Prehistoric puzzle no more: Illinois fossil a vertebrate

• 
  

.

View gallery

• 
  .

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — For decades, fossil hunters combing the soil near a creek in north-central Illinois have been rewarded with the preserved remnants of a prehistoric creature, its wide-set eyes on stalks and a long, arm-like appendage extending from below them with a pincer-like mouth.

There was no doubt that the Tully monster, Illinois' official state fossil, was "very, very bizarre," said Scott Lidgard, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Museum. But no one could say exactly what the soft-bodied creature was.

That changed Wednesday with a paper published in the journal Nature: A group of researchers, Lidgard included, concluded the Tully monster had a precursor to a backbone, making it a vertebrate, or primitive fish.

The origin of vertebrates is still an open question, he said, and there aren't many good examples of preserved, soft-bodied fishes. It's also personally important for Lidgard, who's long been charged with the museum's collection of 1,800 Tully monster fossils, the largest in the world.

"I'm pretty excited because I've had to live with this guy, something I wish I knew what it was, for my 32 years here," he said. "And it's been a puzzle."

The fossilized remnants of the Tully monster have not been found outside Illinois, only in the Mazon Creek area, about 50 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. About 300 million years ago, the spot was a warm coastal marsh along a long-gone sea near the equator. This was before the dinosaurs; Tyrannosaurus rex didn't come about until roughly 67 million years ago.

The abundant plant life eventually became coal, and eons later, strip mining dug up piles of earth and shale — and fossilized prehistoric life. Paleontologists consider the area a treasure because of plant and animal life that was, for reasons not fully known, set in stone quickly enough before decay could set in.

An amateur paleontologist named Francis Tully unearthed the first Tully monster in 1958. Thousands of other examples have since been found by fossil hunters combing the area, much of it now set aside as Mazonia-Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area.

Mining faded in the 1970s, and, after decades of fossil hunting, the area does not yield quite as many specimens as it used to, said Colleen Schmidt, an office associate at the state fish and wildlife area.

View gallery

This undated photo provided by The Field Museum in Chicago shows a fossil of a Tully monster. The Tu …

But those who know where to look — "they do have their (secret) spots," Schmidt said — can still find plenty. They leave with oblong nodules of rock, some of which, when broken open, contain fossils; often it's plant life, like prehistoric ferns that are hard to imagine on Illinois' prairie.

The Tully monster fossils show a creature that swam the shallows of that ancient sea and ranged from a few inches long to roughly a foot. There are traces of other, more-familiar animals, Lidgard said, especially the odd mouth and its teeth, known as stylets, that share some characteristics with squids and lampreys. The eye stalks are similar to some snails.

But the team of researchers from the museum, Argonne National Laboratory, Yale University and elsewhere focused on some of the fossils' curious raised areas. Those areas were once believed to be remnants of the animal's guts, but that kind of soft tissue would have been pressed flat as it was fossilized, so these areas must have been something harder, more resilient, they thought.

"It has a cartilage skeletal system," Lidgard said the group concluded. "It runs along the midline. Beneath it is the nerve cord ... Sort of a precursor to a spine."

Even with the discovery, the Tully monster remains in many ways an enigma.

That strange mouth, extended away from its body, may have helped it as a predator, Lidgard said, or maybe it scavenged for food. The wide-set eyes may have given it a greater field of vision for hunting, but no one knows for sure.

And Mazon Creek continues to offer more mysteries.

"There's an animal called the H animal," named for its odd, H-shaped body, Lingard said. "We don't know what it is."

___

Online:

Nature: www.nature.com/index.html

Field Museum, www.fieldmuseum.org/

Mazonia-Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area: www.dnr.illinois.gov/Parks/Pages/Mazonia-Braidwood.aspxTweet

What Would It Be Like to Live on Alien Planet Kepler-186f?

Tweet

Discovery Science: Alien Planet Earths (2014)

Tweet

Drought Led to Demise of Ancient City of Angkor

The ancient city of Angkor — the most famous monument of which is the breathtaking ruined temple of Angkor Wat — might have collapsed due to valiant but ultimately failed efforts to battle drought, scientists find.

Read more »

20 tons of herring wash up on Norway coast

Molly the dog discovers 20 tons of herring on a Norwegian beach

An estimated 20 tons of dead herring fish mysteriously washed up on the cost of Norway and then disappeared.

