There’s some debate in the scientific community whether hagfish are actually true fish as they have a skull but no vertebral column to speak of.  Some have called them “slime eels” due to the large volumes of slime they can produce but they are not eels either.

Project Shellter, devised by Miles Lightwood, artist-in-residence at the Makerbot Botcave in Brooklyn, NY, plans to work with the hobbyist 3D printing community to crowd-source ideas and designs for hermit crab shells.

In a paper published in PLoS ONE, researchers Redouan Bshary, Andrea Hohner, Karim Ait-el-Djoudi, and Hans Fricke reported on interesting inter-species behavior that they noticed while at the time researching cleaner wrasse behavior in the Red Sea.

One thing my boys like about this time of year is pumpkin carving – scooping the guts out, creating the faces, and lighting them in the evening. I also get into the spirit as it allows me to break out my copies of Extreme Pumpkins and Extreme Pumpkins II and get my pumpkin carving geek on.

Reservoirs of zooxanthellae around a coral reef are vital for coral larvae settlement. Understanding where and how this zooxanthellae got there and are maintained are important factors to know when studying coral reef ecology.

In order to test this theory, researchers threaded eight different Fijian seaweeds through heads of coral including Acropora millepora.

As always, another great podcast was published this past Sunday by Gary and Christine.

In this episode, Richard Ross and Matt Wandell are interviewed about their dual roles at the California Academy of Science’s Steinhart Aquarium where Gary recently visited.

The staff is still at a loss for how this happened. Some staff members at Reef HQ speculate that the babies could be clones from an injured jelly that had been housed and died in the tank months before:

“Jellyfish clone very easily.

In August of 2011, researchers confirmed a bacterium from human excrement, Serratia marcescens, is responsible for White Pox Disease that has devastated Elkhorn Coral (Acropora palmata).