Symbiotic, Predatory and Prey Relationships

The Crocodile

The crocodile is a well-known carnivore, a predator, living in Africa (alligators in South America) and eating fish, birds and mammals. They are reptiles, with thick scaly skin and hundreds of sharp teeth, and, aside from the salt-water crocodile, which lives in the sea, live in rivers. They can weigh a tonne, and have even been known to eat humans in some cases.


The Egyptian Plover and the crocodile have a very symbiotic relationship. The crocodile eats meat, and of course does not have dental floss, so bits of meat get caught between his teeth. This can cause pain, annoyance and infection. When this huge predator feels he needs his teeth brushed, he lies down with his mouth open, and waits. The Egyptian Plover, a small African bird, will recognize this as an invitation. If there is one nearby, it will fly into the crocodile's mouth and start to feed on the bits of meat lodged between his teeth. This results in benefits for both the reptile and the bird: the Plover gets a meal, and the crocodile gets a much-needed tooth-brushing session. This is an example of a symbiotic relationship, which is a relationship in which both species benefit from each other's company.

I think that if a bird flew into a croc's mouth, it would definitely eat it! And if I were the bird, I would never, ever, ever fly into this scary carnivore's mouth. But the natural world never ceases to amaze us. http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2009/03/01/symbiotic-bird-animal-relationships/

This video is a commercial, and a somewhat strange one at that, but it was the only video of a real crocodile with real plovers, and not in cartoon!

Rabbit Population Growth

Rabbit population is very interesting. It just keeps on growing, doubling every year. Rabbits don't care about mating with family, they just reproduce, reproduce, reproduce. This means they just keep on having babies.
In class today, we did a project on this. We measured the amount of rabbits with different coloured beans, and we did indeed get double the previous amount every time. Here are the results:

Giant Carnivorous Centipede!

http://www.damninteresting.com/giant-carnivorous-centipedes/

Scolopendra gigantea. The largest centipede in the world is commonly known as the Amazonian giant centipede, and lives in South America's Amazon Jungle and also on the islands of Trinidad and Jamaica. They usually grow to around thirty-five centimeters, the size of a man's forearm, and they are a venomous, red-maroon centipede with forty-six yellow-tinted legs. They live in dark, damp corners of caves and rocks and creep out for food. Of course, many centipedes are carnivorous, but that diet usually included bugs smaller than themselves. The Amazonian giant centipede is not only an incredibly swift runner, but also is an amazing climber. It eats mice, lizards, frogs, birds and mice, and with a quick motion snags its prey and injects a deadly venom, killing small animals in seconds. Strangest of all, this creepy centipede preys on a hugely ambitious prey: bats. They silently scale cave walls to the roof, where the bats are nesting. They then hang on to the rock with their back legs and detach their front legs, grabbing an unsuspecting bat as it flies away. The bat writhes in the grasp of many legs, but is condemned by the injection of the poison. The centipede then eats the entire bat right there, on the cave ceiling, proceeding to pull its upper three quarters of the body back onto the rock and crawling back into its hole.

In my opinion, this creature is very creepy and weird, and yet amazing. Its size makes it incomparable to any other bug, and what it does freaks me out. It feasts on bats? How does it detach itself from the ceiling and catch a flying animal? Truly amazing.

What Bacteria Don't Know Can Hurt Them

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111117163703.htm

 Many infections resist treatment, making some impossible to cure. This has a main reason: bacteria for nutrients during infection. Starved bacteria resist nearly every type of antibiotic, even new ones they have never been exposed to before. Scientists say that bacteria becomes starved when they run out of nutrients in the body, or when they live in biofilms. Biofilms are clusters of bacteria encased in a slimy coating, and Dr. Pradeep Singh says that an important factor in why biofilms resist so much to antibiotics is that the bacteria on the outside receive most of the nutrients in the body, starving the bacteria on the inside, who then become immune to the antibiotics. Scientists have tested whether bacteria only become resistant if they are aware of their starvation, and have been amazed - bacteria that were unaware of their starvation were thousands of times less resistant to antibiotics than aware starved ones. This means that what bacteria don't know can hurt them.

I think that once again, "what you don't know can't hurt you" has been proved wrong. I also was really amazed that starving bacteria would, instead of weakening, become stronger! It's also really unfair, though, to patients and scientists. They say that because of this, it's really hard to invent new, effective antibiotics.

Extra Giant Planet May Have Dwelled in Our Solar System

http://www.livescience.com/17110-extra-giant-planet-solar-system.html

Billions of years ago, it is possible that a giant planet might have inhabitied the solar system alongside Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.

This possibility has been discovered using computer models, showing how our solar system formed. They suggested the two planets onceused gravity to sling one another across space, only settling into their own orbits after billions of years.

"During more than 6,000 scattering phase, planetary scientist David Nesvorny at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, found that a solar system that began with four giant planets only had a 2.5% chance of leading to the orbits presently seen now. These systems would be too violent in their youth to end up resembling ours, most likely resulting in systems that have less than four giants over time."

Instead, our solar system probably began with five giants, with a now lost world around the size of Uranus and Neptune. It was probably an "ice giant," just like them, Nesvorny explained.

When the solar system was around 600 million years old, there was a major period of instability that scattered giant planets and smaller worlds, researchers said. Eventually, a gravitational encounter would have flung the mystery planet to interstellar space around 4 billion years ago.

Many planets have been discovered in interstellar space, so such an ejection might be common.

Nesvorny says that this is just the beginning. "It will need quite a lot of work to see if there actually was a fifth planet. Iam not fully convinced myself."