The fish remains turned up on Norway's northern coast on New Year's Eve, and officials are still looking to explain just how and why they showed up.

Read more »

Giant plumes of methane bubbling to surface of Arctic Ocean

Methane bubbles trapped in the arctic ice

Russian scientists have discovered hundreds of plumes of methane gas, some 1,000 meters in diameter, bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean. Scientists are concerned that as theArctic Shelf recedes, the unprecedented levels of gas released could greatly accelerate global climate change.

Igor Semiletov of the Russian Academy of Sciences tells the UK's Independent that the plumes of methane, a gas 20 times as harmful as carbon dioxide, have shocked scientists who have been studying the region for decades. "Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of meters in diameter," he said. "This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing."

Read more »

Cheeky monkey! Macaque borrows photographer's camera to take hilarious self-portraits

To capture the perfect wildlife image, you usually have to be in exactly the right place at precisely the right time.
But in this instance, David Slater wasn’t there at all and he still got a result.
Visiting a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, award-winning photographer Mr Slater left his camera unattended for a while.

Read more »

"Descendants" - Animation

"Descendants" - Animation
„Descendants“ is a 14 minute animated short about the wish of attaining the unattainable and about the fact that something good can evolve from something evil. The two main characters are flowers (voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Christy Scott Cashman) who grow on the edge of a clearing next to one another. One is old and jaded by a mysterious history - the other one still young, vivid and curious. Destiny has brought these two together and it seems as if they would exist without possibility for change, until one day a visitor to the clearing brings something unexpected to their lives.

Read more »

Zenattitude - Nautilus

Zenattitude - Nautilus

Original Release Date: 9 April 2002
Label: Essential Media Group

Nautilus (from Greek ναυτίλος, 'sailor') is the common name of marine creatures of cephalopod family Nautilidae, the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in two genera, the type of which is the genus Nautilus. Though it more specifically refers to species Nautilus pompilius, the name chambered nautilus is also used for any species of the Nautilidae.

Nautilidae, both extant and extinct, are characterized by involute or slightly evolute shells that are generally smooth, with compressed or depressed whorl sections, straight to sinuous sutures, and a tubular, generally central siphuncle.[2] Having survived relatively unchanged for millions of years, nautiluses represent the only living members of the subclass Nautiloidea, and are often considered "living fossils."

The name "Nautilus" originally referred to the Argonauta, otherwise known as paper nautiluses, because the ancients believed these animals used their two expanded arms as sails (cf. Aristotle Historia Animalium 622b). However, this octopus is not closely related to the Nautiloidea.Source

Tweet

Binishell Modular Shelters Look Like Green Hobbit Homes

This may look like Frodo Baggins' hobbit 'hood, but it's actually a network of modular, green-roofed structures called Binishells. However, as modern as they may appear, this idea isn't new. Originally conceived by renowned architect Dante Bini in the 1960s, Binishells were recently relaunched with the help of Bini's son Nicoló. The new system, which uses low air pressure to lift and shape a collection of thin reinforced concrete structures, is an array of incredibly efficient abodes that use 80% less materials, have 95% of the embodied CO2, and boast a carbon footprint 80% smaller than traditional constructions.

 

 

 

 The basic idea behind these dome-like structures is to substitute formwork and heavy machinery with air. Instead of big cranes, low air pressure is used to lift and shape wet concrete on top of reinforced steel. Since Binishells can be formed into an infinite variety of shapes, they can be used to build anything from schools, to offices, to low-cost housing, to emergency shelters and everything in between.

While they may sound fragile since they’re relatively lightweight shells (hence their name), they’re actually quite strong and able to resist hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes and fires. They’re suited for temporary relief housing because they’re easily deployable and can even be fabricated from local materials.
Another cool thing about Binishells is that they’re visually appealing, especially when they’re linked together to form larger communities or structures. The result can be contemporary (as shown in the rendering of an airport above) or idyllic (like the green village seen in the opening image). Like other modular building units, the shells can painted, covered in grass or customized to suit the needs of the end user making it adaptable to almost any type of use.
+ Binishells

Source

Tweet

Green Float: The futuristic concept that sees humans live in giant skyscrapers on floating water lilies in the middle of the Pacific

Humans in the future could live in mini floating cities that drift across the Pacific as if on giant water lilies.

The startling new concept has been dreamed up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.

The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.
 

