Rare 'Velvet Spider' species found in Maharashtra's Melghat

Mumbai: Velvet Spider, a very rare spider species which was believed to be extinct has been found in the jungles of Melghat in Maharashtra's Amravati district.The spider, thought to be extinct from the Indian subcontinent, has been found almost after a gap of 80 years," arachnologist Prof Dr Ganesh N Vankhede of Amravati University said.

This particular arthropod species is known for its woolly black or black and red body structure, he said.-READ MORE -http://zeenews.india.com/news/sci-tech/rare-velvet-spider-species-found-in-maharashtras-melghat_1830352.html

New sand fly species discovered in Brazil

In an attempt to better understand the taxonomy of a group of sand flies, researchers in Brazil examined specimens in museum collections. After detailed morphometric and morphological analyses of three different flies in the genus Psathyromyia, they found that the specimens were originally misidentified and that they were actually an undescribed species. The new species, Psathyromyia baratai, is described in the Journal of Medical Entomology. The species name pays homage to Professor José Maria Soares Barata of the Public Health School of the University of São Paulo for his important contribution to medical entomology, mainly through his teaching and research into the Triatominae.-READ MORE -http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/esoa-nsf120315.php

Xiaochelys ningchengensis - Fossil Discovery Reveals New Species of Jehol Turtle

The Jehol Biota is a rich Cretaceous ecosystem preserved in a multi-layered rock formation cropping out in the Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Hebei and Inner Mongolia. A huge variety of ancient organisms became fossilized there 125 million years ago.

Over the course of the last two decades, a large number of turtle fossils were recovered from the Jehol Biota but very few of them were described.

Dr Chang-Fu Zhou of the Shenyang Normal University and Dr Márton Rabi of the University of Tübingen and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have now identified a new species of Jehol turtle and named it Xiaochelys ningchengensis.

According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, this new species is so unique that it also represents a new genus.

Dr Rabi and Dr Zhou also investigated its possible relationship with today’s chelonians (turtles, tortoises, and terrapins).READ MORE -http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/xiaochelys-ningchengensis-new-species-jehol-turtle-03485.html

Animals found living in rock deep, deep underground

A wide variety of animals have been found living more than a kilometre underground — far deeper than scientists used to think it was possible for life to thrive.

A new study, published recently in Nature Communications, has discovered 17 species of animals living in water trapped in rock as deep as 1.4 kilometres underground in two South African gold mines. They include:

• A wide variety of worms — flatworms, roundworms, and ringed worms related to earthworms.
• Aquatic organisms called rotifers.
• A copepod, a tiny relative of shrimp.

Some of the same species were found in both mines.

The 17 species found deep underground include a) a flatworm b) a segmented worm c) a roundworm and d) a copepod. (Borgonie et al./Nature Communications)

The discovery of such animals so deep underground "is promising for the search for life on other planets/moons in our solar system," the researchers wrote.-READ MORE -http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/deep-life-rock-kilometre-down-1.3351408

Warty Wonders: Three New Toads Found in Brazil

He and his team had left Paraná, Brazil (map), at the crack of dawn for a long, bumpy ride in a beat-up 4x4. Parking at the base of a mountain called Serra do Quiriri, the group left their vehicle and began a steep ascent into the cloud forest, exhausted and drenched.

Then, Pie heard a quiet croak. Tiptoeing through the forest in nearly complete darkness, he tracked the sound back to a small, red-bellied toad in the branches of a bromeliad. (See "Seven New Mini-Frogs Found—Among Smallest Known.")-READ MORE -http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151203-toads-brazil-new-species-science-discovery/

Goldfish Memory

Can a goldfish entertain more than one thought at a time, and would it remember if it could...? Dr Karl goes in the deep-end to try and find out.

There are over 125 types of goldfish. This is the result of careful selective breeding, begun when goldfish were first domesticated during the Chinese Sung Dynasty, about a thousand years ago - not that the goldfish would know anything about it! The popular belief is that no goldfish can remember anything that happened more than a few seconds ago. So every circuit of their tank or pond should be fresh and new - because supposedly, they can't remember the last loop.

