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In 1983, Amos Barkai, a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, was investigating the effects of bird guano runoff at the beach when he noticed something that took his research in a new direction. The waters around Malgas Island were teeming with lobsters, so much that you had to move lobsters to see anything else. Meanwhile, around Marcus island, just 4 kilometers away, there were no lobsters at all. To determine why, Barkai arranged to move a thousand lobsters from Malgas to Marcus to see if they would survive and thrive.

On the day of the experiment, Barkai was alone in the water, as he was working with a topside crew that didn’t dive (something that would make university dive safety officers extremely uncomfortable nowadays. Of course, this was the ’80s, and things were different). First, the boat stopped at Malgas, and Barkai collected the lobsters for the transfer. A short 4 kilometer boat ride later, and both he and the lobsters entered the waters by Marcus. And that meant he was the only one to witness what happened next.

“Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire sea bottom started to move,” he said.

That movement was countless whelks. They started to climb onto the newcomers, sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They were outnumbered and overwhelmed.

“To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes, all the lobsters were killed.”

The whelks had literally sucked all the meat out of the lobster shells. Barkai felt bad for the lobsters, and figured he must have conducted the experiment wrong. Then he immediately set about figuring out why the lobster prey had become the lobster predator in a nearby environment. Read what they found that made the two areas different, and what it means for sea management, at Discover magazine.  -via Metafilter

Todd Cobb took on a project to write about ghosts, hauntings, and other urban legends of Portland, Oregon. He solicited stories from anyone who had one about the city. What he got was a range of interesting stories, not-so-interesting stories, and a few crackpots who wasted his time.

Serial disappointments have a way of dulling one’s ambitions. Cobb couldn’t help it if some of the supernatural anecdotes were a bit boring, or if Portland simply didn’t have enough well-documented ghost stories to fill a book. At least one time, he invented a story entirely. It always seemed odd to him to write about “true” ghost stories, but he did get nervous that he was stretching the truth a little too far. But the publisher accepted what he’d written and the book came out in 2007. He became known, at least for awhile, as Portland’s “ghost guy.”

As the ghost guy, he heard more ghost stories, and then a strange thing started happening. He would hear the stories he wrote—parts he knows he made up—repeated back to him, by people he didn’t know and who didn’t realize that they’d read them in a book. He had written in the introduction, “When we move beyond the realm of science, we’re in the realm of faith. We believe because we believe.” But he was surprised that people believed so thoroughly and eagerly in ghosts that he’d just invented.

“The first requirement for there being a ghost in a house is someone believing there’s a ghost in the house,” says Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange, California, who has spent years studying paranormal beliefs in America. A good story can be enough. So now, two haunted bars featured in Cobb’s book—only one of which had a ghost story prior its publication—are equally haunted.

Sarah Laskow went to both bars and talked to employees about the ghostly manifestations, which were strikingly similar. And she talked to experts about how people believe in ghosts because they want to believe in ghosts, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.

The performers you know from movies, TV, and Broadway represent only about one percent of the performing artists making a living today. The rest work in nightclubs, dinner theater, amusement parks, local birthday parties, and cruise ships. Cruise ships hire a wide range of performers to entertain thousands of passengers, and Princess Cruises guest entertainment manager Phil Kaler knows them all.  

The $38 billion cruise industry has boomed with Boomers, growing from 17.8 million passengers in 2010 to 25.8 million passengers in 2017. The Regal Princess is one of more than four hundred fifty active cruise ships, and each is a floating entertainment district. It typically employs a six-piece party band; a seven-piece house band; a jazz quintet; a DJ; a piano-bar lounge singer; and seventeen singer-dancers who rotate through stage shows, including two created exclusively for Princess by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz. (Other lines feature partnerships with outfits like Cirque du Soleil, Second City, and Blue Note Records.) Last year, Kaler and his team booked four hundred sixty-eight different headliners, from “a cappella” to “xylophonist.”

“How can you please all 4,100 passengers?” Kaler asks, as he unfurls massive spreadsheets that map out his bookings across all eighteen ships. “You can’t. You give them variety.”