The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded
by lush green fields
 

Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities.

A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right.

Most people in this brave new world would live in a 1 kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.

The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in 'plains' also surrounding the tower - all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.

The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater.

The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent.
 

The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, 

can join together to form larger modules
 

The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative with extensive environmental technologies and recycling facilities built in

The cells would create zero waste and recycle every product and covert waste into energy using new green technologies. Islands of waste would drift around the ocean and could be ‘harvested’ to provide energy

The location of the islands is key to their success too, the designers claim.

Each group of cells would be near the equator where the climate is at its most stable and a range of technologies would be used to protect the floating cities from tidal waves and extreme weather.

To protect the inhabitants from large waves, strong elastic membranes would be attached to the lagoons around the outer edge of the cells, with the shallows above the membranes standing 30 feet above sea level.
Shimizu scientists calculate that the water pressure difference between the lagoons and the ocean would limit the movement of the membranes and buffer the force of the open sea waves.

Seawalls as high as 100 feet could also be constructed. And tsunamis in the open sea are far less dangerous than those that hit coastal areas, the designers say.
 

A country consisting of one million people would be formed after 

modules joined together one by one

Lightning rods would be fitted around the circumference of the towers and mesh lightning conductors will be placed on the exterior walls to protect against lightning strikes.

Shimizu wants to develop the first cells by 2025 and is concentrating on developing the technologies to make it happen. The concept was displayed at a recent Japanese university conference.

This is the not the first outlandish idea that Shimizu has come up with. The firm also proposes encircling the moon in a belt of solar collectors that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth.
 

Source

200 new species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009

This tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009—including a katydid that "aims for the eyes" and a frog that does a mean cricket impression, Conservation International announced late Tuesday.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In all, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea's Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges found 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects. The remote island country's mountain ranges—which have yielded troves of new and unusual species in recent years—are accessible only by plane, boat, foot, or helicopter.


Source

Nature's weirdest sex lives

ONCE upon a time, sex in the animal kingdom seemed pretty simple. Flamboyant male met coy female, male courted female, male deposited spermatozoa in the vicinity of an ovary, then headed out to do it all again elsewhere.

Then biologists began to look more closely, at what really happens. They found that being the biggest and brashest male doesn't always win you mating rights. Among weaver fish, for example, it is good fathers, the ones who will take care of the fry, who get the girl. Females don't always conform to type either. The female bean weevil, for instance, would rather drink her mate's ejaculate than use it to fertilise her eggs. Reproduction, it turns out, is a complex affair.

Just how complex has been emphasised anew with a slew of studies that highlight the staggering diversity of sexual practice in the animal kingdom. Intercourse is a bizarre and often dangerous pursuit, where sexually transmitted infections can be desirable, living in a male harem inside your mate can make sense, and headless lovers give you extra. Relations between the sexes are also surprisingly convoluted. Biologists have charted virgin births, spontaneous sex changes and, perhaps weirdest of all, males who father their brother's offspring. Human sexual exuberance is tame compared with some of the things that animals get up to in the name of reproduction.
 

Preying mantis

Take the male preying mantis, the poster boy of risky sex. In an ideal world, he will jump onto a female's back, establish a rigid grip, copulate and jump away again, safe to repeat the process with some other female. Much of the time, however, that grip will slip. If it does, the male slides within reach of the female's mandibles and he stands a very good chance of having his head bitten off.

Being eaten by your partner during copulation is clearly not desirable. William Brown at the State University of New York at Fredonia thinks the males tread a delicate line. His research reveals that they approach females with trepidation: the drive to reproduce and the drive to survive are at loggerheads (The American Naturalist, vol 167, p 263). "Our work suggests that males actively assess the level of risk posed by an individual female and alter their behaviour to reduce the risk of sexual cannibalism," Brown says. "We expect that the level of acceptable risk to the male will depend upon features such as the availability of safer mating opportunities, the age of the male - and thus his expectation of future reproduction - and perhaps even the quality of the female."

From the female's point of view, cannibalistic sex looks like a winner on several fronts. Clearly, it provides a nutritious meal, making it particularly popular among females who have not eaten for a while. But there may also be another benefit. In some mantid species, losing your head means that you have also lost the system of nerves that tells you to stop copulating. Meanwhile, the nerves that keep copulation going, which are in your abdomen, remain intact. So following decapitation, the female gets everything the male has to offer, as it were. There's just one downside. "Hungrier, more cannibalistic females attract fewer males," Brown says.
  

