsace in France said: I was lucky because I was photographing a very calm and cooperative mother and her two large cubs.

Photographer: Sylvain Cordier,
Caters News
2 more photos @: Yahoo Photos

MYSTERY OF THE WHORL TOOTH SHARK

The whorl tooth shark or helicoprion has a spiraling coil of serrated teeth. Placement and function of this bizarre structure has been a mystery to scientists for almost a century. 

Ray Troll has been searching for answers for the better of 20 years and much of his art has been inspired by this amazing creature.

THRESHER SHARKS KILL PREY WITH TAIL

The thresher shark has evolved a deadly hunting tactic to kill its prey with its tail. 

Coming Ashore

Predators are forced to specialize and devise new strategies when they're confined by geography, other species... or changing conditions.

Jaguar Attacks Caiman

When a jaguar pounces, sometimes one bite is all it takes to get a meal. National Geographic has exclusive video of a jaguar taking down a caiman in Brazil's Pantanal wetlands, photos of which went viral earlier this month. Luke Dollar, a conservation scientist who helps manage National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative, explains the hunt and explosive moment of predation.

Read the article from National Geographic News:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ne...

VIDEOGRAPHERS: Kedar Hippalgaonkar and Parul Jain
NARRATOR: Luke Dollar
EDITOR: Will Halicks
SPECIAL THANKS: Jason Kurtis
RESEARCH: Joe Lemeris

Leopards

Courtesy Of The BBC

Jonathan Scott narrates the extraordinary story of the leopard - the one big cat that still survives across half the world while tigers, cheetahs and lions are all struggling.

By following the lives of leopard mothers and their cubs in East Africa, the film investigates what it is about the natural history of these cats that makes them born survivors.

Perhaps the most extraordinary revelation is that leopards are living undercover on farms and even in cities across Africa and Asia.

Speed Kills - This is Why You Can't Outrun a Cheetah

Courtesy Of "The Smithsonian Channel"

With a flexible spine and feet like tire treads, the cheetah is built not only for speed - but for unrivaled acceleration.

'T. Rex' Of The Seas

An artist's illustration of the giant ichthyosaur ruled the oceans some 244 million years ago. (Image: Raul Martin/National Geographic Magazine)

The researchers say the 28-foot long predator probably could have tackled victims as large as itself or larger.

Newfound fossils of a giant dolphin-shaped reptilian predator are now shedding light on how the world recovered after the most devastating mass extinction in history, researchers say.

 

This prehistoric sea monster could provide information on how the planet might deal with the mass extinction humans are causing now, scientists added.

 

The giant marine predator was at least 28 feet (8.6 meters) long, fossils showed. The carnivore was recovered over a course of three weeks in 2008 from what is today a mountain range in central Nevada, and is now kept at the Field Museum in Chicago.

 

This new species, formally named Thalattoarchon saurophagis — which means "lizard-eating ruler of the sea" — was an early member of the ichthyosaurs, marine reptiles that evolved from land reptiles just as modern whales did from land mammals. Ichthyosaurs cruised the oceans for 160 million years, apparently going extinct about 90 million years ago, some 25 million years before the age of dinosaurs ended.

 

"They were the most highly adapted of all marine reptiles, acquiring a fishlike shape and giving birth to live young," said researcher Martin Sander, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Thalattoarchon possessed a massive skull and jaws armed with large teeth with cutting edges used to seize and slice prey. The researchers say it probably could have tackled victims as large as itself or larger. [See Images of the Prehistoric Sea Monster]

 

"Our new carnivorous ichthyosaur was a top predator, meaning that it had the same role as killer whales in the sea and Tyrannosaurus or the big cats of today on land," Sander said. "This is the first predator in a long row of predators down to this day. The players have changed, but not the game."

 

Most of the animal was preserved, including the skull — except the front of the snout — parts of the fins, and the complete vertebral column up to the tip of the tail. The fossil was christened "Jim" after its discoverer, Jim Holstein, of the Field Museum.

 

The newfound carnivore apparently lived 244 million years ago, just 8 million years before the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, a die-off at the end of the Permian period that killed as many as 80 to 96 percent of all ocean species. Relatively small species were the main survivors.

 

"Our 'Jim' was thus the first in a long row of T. rexes of the sea, which is why we named him Thalattoarchon, 'ruler of the seas,'" Sander said.

 

The fact that a giant predator capable of tackling similarly large prey arose so soon after the end-Permian mass extinction reveals that ecosystems recovered rapidly after the die-off.

 

"A top predator is a very good indicator that the ecosystem was complete, because if the highest level in the food web is there, the lower levels must have been there as well. Otherwise it won't work," Sander said.

Ichthyosaurs diversified very rapidly. "We hope that by studying this group we can better understand the processes of evolution at the grand scale," researcher Lars Schmitz, an evolutionary biologist at Claremont McKenna College, told LiveScience.