Seven years ago, Kahler launched the Entertainer of the Year competition for cruise performers, to reward the best artists for their hard work. The contest gets its own week-long cruise. The top prize is only $5,000, which is a couple weeks pay for cruise performers, but the recognition that comes with the title is worth it, and is especially useful for booking further jobs. Esquire magazine followed the Entertainer of the Year cruise and competition, and tells us the stories of the performers who make their living entertaining passengers. -via Digg

(Image credit: Logan Hill)  

There are many species of parasitic wasps, many of which we've posted. But even parasites can become the victim of parasites, in this case a plant that feeds on wasps that feed on plants. The oak leaf gall wasp invades oak trees and induces them to develop galls, or abnormal growths, that the wasps use to draw nutrition from and lay their eggs in. A research team led by Scott Egan of Rice University noticed a vine among collected galls that seem to have attached suction cups to the galls.  

So, Dr. Egan went back to the Florida sand live oak forest where his collaborator, Glen Hood, first found the gall. Dr. Egan walked through the trees and kept his eyes open. Soon, he realized that in one patch, the oaks and their galls were threaded with a plant called the parasitic love vine. There the researchers found numerous instances of the vine entering the galls.

The connection did not seem harmless. When the researchers dissected 51 love-vine-infested galls from one wasp species, they found that 45 percent contained a mummified adult wasp, compared with only 2 percent of uninfested galls.

That suggests that the love vine interferes with the wasp’s nutrition such that it develops fully but is not able to leave. And the host tissue within dissected galls was twisted toward the vine's entry points, hinting that it was co-opting the gall's nutrients.

Revenge of the plant kingdom, indeed. Read more about the parasitic vine at the New York Times. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Egan, Zhang, Comerford, and Hood)

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Animator Joshua Slice is also a musician. That means Lucas the Spider can play tiny little musical instruments -five of them! And he does it cutely, as always. -via Geeks Are Sexy

At first glance, running a lemonade stand appears to be a wholesome activity. We imagine children getting their first taste of entrepreneurship, while passers-by get a refreshing drink on a hot day. But it wasn't always that way. Lemonade sold on the street was always iffy. If you were lucky, it contained alcohol, and if you were unlucky, it could be vinegar and swill. And even when kids took over, sometimes it could be dangerous.

One hot afternoon in July of 1941, a young woman—name and age unreported—opened up a lemonade stand in Western Springs, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The “little girl,” as newspaper accounts later described her, plied her friends and passing strangers with refreshing glasses of lemonade in a makeshift stand just outside of her home. She sometimes sampled her own supply.

Within weeks, the county’s health department was knocking on her door. They asked questions about the chain of lemonade custody and her sanitary practices. It turned out that the budding entrepreneur had failed to rinse the glasses she gave to her customers after they had been used. As a result, she had contracted polio, and so had four of her young friends. According to the Associated Press, the outbreak of the disease was no less than the “hottest trail of the deadly disease virus in the history of epidemiology.”

Read the history of lemonade stands at Mental Floss.

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We knew cheetahs were born to run, but who knew that liked to play fetch? The Oregon Zoo throws balls for their cheetahs to chase for exercise and enrichment, and in order to fling them fast and far enough, they built a huge slingshot they call the Cheetahpult. Imagine getting to shoot that contraption and play ball with large cats ...and getting paid for it. -via Laughing Squid

Dani El Eos (Eye of Sauron Designs) is a cosplayer who's been everyone from Gaston to Batman. You can see that he really doesn't look all that much like Popeye. But he teamed up with makeup effects artist Sendy Kumalakanta Lenardic (Mad Squirrel Design FX) to bring Popeye to life for Yunicon 2018!  



The secret was the sculpted silicone prosthetics and makeup by Mad Squirrel Design.



So of course, you want to see Popeye's forearms. El Eos described them as "basicly silicone pancakes that are wrapped around my arms."



Yes, he can move and speak under all that. See more pictures of Popeye here. See the range of Dani El Eos' cosplay characters at Instagram.

-via reddit

A woman in California, Jessica Allen, agreed to become a surrogate mother for a couple from China. Allen and her husband already had two sons. An embryo from the couple was implanted, and the pregnancy confirmed. Later tests showed that Jessica was pregnant with twins, which the surrogacy agency assumed were identical twins. But after the birth, the Chinese government demanded a DNA test before the couple could get passports for the twins. That test showed that one twin was not related to the couple! Further tests showed that the boy was the biological child of Allen and her husband, Wardell Jasper. It was a rare case of superfetation, or getting pregnant when you are already pregnant. The logical thing would be to return the baby, then called Max, to his biological parents. But there was a problem.