Another species in which females keep males firmly in their place is the green spoonworm, Bonellia viridis. Found in the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, B. viridis begins life as free-floating flake-like larvae. When they settle on the sea floor, they mature over a period of years into 10-centimetre-long females. Many, however, do not make it this far. If a larva should settle on top of a female instead, she produces a chemical called bonellin that turns the larva into a tiny male. This male then creeps up her body and into her mouth, from where it migrates down to her uterus. "Once inside the female, males assume a parasitic existence: they depend on the female for their nourishment," says Patrick Schembri of the University of Malta. But there is mutual benefit. With up to 20 males safely holed up inside her genital sac, the female can get her eggs fertilised without expending any effort on finding a mate.

With 20 males inside her genital sac, the female green spoonworm can get her eggs fertilised without any effort While B. viridis females keep their males captive, aphids prefer a more detached relationship. In fact, many species only copulate once a year and it's not even sperm the females are after.

 

 

The female green spoonworm keeps the male in its place 

(Image: Biosphoto/Dino Simeonidis/Still Pictures)

A female aphid can reproduce without sex. In terms of her genetic legacy, it makes perfect sense to do this because she can produce many clones that carry all her genes down through the generations. So why do aphids make time for an annual bout of sex? This question puzzled Nancy Moran and Helen Dunbar at the University of Tucson in Arizona. Their surprising discovery is that aphids have sex to acquire sexually transmitted infections (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 12803).
 

Infectious sex

Like you and me, aphids carry bacteria on and in their bodies, many of which are useful. Some break down plants the insect would not be able to digest unaided. Others confer resistance to extremes of temperature. One particularly valuable bacterium, Hamiltonella defensa, kills the grubs of parasitic wasps before they start growing within the aphid's body cavity and consume it from the inside. A female aphid can acquire such useful bacteria by having sex with an infected male, and she can also pass them to her future clones. "Once they are established in the clonal descendants of the sexual female, they can be quite stable and confer longer term resistance," Moran says. So her female offspring will continue favouring asexual reproduction while the males wait on the sidelines for a chance to exchange bacteria for sex.
 

  Aphids

Aphids not withstanding, sex is an extremely popular means of procreation in the animal kingdom. Its ubiquity is still something of a mystery but it must offer benefits that outweigh the advantage of being able to produce numerous exact copies of oneself by cloning. One possibility is that by shuffling your genes and throwing your lot in with another individual, you can produce healthier offspring that do not inherit the damaging mutations that inevitably build up in an isolated genome. Another is that sexual reproduction gives rise to offspring with novel genetic combinations that increase the chances that some will survive when faced with environmental change or disease. But wouldn't it be more useful if, like the aphids, an individual could hedge its bets, switching between sexual and asexual reproduction and getting the benefit of both?
 

Alas, for most higher animals that is not possible. However, there are some exceptions where cloning occurs via a process called parthenogenesis, where the egg fuses with a by-product of egg production - known as a sister polar body - rather than a sperm cell. This rare form of asexual reproduction has occasionally been observed in lizards and birds: female turkeys isolated from males for a very long time, for instance, sometimes produce young by parthenogenesis. But it seems to come at a price. Mortality rates are high and developmental problems abound.
 

Which makes a recent report from researchers at the Field Museum in Chicago all the more intriguing. Earlier this year, Kevin Feldheim and colleagues published the results of a genetic analysis of two white-spotted bamboo sharks born in captivity to a mother who had never shared her tank with a male (Journal of Heredity, vol 101, p 374). The test confirmed that they are clones and that their mother had not experienced a close encounter of the sperm kind. There have been a few reports of virgin births in sharks before now, but none has been known to produce offspring that survived long term. The bamboo sharks are now five years old and healthy, suggesting that parthenogenesis is not an evolutionary dead end after all.
 

Mushroom coral

Animals that can adapt their sexual strategy to suit their situation are clearly at an advantage. The ability to occasionally do without sperm if there are no males available may be what has allowed sharks to stick around for hundreds of millions of years, making them one of the most ancient animal lineages on Earth. Some creatures have an even more impressive trick, though - when the going gets tough they have a sex change.
 

