India Narrative

Like any other mother, the female octopus is protective of her eggs. Guarding them day and night, she zealously shields them from predators while ensuring they remain oxygenated by blowing water over them. Yet, a report in smithsonianmag.com stated that a mother octopus is different as unlike other mums, she ceases to eat and worse self-destructs and inflicts injury to herself – tearing her skin, beating herself against rock and eating her arms. Finally, she dies before getting to see the eggs hatch! Till now what the octopus experts knew was that the optic glands of the creature were accountable for this peculiar conduct. This was confirmed since the removal of these glands saw the octopus start eating and living longer. Yet, what was fascinating was how did these glands trigger such amazing and strange actions? Read more

When marine creatures like sea turtles travel great distances in the oceans to their breeding grounds without any aid for navigation, it has fascinated scientists. A report in sciencealert.com states that a new study has revealed that this ability in turtles is due to its built-in geomagnetic steering and also plenty of luck and tenacity. For this study 22 hawksbill turtles or Eretmochelys imbricata were fitted with GPS trackers to chart their routes they would adhere, to reach their foraging regions following mating and breeding. It was indeed surprising to know that the routes taken were circuitous. For instance, one creature swam 1,306 kilometres to reach an island which was merely 176 km from where it started. Basically, the travelling entailed plenty of swimming before they reached the dry land. In their paper, the scientists wrote: "Our results provide compelling evidence that hawksbill turtles only have a relatively crude map sense in the open ocean. The existence of widesp

It is not just mammals and birds who can do simple addition and subtraction as studies have shown that bees and salamanders are capable of that. Now fresh research has added fishes – cichlids and stingrays – to that growing list as per a report in sciencealert.com. Both the zebra mbuna cichlids or Pseudotropheus zebra and freshwater stingrays or Potamotrygon motoro have exhibited this capability which goes beyond symbol memorisation. Sharing the essence of their study in a paper, Vera Schluessel and colleagues wrote: “Individuals did not just learn to pick the highest or lowest number presented based on the respective colour; instead, learning was specific to adding or subtracting 'one'.” Schluessel is a zoologist at Bonn University. Scientists showed the fish two gates which had cards with different number of shapes. On being shown a card that three blue squares, the correct door would have to be one with four blue squares, meaning that they have to add one and for this they w

It has been a long held belief that sharks don’t sleep and the reason given for this was that some of them needed to keep swimming in order to have a constant and steady supply of oxygen-rich water go through their gills. Now, a report in smithsonianmag.com mentions that Australian scientists have studied and recorded a species of these fishes which live in the bottom and have been observed to sleep. The details of this new study which has been published in Biology Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, points out that sharks can sleep and many prefer keeping their eyes wide open while doing so. Talking to Newsweek, Michael Kelly, an author of this study said: "Until now, sleep in sharks was completely unstudied and unknown. Sharks are a particularly important group as they are the oldest living jawed vertebrates—a trait they share with us.” Kelly is an ecophysiologist at La Trobe University, Melbourne. The subject of this study was the draughtsboard sharks. This native to