Technology Info Crunch

Beware the blenny’s bite: scientists uncover the toxins in fang blenny venom By Christie Wilcox | March 30, 2017 11:00 am     Meiacanthus atrodorsalis —a pretty little fish with a venomous bite. Photo by Klaus Stiefel via  Flickr “Did you tell her the one about George Losey and the blenny?” Rich Pyle asked with a knowing smirk. Pyle and I were sitting in the living room of legendary ichthyologist Jack Randall for a piece I was writing about him for  Hakai Magazine . “It’s a good venom story,” Pyle continued, grinning. Randall’s eyes lit up with mischievious joy as he launched into the tale. He and George Losey were invited to Guam to bear witness to a massive crown of thorns sea star invasion, he explained (“It was one overlapping another as far as you could see,” he recalled; “They decimated the corals of the whole northern coast”). While he and Losey were diving, Randall saw a small blenny—one of a group of blennies that he ...

By Christie Wilcox | March 31, 2017 7:50 pm      A female seven-arm octopus carrying an egg-yolk jelly. Photo © MBARI The seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus , lives a hidden life deep in the dark depths of the oceans. These massive cephalopods—females of which can grow to be more than 12 feet long—earned the moniker for their habit of folding one of their eight arms away. What little is known of their daily lives has largely been gleaned from dead animals pulled from the sea by trawls, as inhabitants of the deep sea, their activities are nearly impossible to observe. Now, a new paper in Scientific Reports  provides insights into their diet and behavior, finding they prefer to dine on species we tend to think of as less than palatable: jellyfish. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) used remotely operated vehicles (R...