Bees do it, some fish do too, but the latest creature to join the list of transsexuals is the mushroom coral. By switching from female to male, it can survive environmental stresses such as temperature rises that cause other species of coral to become bleached and die. "The whole idea is to save energy," says Yossi Loya of Tel Aviv University in Israel, who first spotted this behaviour in 2008 (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 275, p 2335). The reason is simple - producing eggs costs more energy than producing sperm. So a male-dominated colony is more energetically frugal, increasing its chances of toughing out the hard times. Then, when conditions improve, Loya has shown, some individuals flip between sexes, choosing the one that will give them the best chance of reproducing, depending on what their nearest neighbours are doing.
 

Ultimate male shirker

The mushroom coral's pragmatic attitude to gender highlights the point that being male is often an easier option than being female. The ultimate male shirker, however, has to be the fire ant - but it pays a price. While the queen and her daughters work tirelessly to keep the colony going, "males are only spermatozoid with wings: they do nothing", says Denis Fournier of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium. Even their occasional contributions of sperm ultimately come to naught, since the eggs they fertilise all develop into the sterile female workers. Meanwhile, the queen produces new queens by cloning. In this way, males are cut out of the evolutionary line.
 

In fact, additional males are only produced when the queen lays eggs that do not contain any of her genetic material and a male fertilises them. This odd situation has led David Queller of Rice University in Houston, Texas, to suggest that the males can be considered a separate species to the females (Nature, vol 435, p 1167).
 

If your sole contribution to reproduction is a single, tiny sperm, you are always in danger of becoming expendable, so it makes sense for males to add value. A good ploy is to help raise the kids, but if males are not to waste time and energy caring for someone else's offspring they need to be able to recognise their own. That can be far from simple, as the very strange tale of the marmoset illustrates.
 

  Marmosets

These small South American monkeys are among the most attentive of fathers. Marmosets are born as fraternal twins, developing from two distinct eggs, but they have more in common than your average siblings. From early in gestation they share a placenta, causing their blood to intermingle. As a result, most are born containing cells from their twin, making them chimeras. This has been known for half a century, but it has now become apparent that there is a link between marmoset chimerism and doting dadhood.
 

In 2007, Jeffrey French and colleagues from the University of Nebraska in Omaha reported that over half of all male marmosets have chimeric sperm, meaning that they are in the bizarre position of being able to father their brother's or sister's offspring. Some females also have chimeric eggs, meaning they may effectively be surrogate mothers for their twin. In addition, many marmosets also have chimeric skin and so produce odours characteristic of both their own genetic make-up and that of their twin. Marmosets recognise each other by these smells, and the researchers found that fathers and uncles are more than twice as likely to look after young with chimeric skin. Mothers and aunts, in contrast, pay less attention to offspring with chimeric skin than to those without.
 

Over half of all male marmosets have chimeric sperm, meaning that they are able to father their twin's offspring

The implications are mind-boggling. Clearly the marmosets' genes are all mixed up - to such an extent that even the researchers are left scratching their heads over whether these little monkeys should even be considered as separate individuals. Still, in a world where a chimeric male can father chimeric twins with his brother's sperm, surely human relationships will never look quite so complicated again.
 

How to survive celibacy

Animals have some very strange sexual habits, but perhaps nothing is quite as puzzling as the bdelloid rotifer, which has survived for 80 million years with no sex at all. This ancient line of cloners was seen by the late John Maynard Smith as an "evolutionary scandal". According to standard evolutionary theory they should have become extinct long ago. Without the gene shuffling and novel genetic combinations that sex brings, parasites or changing environments ought to have done them in by now. However, it is now becoming clear how bdelloid rotifers have kept their virginity for so long.
 

Rotifers

In 2008, researchers from Harvard University and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, both in Massachusetts, found one trick the rotifers use when they discovered that the creature's genome is chock-full of genes from bacteria, fungi and plants. While bdelloid rotifers may not be swapping genes among themselves, over the millennia they have clearly had a healthy trade via horizontal gene transfer with other organisms. This, the team suggests, could be a satisfactory alternative to sex, giving a limited means of shuffling genes (Science, vol 320, p 1210).

Then, earlier this year, a team led by Chris Wilson of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, found that the canny rotifers have another strategy that might make sex redundant. Rather than fighting their parasites by evolving, they evade them by allowing themselves to desiccate and be blown away on the wind. When they reach another location, they rehydrate and get back on with the business of not having sex (Science, vol 327, p 574).
"If parasites are indeed the problem that sex evolved to address, then bdelloids may have a unique alternative way of solving it," says Wilson.

