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Getting evicted from your house isn’t something that happens only to humans. Sophie Mowles and colleagues filmed one such eviction event in hermit crabs:
To evict a fellow crab from a coveted shell, the attacker will rap on the outside of it. This can either result in an eviction, and the attacker can move into its new home, or the resident can hold tight until the attacker gives up. The current shell occupant might also emerge and fight back, defending its shell against the perpetrator
Link [Flash video clip]
A bit too strong? No, this record has nothing to do with the way they smell. A recent study determined that a dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its own body weight. Just picture how they figured that out:
In the study, scientists calibrated the males’ strength by gluing a cotton thread to the beetles’ hard wing-cases, stringing the thread across a pulley, and tying it to a miniature bucket, to which they added drops of water [ScienceNOW]. The dung beetle’s coronation as the world’s strongest insect steals the thunder from the rhinoceros beetle, which can lift up to 850 times its own weight.
Dung beetles developed this strength in other to compete for mates, but that isn’t their only strategy. Some weaker male dung beetles mate successfully because they have “substantially bigger testicles”. Link
(image credit: Alex Wild)
You only have to look at a turtle once to realize how different they are from other vertebrates. Where did that shell come from?
The shell itself is made from broadened and flattened ribs, fused to parts of the turtle’s backbone (so that unlike in cartoons, you couldn’t pull a turtle out of its shell). The shoulder blades sit underneath this bony case, effectively lying within the turtle’s ribcage. In all other back-boned animals, whose shoulder blades sit outside their ribs (think of your own back for a start). The turtle’s torso muscles are even more bizarrely arranged.
Ed Yong looks at turtle anatomy and how this weird configuration evolved from the basic vertebrate plan. Link
Shell commercial featuring a Ferraris racing through major world cities.
Make sure to turn your speakers up so you can hear the sound of the engine.