 

"Ecosystem recovery has been a big topic of research for a while, partially because we as humans are causing one of the biggest extinctions right now," Sander said. "People thus have a keen interest in knowing how long it takes to rebuild things once you have destroyed them."

Via: "Mother Nature Network"

Introducing: MegaPiranha

Skeleton of today’s black piranha. In the wild, one 2 ½ pound black piranha delivered a bite with a force 30 times its body weight.

Piranha Kin Wielded Dental Weaponry Even T. Rex Would Have Admired

The bite force of Megapiranha, which lived 10 million years ago, was extrapolated from the first field measurements of the biting force of Earth’s largest piranha today, Serrasalmus rhombeus or black piranha. One 2 ½ pound fish delivered a bite with a force of 320 newtons, or about 72 pounds, which is 30 times its body weight. The force is nearly three times greater than the bite force of an equivalent size American alligator.

Based on the 2 ½ pound piranha and other specimens tested in the wild,  the scientists calculate that Megapiranha paranensis, which weighed approximately 22 pounds, could have had a bite force anywhere from 1,240 to 4,750 newtons  – or 280 to 1,070 pounds – and possibly more.

Other scientists have previously estimated that T. rex slammed its jaws shut with 13,400 newtons, or 3,000 pounds of force, but that’s nowhere near 30 times its body weight.

Pound for pound, Megapiranha and black piranha have the most powerful bites among carnivorous fishes, living or extinct, the paper said. “For its relatively diminutive size, Megapiranha paranensis’ bite dwarfs other extinct mega-predators” including the enormous whale-eating Carcharodon megalodon and the monstrous Dunkleosteus terrelli, a four-ton armored fish.

Justin Grubich, et al/Scientific Reports

Bite force quotients – considering both bite force and body size – compare the powerful bites of black piranha (S. rhombeus) and now-extinct Megapiranha (M. paranensis) with barracuda, blacktip shark (C. limbatus), bull shark (C. leucas), hammerhead shark (S. mokarran), the extinct 4-ton Dunkleosteus terrelli, great white shark (C caracharias) and the extinct whale-eating Carcharodon megalodon.

The same was true when the scientists corrected for body size and made comparisons with today’s barracudas, hammerhead sharks and great white sharks.

“We were surprised that in spite of their long history and infamous reputations that no one had ever measured their bite forces,” said Justin Grubich, with the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and lead author of the paper. “When we finally started to get the data, we were blown away at how tremendously strong the bites were for these relatively little fish.”

As the paper says, “While anecdotes of piranha-infested waters skeletonizing hapless victims are generally hyperbole, the effectiveness of their bite is not.”

Just how does one measure the bite force of a piranha living in the wild? Well, you get out your rod and reel and go fishing. Land a specimen, then hang tight to the tail with one hand and use your other hand to support its belly while offering the fish a chance to bite the plates of a customized force gauge.

“Piranhas are ornery little fish so they bit down as hard as they could,” Crofts said based on what she was told by those on the fishing expedition along tributaries of the Amazon River.

The black piranha’s bite is so powerful in part because of its massive jaw muscles and rope-like tendons that together account for 2 percent of the fish’s overall weight, the scientists found. Further the shape of their jaw has evolved into a powerful lever, “one of the highest jaw-closing mechanical advantages ever identified in fishes,” the paper said.

Crofts’ main contribution involved analysis of how Megapiranha teeth handled stresses and how breakable the teeth might have been. The scientists were particularly interested because Megapiranha’s unusual teeth appear to do two things at the same time, one the piranha-like ability to shear soft tissues and the other an ability to bite like the nut-crushing pacu, piranha’s close relative.

Based on a fossilized jaw and three teeth, Crofts conducted a computer generated “finite element analysis” for the team.

“We found the Megapiranha teeth had the same maximum strength like you saw in regular piranha, but then the patterns of stress distribution within the tooth was also similar to fish able to eat hard-prey,” she said.

The actual diet remains a mystery, but during the time when Megapiranha lived a lot of potential prey species were gigantic.

“Thus it is reasonable to assume the food resources available to Megapiranha would likely have required jaw forces and dental weaponry capable of capturing and processing very large prey,” the paper says.

Other co-authors on the paper are Steve Huskey with Western Kentucky University, Guillermo Orti with George Washington University and Jorge Porto with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia.

Funding came from the National Geographic and the Field Museum of Natural History.

###

For more information:
Crofts, croftss@uw.edu, phone: Contact Sandra Hines, shines@uw.edu, 206-543-2580

National Geographic video (natgeotv.com) of Justin Grubich and others fishing for piranha and testing bite force in the wild.