Source

A planet poisoned by plastic: From Hawaiian beaches to the coast of Britain, we're paying a lethal price for our throwaway society, says TV adventurer

Hawaii is generally considered to be the one place in the world where you should be able to guarantee finding paradise. The beautiful tropical islands have been used as the setting for countless TV series, ranging from Lost to Jurassic Park.
Isolated in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, distance alone should protect Hawaii's spectacular landscapes and turquoise sea from the environmental problems facing the rest of the planet.
So when I arrived in Hawaii, at the end of a long journey around the Tropic of Cancer for my recent BBC2 series, I was staggered to discover beaches covered in plastic rubbish washed up from around the world.

Threat: Plastic is destroying the environment -
here a young lion is pictured with a plastic bottle trapped in its mouth

Simon Reeve said the environmental dangers posed by plastic are
being ignored by politicians

Pristine sand was covered by old plastic toothbrushes, combs, shoes, belts and mouldings. Sam Gon, a Hawaiian conservationist, took me to one beach where 70 local volunteers had just removed tons of garbage.
Yet as soon as it was cleaned, the waves dumped another mountain of rubbish.
The larger pieces of waste can be collected by hand. But when Sam and I dropped to our knees, I could see the surface of the beach was covered with millions of small plastic pellets, known as nurdles, the raw material that factories warm, shape and mould to form the almost infinite number of plastic products that surround our lives.
Dumped, lost or washed out of factories into our seas in their trillions, the nurdles would be difficult to remove from the beach even with a giant sieve.
Yet the big shock came when Sam told me to dig into the sand. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. Instead it breaks down into ever smaller pieces.
Among the grains of sand, and to a depth of several feet, were billions of tiny plastic flecks, which the pounding of the sea was reducing in size.
As I dug through the plastic, I realised the sandy beach was being transformed into a plastic beach. A chill went down my spine.
During the past five years I have travelled around Earth's tropical region for three television series, Equator, Tropic Of Capricorn and, most recently, Tropic Of Cancer.
On my trips I've explored and investigated some of the most pressing issues affecting us and our planet, including poverty, disease and religious fundamentalism.
My journeys have left me in no doubt that the most critical challenge we face is our relationship with the environment.

Rubbish: Plastic poses a real threat to the wildlife of the planet

Wherever you stand on the issue of climate change, no one should be in denial about the damage we are doing to our world with deforestation, over-population and by poisoning our rivers and oceans with rubbish.
From the beaches of Hawaii to the seas around Britain, we are soiling our own nest. Since finishing my travels and returning home from Hawaii, I've taken a closer look at British beaches.
It was a shock to realise how they have changed since I was a child playing on beautiful coastlines in Dorset and south Wales, where my little brother James would happily eat the sand.
Britain's beaches, just like those in Hawaii, are now covered in more litter than ever before.
The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), the charity dedicated to protecting our seas, shores and wildlife, has revealed that while total litter has increased by 77 per cent since its Beachwatch survey and clean-up in 1994, plastic litter has increased by an extraordinary 121 per cent.
In September, the MCS will be organising another national Beachwatch clean-up and it needs all the help it can get.
Decades ago, beach rubbish was biodegradable. Now it is mainly plastic and even beaches that seem clean can have an astonishing 5,000 plastic fibres per litre of sand. But worryingly, the plastic we see on our beaches is just a fraction of the plastic waste that is clogging our oceans.
Apart from a tiny quantity that has been incinerated, all the plastic ever created - totalling hundreds of millions of tons - is still out there in the environment in some form.
Huge amounts have been stuffed into landfills as rubbish, from where plastic can leach poisonous toxins into groundwater supplies.