So do fish have a memory? And how would you show that a fish has a memory? Or any animal for that matter?

Clearly, the Clark's Nutcracker has a superb memory. This bird lives in the American Southwest, and hoards food to get it through the winter. As autumn approaches, a single bird harvests up to 33,000 pine seeds. It then buries them in some 7,000 separate hidden treasure troves, each with about 4 or 5 seeds. Its memory is so good that it later successfully finds each of these individual 7,000 stockpiles. It digs up and eats the seeds to survive the winter. So there you go. Nobody could doubt that this animal has a superb memory.

In fact, few humans could do this - except perhaps Hiroyuki Goto, of Keio University in Tokyo, who in February 1995, correctly recited π to 42,194 places. (π is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.)

Jonathan Lovell from Plymouth University's Institute of Marine Studies is convinced that some fish have a memory. He has successfully trained fish to swim towards a sound. He wants to release domesticated fish into the open sea, and call them back with special sounds to a feeding station, to supplement their natural diet.

Culum Brown (of the Institute of Cell, Animal and Population Biology at the University of Edinburgh) studied the crimson spotted rainbow fish while in Queensland. He compared fish that knew their tanks well, with fish that had just been placed in tanks. He introduced a net with a central hole into a tank, and then swept it from one end to the other. The fish that had a strong memory of their tank were better able to escape through the central hole - presumably because they could ignore what they remembered to be familiar and non-threatening to them (their tank), and instead, could concentrate on the new threat (the net). The fish that knew their tank remembered the trawling net so well, that they could escape it in a follow-up study some 11 months later.

By the way, 11 months is nearly one third of his fish's 3-year lifespan. That's a very long time to remember something that has happened to you only once, and in human terms, about 25 years ago.

Yoichi Oda of Osaka University in Japan has spent years studying the fine details of memory in goldfish - and he's also convinced that goldfish have a good memory.

Some goldfish will come to the glass of their tank whenever people walk into the room. These particular goldfish have worked out that when people turn up, so will food - at least, sometimes. In other words, People = Food. This is called "associative learning". The fish now associate people with food.

Fish also do "social learning", where they learn by watching their fellow fish. Fish are very good at "social learning", because some species of fish are very social. They all hang out together in schools. To survive in the school, they spend a lot of time paying attention to what their school mates do.

Some fish can learn music - probably because it's important for them, in the wild, to be able to distinguish between different sounds in their environment. Ava Chase of the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts taught carp to tell the difference between John Lee Hooker (blues) and a Bach Oboe concerto (classical), by feeding them smaller fish as a food reward. The music was played to the fish through loudspeakers in their tank. She then discovered that the carp could generalize from what they had learnt, and classify music that they had not heard before, into the categories of blues or classical.

Some owners say that their goldfish remember their faces and freely frolic in the tank when they're the only ones present, but hide for an hour or so, when strangers enter the room.

And of course, there are thousands of anecdotes from owners of goldfish, who say that the fish remember regular feeding times. This is very impressive - after all, the goldfish food they get, looks nothing like the food they are genetically programmed to eat.

Ancient giant wasp species found in B.C.

VANCOUVER -- It was literally a huge discovery. Bruce Archibald was searching for fossilized insects in British Columbia's southern Interior when he cracked open a rock and found a beautifully-preserved giant horntail wood-wasp. "I immediately jumped up and split my pants," he recalled with a laugh. "Probably, the species should have been named Latin for pants-splitter, but we went with something a little more technical." Archibald, a paleoentomologist with the Royal B.C. Museum and Simon Fraser University, had discovered a 53-million-year-old species of giant wasp, which he dubbed Ypresiosirex orthosemos.READ MORE-http://www.torontosun.com/2015/11/18/ancient-giant-wasp-species-found-in-bc