Piranha Bite Force:



Via: "The University Of Washington"

Inside The Perfect Predator

The BBC examines the traits of 4 exceptional predators:

1. The Peregrine Falcon
2. The Nile Crocodile
3. The Cheetah
4. The Great White Shark

The Predator and The Suicide Bomber

Perfect Asymmetry

By N. Joseph Potts,
June 08, 2011
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

The expansion (and contraction) of great empires has long been driven by tactical and strategic “asymmetries” in the conduct of war. Norman archers overcame sword- and spear-wielding Anglo-Saxons at Hastings in 1066. Musket- and rifle-bearing Europeans slaughtered Native Americans opposing them with bows and arrows. And vast fleets of heavy bombers laid both Japan and Germany waste as they struggled to supply the armies and navies with which they opposed invasions of their homelands.

Typically, these asymmetries have taken the form of mastering distance through speed. The bowmen at Hastings could pick off their opponents at a distance of a hundred yards using arrows that flew far faster than even the fleetest spearman could cover the distance required to place his target within his range. The bullets Europeans fired at Native Americans were so fast they couldn’t even be seen in flight, as arrows usually could. And bombers from England arrived over Hamburg from farther away than an interceptor could fly and dropped their lethal loads from altitudes well above the accurate range of the opposing FlaK guns below.

Remote-control devastation arrived theoretically some 40 years ago with the intercontinental ballistic missile, but as yet none of the thousands built and emplaced has been used, at least not with the nuclear warheads with which most are armed. It moved palpably closer with the deployment of cruise missiles, with range and speed such that they could be delivered, with no practical prospect of interdiction, upon targets in landlocked Afghanistan from ships at sea many hundreds of miles from the targets. And no attacking human came any closer than those ships to the people who were killed and injured by these missiles.

The Predator and other unmanned warplanes perfect the remote-control milieu in that the launching (and controlled) aircraft returns, typically undetected and unscathed, to its launchers, unlike the cruise missile, which was expended on its first use. With the drone, remote-control devastation has become not only safe and impossible to oppose, but cheap as well—an industrial triumph of sorts: world domination mass-produced.

This, it might be said, constitutes the “high ground” of lethal confrontation: a technician sitting at a console in California directs a drone, and its missile(s), 10,000 miles away in Pakistan against a target (admittedly, one about whom the technician possesses limited knowledge) who is unable even to detect the imminent threat facing him. As with the German V-2s that hit England, death and destruction come to the target completely unannounced, but with far greater precision, at least in a geospatial sense, than was the case in 1945. Life for such people is lived entirely “on the edge.”

The tactical and moral counterpoint to such remote-control slaughter is the suicide bomber. Suicide attacks have been possible at least since the first time one person hit another over the head with a stick, but with the development of portable explosives, it became possible for the suicide attacker to kill his enemies and himself through his own single act. Japan’s kamikaze pilots may have been the first conspicuous appearance of such attackers in the consciousness of Americans, though at least Japan and Germany had developed and deployed manned torpedoes whose pilots stood little, if any, chance of surviving the attacks they carried out. The (last) crew of the CSS Hunley, the Confederate submarine, may have led this category into the hereafter in 1864 off Charleston, S.C., though theirs was not known in advance to be a suicide mission.

But some suicide bombers eschew vehicles and mingle on an up-close-and-personal basis with their victims, crowds in marketplaces, stadiums, or even buses. If they wanted to kiss any of their victims before killing them, they could (and vice-versa). However it is that they are moved to their deeds, their commitment to their mayhem is total—the exact opposite to that of the technician in California, who could be eating a sandwich as he drives his attack home, and whose shift in any case ends at 0800 sharp. Unlike the suicide bomber, the drone pilot is likely to enjoy pension benefits from his employment guiding tons of explosives to kill dozens of people he has never laid eyes on other than (possibly) through a television camera thousands of miles away from him. (Like many warriors “killed in action,” suicide bombers enjoy benefits bestowed upon their designated beneficiaries, a reward provided for fighters on both sides of today’s deathly contests.)

The asymmetry in struggles going on in several parts of the world today (and potentially everywhere in the world that two human beings find themselves in conflict) reflects many other asymmetries: resources, desperation, alternatives, devotion, indoctrination, bribery, blackmail, and so on. But the asymmetry itself has become quite as stark as can be imagined.

If the United States were materially poor and ravaged by invading armies of rich, gibberish-spouting, light-skinned infidels sowing death and fear indiscriminately among the populace, would fresh-faced, idealistic suicide bombers step forward from our ranks? I think so, and they would, except of course for our own children, do so with our approval and appreciation. They would be our most potent, and most precious, weapons—making the ultimate sacrifice, not only for the “weapon” him/herself, but for parents, siblings, and children.

As it is, the propaganda we spread among ourselves demonizes those who devote themselves totally to various causes unpopular among us and serves to “prove” the savagery regnant among those billions of radicals our institutions urge us to detest.

Suicide is the bottom line—the one that’s under every other “bottom line” ever so described. To dismiss its profound significance with ethnocentric platitudes is to demean the value of human life itself.