Damage: A wild black bear whose head got stuck inside a 2-gallon clear plastic jug,
presumably while foraging for food in Minnesota

But vast quantities have also been dropped as litter on beaches or city streets around the world. Rivers often wash it out to sea.
Added to that are the estimated 600,000 plastic containers dumped overboard by ships and navies every single day. In total, at least 100 million tons of plastic rubbish is thought to be sloshing around in our seas.
The scale of the problem is extraordinary. The beaches I visited in Hawaii are being swamped by rubbish from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast accumulation of the world's plastic debris floating in the Pacific Ocean.
Twice the size of France, the Garbage Patch is like a plastic soup in the sea and is doubling in size each decade.
Unbelievably, it is not alone. Scientists are convinced that sea currents have created five vast swirling garbage patches in our oceans, including a huge one in the North Atlantic identified in the past few months, which has up to 520,000 bits of rubbish per square mile.
Even more rubbish lurks below the surface, as around 70 per cent sinks down to pollute the seabed.
This is an international scandal and a global problem, for which we are all responsible.
From bicycle helmets to food packaging, from water bottles to toothbrushes, plastic makes our lives easier.
But its production and use is completely out of control. Factories produced more plastic in the first decade of this century than in the entire 20th century.

Dumped: Plastic biodegrades into smaller plastic pieces never completely disappearing

They are churning out a staggering 300 million tons of plastic each year, much of which will be turned into products that are used once and then thrown away.
As rubbish on land, plastic is a scourge of our modern world. In our seas, the damage all this plastic does is terrifying.
Plastic garbage traps, chokes and kills at least a million seabirds every year and 100,000 marine mammals.
As if that wasn't bad enough, it could also be killing us.
Plastic fragments release potentially harmful styrene compounds, contaminating the sea, and they attract other nasty chemicals in the water, such as DDT and PCBs, which then 'stick' to the plastic.
Fragments of plastic collected from the sea around Japan have been found with concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals at levels one million times higher than in the surrounding seawater.
In some areas of the Pacific there are six times more plastic bits than plankton.
Because the polluted fragments are so small and look like food, they are being gobbled up by small fish, which in turn are eaten by larger fish - which in turn are eaten by us.
So plastic is ruining our beaches, choking the oceans and poisoning our food chain. The consequences are still not fully understood, but they are likely to be devastating.

Human wastage: In Bangladesh, they have abandoned plastic bags and
replaced them with natural jute bags

This environmental catastrophe is being completely ignored by our politicians.
Yet there is so much that could and must be done to help the problem.
Alternatives to plastic and biodegradable plastics made from corn and soy are under development.
We need to spurn and reject the main culprits: plastic bags, packaging and single-use water bottles, a wasteful obscenity. These make up the bulk of plastic garbage.
In Bangladesh, they have abandoned plastic bags and replaced them with natural jute bags. If they can do it, so can we.
At stake is the future of British beaches, our seas and the food chain. It is nothing short of an environmental emergency.
Source

Eight of the World’s Most Unusual Plants

Weird is relative. What seems weird to me might not seem weird to you. In the plant kingdom, however, there are definitely some species that most people would acknowledge are highly unusual.

1. Rafflesia arnoldii: this parasitic plant develops the world's largest bloom that can grow over three feet across. The flower is a fleshy color, with spots that make it look like a teenager's acne-ridden skin. It smells bad and has a hole in the center that holds six or seven quarts of water. The plant has no leaves, stems, or roots.

---

2. Hydnora africana, an unusual flesh-colored, parasitic flower that attacks the nearby roots of shrubby in arid deserts of South Africa. The putrid-smelling blossom attracts herds of carrion beetles.

Image Credit: Martin Heigan (via creative commons)

---

3. Dracunculus vulgaris: smells like rotting flesh, and has a burgundy-colored, leaf-like flower that projects a slender, black appendage.

---

4. Amorphophallus: means, literally, "shapeless male genetalia." The name comes from the shape of the protruding black spadix.

---

5. Wollemia nobilis: This bizarre-looking tree was known only from 120 million-year-old fossil leaves before 1994; fewer than one hundred exist in the wild. They have strange bark that looks like bubbles of chocolate, multiple trunks, and ferny-looking leaves growing in spirals. They can grow up to 125 feet tall.

---

6. Welwitschia mirabilis consists of only two leaves and a stem with roots. Its two leaves continue to grow until they resemble an alien life form. The stem gets thicker rather than higher, although this plant can grow to be almost six feet high and twenty-four feet wide. Its estimated lifespan is 400 to 1500 years. Mirabilis grows in Namibia, and is thought to be a relic of the Jurassic period.

---

7. Drakaea glyptodon: an orchid. It is the color of, and smells like, raw meat. Pollinated by male wasps.

---

8. Wolffia angusta: the world's smallest flower. A dozen plants would easily fit on the head of a pin and two plants in full bloom will fit inside a small printed letter "o."

Source