The two pics shown here come from new research being done on oceanic zooplankton. You probably don't care all that much about zooplankton (please don't take that personally, I'm just talking statistical likelihood here). But you have to admit the pictures are kind of cool.
Surprisingly, FOX News has the story as well, although they play up the Bermuda Triangle angle. Because the rubes love stupid crap like that. Still no sign of Natalee, though.
If your cup of tea doesn't include plankton, here are some newly discovered frogs in Laos. I get the impression that if you want to make a name for yourself in biology fieldwork right now, you want to be working in Laos, where just about everything is a species previously unknown to science, including whatever it was that you just ate for dinner. Grilled Laotian Rock Rat, anyone?
The feds have decided to list a couple of coral species as "threatened". It's a mild step, to be sure, but it's still more than I would've expected from the Busheviks. Maybe some wealthy campaign contributor is a scuba diver in his spare time, or we're getting ready to bomb some random Third World country and we're planning to use "protecting the coral" as a handy excuse. Nothing would surprise me these days.
A couple of cute pictures of blackbirds, from across the pond. Baby birds usually aren't cute, but this is a notable exception.
Turning to the plant kingdom, India is facing the loss of many species of wild banana trees. I didn't realize bananas were originally from India, but apparently they are. Which means that when you see the trees growing elsewhere, in the Carribbean for example, they aren't truly wild but instead are feral bananas.
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