Allen had been paid extra for carrying twins. The case worker insisted some of that money needed to be paid back to the intended parents. She was also asking for money to pay for the care of the baby while he was in their care.

It was money that the family simply didn't have. And it was hard to find a lawyer who knew what to do in this unusual situation.

At one point Allen says the surrogacy agency offered an option — if they gave up custody rights to the boy and agreed to have him adopted out, the bills would be paid by the adoptive parents.  They wanted a decision right away.

The good news is that Max was returned to Allen and Jasper at the age of two months. The bad news is that the baby, now named Malachi, is still not recognized as their legal son and has no birth certificate. Legal wrangling continues between Allen and Jasper and the surrogacy agency. Read the story at CBC and get even more information from the attached audio story. -via Metafilter

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In this fan film by Brendan H. Banks, a marooned Imperial scout trooper is tracking a Jedi on an unfamiliar planet. Since the odds of escape are pretty low, he may as well complete his mission. But then a kid shows up. The sequence is beautifully shot, but if you are pinched for time, you can skip forward to 2:45 to catch the story. -via Digg

Once upon a time, going to a concert was all about the music. Then Alice Cooper came along and turned the concert stage into a circus, playing a character in terrifying makeup, singing terrifying songs in a powerful show that no one could forget. And all while using a woman's name for reasons no one could fathom. Those concerts propelled his songs to the top of the charts.   

“[When] that curtain goes up all of a sudden I am not that same guy,” Cooper told me recently about his onstage transformation from Vincent Furnier into the man we all love and fear as Alice. “I become that character and the game is on. And that character is a villain and he goes out there with absolutely no attitude of ‘Gee, I hope you like us tonight.’ He goes out there with the attitude of grabbing ’em by the throat and shaking them for an hour and a half.”

He's been doing that for 50 years now. Alice Cooper shares stories from his long career in an interview at Uproxx.

(Image credit: Eduardo Gabriel via Flickr)

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John Krasinski is best known for playing Jim Halpert in the TV series The Office. Now he's playing the title character in Amazon's new series Jack Ryan (available as of today), based on the Tom Clancy character. It only makes sense that the CIA operative would be instantly mashed up with The Office. Funny or Die jumped on that idea. -via Metafilter

Wire Hon collects action figures, but they don't just lie around. These superheroes are earning their keep by posing for action pictures, many of them with Hon!



The perspective isn't a matter of Photoshop. These pictures were taken with a iPhone placed just right to get the proper angle, to make the action figures life-size.  



See all of his images at Instagram and a collection of the best at Bored Panda.

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In case you've ever wondered why the comic strip Garfield isn't funny, comic artist Jim Davis will readily admit to the fact that it wasn't even designed to be funny. The cartoon cat is wildly popular in spite of this ...or specifically because of this. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains the thinking behind Garfield. Despite the apparent length, the story is less then 12 minutes.

August seems like an odd time to post a "best of the year" list, but here we are. There have been so many people trying to get away with something that Mashable has plenty of material to work with. Four months from now, they may have an update, but what we've got so far is pretty egregious, and it doesn't even include politicians.

14. Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame

You might remember McFarland from his other failed scam: Fyre Festival. Unfortunately, he does not appear to have learned a single lesson from that debacle. McFarland was arrested in June and charged with wire fraud and money laundering for a fake ticket sales scheme completely separate from Fyre Fest. Billy, dude, what's up?

3. The royal wedding expert

Thomas J. Mace-Archer-Mills, Esq. sounds exactly like the name of someone who would fake their way into becoming an expert in all things royal wedding. With his best fake British accent, Tommy Muscatello scammed his way into history just in time for the nuptials of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

He perfected his British accent twenty years ago during a school play and put it to good use by appearing on news programs regularly as a royal wedding expert and founding member of the British Monarchist Foundation — only to eventually be called out by The Wall Street Journal. Turns out, Mace-Archer-Mills was just a combination of his friends’ last names. In an interesting twist, the British accent has stuck with Muscatello even after all this controversy. Pretty impressive.

Read the rest of the list at Mashable. A couple of them aren't even human.

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