Marine biologist Stephen Palumbi picks 10 of his favorite underwater creatures. From the oldest living animal to the fastest food in the sea, they’re all pretty extreme.
Marine biologist Stephen Palumbi (his new TEDxStanford Talk is The Extreme Life of the Sea) knows a lot about what goes on beneath the world’s waves. Palumbi is the director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, where he is mapping the genome of sea corals. As a scientist, professor and researcher, he has also shown the value of DNA identification in whale conservation and in seafood markets (see his TED Talk: The Hidden Toxins in the Fish We Eat) and traced the variation in sea urchin sperm shape. (How about that for dinner conversation?) His recent book The Extreme Life of the Sea — written with his son, novelist Anthony Palumbi — shines a light on the wild world of sea life. Recently we asked Palumbi to share some of his favorite sea creatures — from the obscure to the fascinating to the just plain strange. He gracefully obliged. Below, his top 10 picks:
1. SAILFISH
Sailfish are the fastest eaters in the sea. They can move at 40 miles per hour — powering through schools of fish, stunning them with blows from their bills, and gulping them down on the fly. Their eyes and brains have to work so fast at these speeds that they need to be heated up, using specialized heat-generating muscles that line the eyes and brain. Photo: iStock.
2. BOWHEAD WHALE
The bowhead whale is the oldest living mammal. This was proven by the discovery of century-old brass harpoon tips embedded in scars on the backs of whales hunted in the 1990s. These harpoons haven’t been thrown at whales for over a century. Thus, the very same animals hunted in the 1990s also survived human attacks 100 years ago. Photo: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images.
3. CORAL LEIOPATHES (DEEP WATER BLACK CORAL)
The oldest known animal is a coral living on the slopes of Hawaii — deep in the sea, thousands of feet below the surface, where conditions are dark and cold and slow. These black corals grow a hair’s width a year. The oldest is now known to have lived longer than any other animal on Earth — 4,270 years. Before some of the Egyptian pyramids were built, this coral was alive. Photo courtesy of NOAA Hawaiian Undersea Research Lab.
文章內容轉貼自:http://ideas.ted.com/2014/06/30/10_extreme_sea_creatures/
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