Latest news with #seafloor
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Science
- Washington Post
Some Australian dolphins use sponges to hunt fish, but it's harder than it looks
WASHINGTON — Some dolphins in Australia have a special technique to flush fish from the seafloor. They hunt with a sponge on their beak, like a clown nose. Using the sponge to protect from sharp rocks, the dolphins swim with their beaks covered, shoveling through rubble at the bottom of sandy channels and stirring up barred sandperch for a meal.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Mysterious Two-Mile Wide Dome Slithers in Pacific Ocean
Something strange is lurking on the seafloor. Off the coast of Washington, deep in the Pacific Ocean, a dome-shaped object has been spotted on Google Earth. The unknown entity is an estimated two miles wide, appears circular in shape, and it's moving… leaving behind a snake-like trail. Wanna see for yourself? Check it out at 49°50'43.0'N 140°13'21.0'W. Conspiracy theorists and obsessively online individuals have jumped on the case, exposing the mystery, speculating wildly as to what it might be (aliens! Godzilla!), and following its movements. One commenter, however, took a different track than the tin foil hat community. Instead, they offered a more plausible explanation: 'You're not looking at a crawling dome. You're looking at a low-res sonar stitch glitch on Google Earth's bathymetric layer. What you're calling a 2-mile sea creature is just cartographic noise from overlapping survey lines and interpolation gaps.'This is what happens when someone opens Google Earth, sees a shadow, and decides they're Deep Sea Dora the Explorer with zero understanding of how seafloor mapping works. These aren't alien trails. They're digital potholes from outdated sonar passes.'Recently, a similar situation involving a strange object observed on Google Earth underwater caused a stir. That time, the perceived anomaly was off the coast of Malibu. It showed Sycamore Knoll, a submerged topographical feature, which conspiracy theorists ventured that it could be a covert military base or, of course, aliens. Then, adding to the mystery, it disappeared from Google. As for this new anomaly stoking speculation, there's been no certifiable explanation yet. Is it a glitch in Google Earth's mapping technology? Or something more sci-fi? Commence speculation. Mysterious Two-Mile Wide Dome Slithers in Pacific Ocean first appeared on Surfer on Jun 16, 2025
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scaly-foot snail: The armor-plated hermaphrodite with a giant heart that lives near scalding deep-sea volcanoes and never eats
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. QUICK FACTS Name: Scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum) Where it lives: Hydrothermal vents on the seafloor of the Indian Ocean What it eats: As an adult, it doesn't! All of the snail's nutrition is generated internally, by endosymbiotic bacteria — microbes that live in the snail's gut. The scaly-foot snail, or volcano snail, possesses something unique among gastropods: a coat of protective armor covering its foot, made from hundreds of overlapping iron-infused scales. It fortifies these scales with minerals absorbed from the hot liquid spewed by hydrothermal vents and black smoker chimneys at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, where water can reach temperatures of 752 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). Related: Elusive colossal squid finally caught on camera 100 years after discovery in world 1st footage Within the snail's scales, sulfur reacts with iron ions to form iron sulfide nanoparticles. Further toughening the snail's defenses is an outer layer of iron sulfide in its shell, making it the only known multicellular animal to strengthen its skeleton with iron. When the National Museum of Wales acquired a pair of specimens in 2015, curators were told to avoid using any water in the preservative solution, because otherwise the snails would start to rust. Underneath all that armor, the scaly-foot snail has a big heart — the largest in the Animal Kingdom relative to the animal's size — making up about 4% of the volume of its entire body. In waters where oxygen levels are low, that enormous heart also supplies oxygen to the symbiotic bacteria that live in the snail's esophageal gland and act as a built-in food factory. The snails, whose shells measure about 2 inches (5 centimeters) in length on average, are sometimes called "sea pangolins" for their resemblance to the armor-plated land mammal. Individuals have both male and female sex organs. They creep along the ocean bottom at depths of approximately 1.7 miles (2,780 meters), and are known from just three hydrothermal vent fields to the east of Mauritius, an island off the southeastern coast of Africa. RELATED STORIES —Bone collector caterpillar: The very hungry caterpillar of your nightmares —Mount Kaputar pink slug: The giant hot-pink mollusk found only on a single, extinct volcano —Leaf sheep: The adorable solar-powered sea slug that looks like Shaun the Sheep While the snails' potential habitat adds up to around 0.1 square miles (0.3 square kilometers), the range where they are currently found covers just 0.008 square miles (0.02 sq km). But even this tiny sliver of the deep ocean is becoming unsafe for the snails, due to human activity. In 2019, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added scaly-foot snails to its Red List of life at risk of extinction. The snails became the first animal to be listed as "endangered" due to threats to two of its three habitat locations from deep sea mining.
