That nightmarish thing in the photo above isn’t a screen-used graboid prop from Tremors.

Nope.

That’s an actual creature that lives in our oceans…you know…that giant mass of water that you swim in when you vacation?

Caught off the coast of Australia by a fishing trawler, that thing is a six-foot long monster known as a frilled shark.

Frilled sharks haven’t evolved in almost 80 million years simply because a nightmare is always going to be a nightmare. On very rare occasions frilled sharks are found close to the surface because they’re dying. “Close to the surface” is around 4,000 feet below the surface.

Simon Boag of the trawling company that caught the creature:

“It does look 80 million years old. It looks prehistoric. It looks like it’s from another time! It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you’re in that mouth, you’re not coming out.”

According to a marine conservation society in California there is a report of a frilled shark from 1880 measuring in at 25 feet.

Next time you go splashing around in the ocean for fun just remember…

These live there.

[NatGeo]

‘Squirrel!’

Ever wonder what it looked like at the inception point of a thought? Like when your watching ‘fail videos’ online and you do that mental cringe at the exact moment that you’re watching someone sledding down a hill on an oil-pan and suddenly the shot pans far enough to see the gaggle of unattentive people about to meet said oil-pan driver?

Wonder no more!

Researchers in Japan have actually filmed that ‘Oh $#%*!’ moment…

In a zebrafish.

Watch the video. That sudden flash of light takes place the moment the fish noticed food being put into the tank. Zebrafish aren’t going to be taking over the world anytime soon with all of their incredible cerebral abilities, but that was the point of this…to record the inception of a thought in a more simple brain simply to see if it could be done.

A double-transgenic larva was embedded in agarose, and a spot was presented on an LCD display placed on the right-eye side. Ca2+ signals were detected on the left tectum upon appearance (ON) and disappearance (OFF) of the spot. The spot was shown for the first 3 s in this 6 s movie. The video is shown at 3x real time.

Experiments are expected to take place on more advanced brains way too soon.

We could sit around all day and come up with scenarios about this stunning breakthrough.

But if you were a zebrafish, we’d already know that.

[Gizmodo]

What you’re looking at isn’t the newest trend in ‘crop-circling’. The thing that created this spectacular-looking sand sculpture isn’t an alien trying to communicate with humankind, either.

The master craftsman behind this amazing looking design is something far less scary and almost kind of adorable.

Yoji Ookota, an office worker who left his cubicle life to pursue his love of underwater photography, recently discovered something that no one had seen until his camera caught sight of it.

A six-foot-wide, elaborate geometric shape 80 feet under the surface of the water on the sea floor. Then he began to spot more of them. Ookota dubbed them the ‘mystery circles’.

As Ookota began to study the circles to find out how they were created, he found the culprit.

An adorable little male puffer fish.

In an amazing display of engineering and the need to be loved, the male puffer fish uses its fins and works day and night to create these things in order to attract females to mate with them. Once the puffer fish creates the ridges, males have even been seen filling their mouths with shells and blowing them onto the ridges they created like they were doing some primitive, animal form of bedazzling.

Females, attracted by the final design, join the male in the center of the design and mate. Later on the female returns to the center of the ‘mystery circle’ and lays her eggs.

These ‘mystery circles’ aren’t just for decoration either. Those shells used to ‘bedazzle’ the ridges appear to serve as nutrients to the young fish when they hatch. According to the most recent research, the design isn’t just for decoration and attracting a mate. The design also features a small bit of engineering. Scientists are discovering that the ridges also serve to protect the eggs from predators and currents that could scatter the eggs across the ocean floor.

This fish has more motivation and interior design abilities than most guys we know.

Weirdly amazing.

[Spoon & Tamago]

You can all rest easy now.

NOAA, a government body that apparently has a lot of time on their hands, have recently laid to rest the idea that mermaids might actually exist.

According to NOAA? They don’t.

Thanks, NOAA…you’ve single-handedly just slapped several million little girls who adorably talk-sing ‘Part of Your World’ and dress up like Ariel right in their precious, red-wigged face and told them to “Knock it OFF!”

After a recent faux documentary called “Mermaids: The Body Found” aired on Animal Planet, NOAA decided it was time to put this silliness to rest once and for all.

“Mermaids: The Body Found” took small truths and sort of expanded upon them keeping the show just within the bounds of plausibility. Much like the “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” ‘documentary’ that aired on television in the 90s or going even further back to the original mayhem-causing broadcast of “War of the Worlds”, “The Body Found” sauntered up to the wall where science fiction and science fact eyeball one another and occasionally hi-five each other.

The mix of vague fact and more exciting fiction was just enough of a mix to get NOAA’s imagination police flustered enough to step in and settle this whole thing once and for all.

In a post titled “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found,” NOAA states that:

The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few. But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.

NOAA has also stepped up to swing a bat at the Lost City of Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle.

NOAA’s statement about ‘No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found” shows that they’re oblivious to our shark-people ancestors we posted about on this very blog.

Up next for NOAA? Proving that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a dude in a rubber suit and that Davy Jones really doesn’t have a locker.

Release the Kraken! Oh…wait…

[Discovery News]

He’s no Muddy Mudskipper, but this African lungfish is shown walking on his fins in this video. You know what they say, you have to crawl before you walk and walk before you climb from the water and murder the land dwelling mammals above you.

Click link below for full video.

[Live Science]

[Animal Planet]

Northwestern University scientists have have created a robotic fish (GhostBot) that mimics the swimming motions of the black ghost knifefish found in the Amazon. Ghostbot can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin.

[Physorg.com]

Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down onto Beebe, Arkansas to help ring in the new year. Welcome to 2011!

UPDATE: 100,000 dead fish have washed up on the banks of the Arkansas River as well.  Get out while you still can.

[KATV via io9]

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute captured the first video of this odd Pacific barreleye fish whose most prominent feature is a completely transparent head. Watch the video for a weird look into a working mind.

Above is a scene from Animal Planet’s series River Monsters. But although some fish look straight up and down bizarre (see the massive fugly catfish above) that doesn’t necessarily make them dangerous.

For example, hippos and alligators are far more murderous than say piranhas, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t once a fish that could cause some serious trouble.

A relative of the piranha, the Megapiranha, grew to 3-feet-long (1 meter), or four times the size of today’s piranhas. Scientists aren’t sure why the fish-beast had seven teeth arranged in a zig-zag row, while today’s piranhas sport six teeth. Fortunately the mega creature is not much of a threat, having died out several million years ago.

Read the whole Live Science article for far more info.

[Live Science]