Tag: animals

Sharks Are Eating Asia’s Internet

Shark species in the region may be drawn to chow down on undersea cables, which send off electromagnetic waves that can act as shark bait.

If you live in Southeast Asia and can’t stream YouTube videos or access Facebook, sharks may be to blame.

The underwater trans-Pacific cable that provides Internet to most of Southeast Asia broke again yesterday, leaving millions with slow or spotty connectivity. The region faces an estimated repair time of up to a month.

The Asia-America Gateway (AAG), launched in 2009, is an enormous underwater cable line stretching 12,000 miles across the Pacific. It connects 10 points throughout the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and provides vital connectivity to several countries between Malaysia and California.

But one branch of the $500 million AAG has been continually beset with problems. The segment of the cable that runs between Vietnam and Hong Kong has ruptured four times within the last six months—twice near Hong Kong and twice near Vietnam. The latest incident occurred yesterday, when the cable broke near the Vietnamese city of Ba Ria.

In addition to Vietnam, the outage effects the cable’s offshoot points further west, which means Internet users in Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia are also feeling the slow-down. Although these other countries rely on the cable, it is managed by one Vietnamese telecommunications company.

Investigators have not confirmed a reason for the latest rupture. One common explanation in these cases is that anchors from passing fishing trawlers snagged the cable and caused damage. Increasingly, however, cable watchers believe that the problem may be sharks.

Shark species in the region, these experts say, may be drawn to chow down on the cables, which send off electromagnetic waves that can act as sharkbait. One theory holds that sharks mistake the cables for the bioelectric fields surrounding schools of fish. Others suggest that perhaps sharks are merely overly curious.

To prevent sharks from chomping through fragile and expensive fiber-optic wires, Google, which has pledged to collaborate on a similar $300 million undersea cable to Japan, has started wrapping its cables in kevlar.

Sea Ghost Breaks Record for Deepest Living Fish

A ghostly never-before-seen fish with wing-like fins has set a new depth record for fish. The previously-unknown snailfish was filmed 8143m under the sea.

A ghostly never-before-seen fish with wing-like fins has set a new depth record for fish. During a recent trip to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest place on Earth, the previously-unknown snailfish was filmed several times floating along the dark sea floor, reaching a record low of 8143 metres below the surface (see video above).

The unusual fish, spotted on the expedition, which was led by Jeff Drazen andPatty Fryer of the University of Hawaii, has a different body shape from other known varieties of snailfish. It boasts broad, translucent fins, stringy appendages and an eel-like tail that allows it to glide smoothly.

Snailfish are known to thrive at extreme depths: another variety, Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, previously held the undisputed record for deepest-living fish at 7703 metres. Handling the intense pressure of the deep sea is a challenge for most animals because it impedes muscles and nerves and bends proteins out of shape, disrupting the working of enzymes required for life.

In 1999, Paul Yancey from Whitman College in Washington, who was also on the recent trip, discovered that a chemical called trimethylamine oxide, or TMAO, which helps regulate the concentration of dissolved substances in cells,prevents proteins from warping in deep-living fish. Levels of TMAO were found to be higher in deeper-dwelling species and individuals. But there is a limit to the amount of the chemical that a cell can hold, which should also constrain how low fish can go.

Earlier this year, along with Alan Jamieson from the University of Aberdeen, UK, Yancey calculated that the depth limit for fish, based on TMAO, should be about 8200 metres, which neatly matched real observations. And the new discovery gets even closer to the mark. “The new depth record for fish is still within the 8200 metres we predicted,” says Yancey.

ghost fish

Trippy Spiral Hacks a Hummingbird’s Hover

A moving view, like a trippy morphing spiral, is enough to make a hummingbird unstable. Little is known about how birds use senses to control flight.

If a sipping hummingbird starts to wobble when near a flower, it’s probably not because its nectar has been spiked. A moving view, like a trippy morphing spiral, seems to be enough to make it lose its stability (see video above).

To investigate how Anna’s hummingbirds control their body position, Douglas Altshuler and his team at the University of British Columbia in Canada set up a hummingbird bar in front of a screen with moving patterns. The group found that even minimal background movement affected the birds’ hovering, causing them to wobble back and forth while feeding or to jam their bills in too far, depending on the direction of motion.

Given that the birds’ natural environment is full of moving elements, it is surprising how sensitive they are to movement in their visual field, says the team. Little is known about how birds use their senses to control flight.

The effect, however, doesn’t stop hummingbirds from being spectacular aerial acrobats: Anna’s hummingbirds can shake faster than any other vertebrate and dive at record-breaking speeds.

Trippy spiral hacks a hummingbird's hover