As for me, Ithink that this is truly amazing and that the world should definitely be told about this if it turns out to be true.

Apple iPhone 4S "Drains Battery Too Fast" Complaints

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15559721

The new iPhone 4S has received many complaints about its battery, saying that the battery is absolutely terrible.

"The iPhone 4S has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It is supposed to provide up to eight hours of 3G talk time (14 hours of 2G) with standby time of up to 200 hours."

But thousands of Apple customers are saying that "their iPhone battery drains at a ridiculous rate, even when on standby mode.

Apple told BBC it had no comments on the issue.

One man says "I have an iPhone 4 and since putting iOS 5 on it the battery life has been really bad it drops at a ridiculous rate even when I'm not using it where as it would barely drop any charge when it was in standby." Some blame it on iCloud services, others the Notifications, one of the key features of iOS 5.

One person said that deactivating the time zone setting function. When he did, he said, the iPhone was no longer constantly changing the time and using up so much battery.

When iPhone 4S was launched, however, Apple chief executive Tim Cook promised a significant change in battery life.

So what is Apple going to do?

DIRT! the movie

I watched this film with my brother because I wasn’t there in class, and we both really enjoyed it. It taught me a lot, like: there are more organisms in a handful of dirt than on all other known planets! I thought it was very descriptive, though scary in some ways. For example, when it showed what has happened to our planet and what will happen. It was also very funny, when it showed the dirt in cartoon fighting, playing and laughing.

I never thought much of dirt before, but now I realise how important it is to our planet. If only more people knew this, the world would truly be a better place. I think that there should be more places where children can plant vegetables, eat them and overall learn about them and have fun. It is a great opportunity.

There are people who worship dirt, others who just don’t think it’s important. Some have destroyed it without meaning to; others have bad weather which ruins dirt. Some destroy it on purpose to make space for cities, roads or buildings. Whatever happens, the last of our dirt will probably soon be destroyed...

Dirt contains billions of tiny organisms, like fungi, bacteria, protists, insects, worms... so it is very much alive. STOP KILLING IT, WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Freaky Beetle Larva Turn on and Devour their Frog Predators

http://www.livescience.com/16232-beetle-larvae-devour-frogs-toads.html

These horribly creepy crawlies have attacked their predators! Their usual killers are frogs and toads but the larvae of several species of ground beetle have turned on the poor amphibians. They have a grisly way of doing so: they attract the frog by waggling their antennae and jiggling their jaws, at which point the toad thinks he’s going in for an easy kill. He closes in slowly and then pounces. But the larva evades capture and launches itself onto the nearest part of the frog or toad's body. He then begins to suck out the amphibian’s fluids and chew and gnaw on its flesh, leaving nothing but a pile of bones.

Researchers say that sometimes the victim manages to swallow the horrible beetle larva, only to vomit it up later. If the larva is unharmed, it will promptly jump onto the exhausted frog and continue its meal. The record is for a larva to survive in its victim’s belly for two hours before it was vomited out and devoured the frog.  If the frog is lucky, the attacking beetle will be in its first stage of development, and when it moults will drop of the toad, leaving a horrid scar. But if the larva is older, the frog is doomed. The beetle not only sucks the body fluids, but starts to chew. (Adult beetles can also ambush amphibians, paralyzing them by severing their spinal cord or a crucial muscle.)

All this is absolutely disgusting, and gives me the shivers just reading about it. But it’s life!

The Planet Orbiting Two Suns

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/215813/20110918/planet-orbiting-two-suns-uncommon-planet-tatooine-kepler-16b-kepler-16-saturn-mass-planet.htm

NASA's $600 million Kepler space telescope discovered a planet orbiting two suns, just like in Star Wars, 34 years ago, where they refer to a planet called "Tatooine" with two sunsets. Named Kepler-16b, the rare planet is the first confirmed solar system of its kind. A planet like this is called a circumbinary planet. (A planet that orbits one sun is called a binary planet.)

Kepler-16b is about the size of Saturn and 200 light years from Earth.

But Kepler-16b is not completely like Tatooine. It is cold and dark, made of gas and probably not inhabited.

The reason for this is that the two suns are smaller and cooler than our sun. They are 20 and 69 percent as massive as the sun and circle each other every 41 days. It takes Kepler 229 days to circle both stars. Kepler 16b's interaction with two different suns means that temperatures on its surface can vary by about 50 degrees, between roughly minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Macaroni Penguin's Weird Habit of Laying Two Eggs a Year

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20obpeng.html?ref=penguins

The female Macaroni penguin lays two eggs every year, the first one much smaller than the second. This has puzzled scientists for six decades, particularly as the mother kicks the tiny egg out of the nest before it hatches.
But they think that the reason that the reason for the lack of size for the first egg is a drop in the amount of protein as the penguin returns to land from the sea. Also, if the egg is laid within days of arrival to land, the egg will be tiny, maybe even half the size of the second egg. And if the couple wait longer, the egg will be closer to the size of the next egg, though it will still be kicked out.
But why the female Macaroni penguin bothers to produce the small egg in the first place is still a mystery. Scientists believe that it may be a part of evolution gone wrong.

What I Know and Want to Learn

What I want to learn:

Everything about living things, which I am very interested in.

What I already knew:

I know that the Spanish flu after World War I wiped out more people than the war itself. That mites live in our hair, our beds, our clothes. That frogs fertilize their eggs on the outside and insects on the inside. I can’t really say everything I know…