Palau's Prehistoric Eel: Smithsonian makes new discovery deep in underwater cave

The oceans continue to surprise us. Even as we struggle to preserve species being lost to pollution or overfishing, scientists continue to find new species - and sometimes new "old" species. Case in point, a truly prehistoric eel found in a deep underwater cave, 115 feet below the surface, in the island nation of Palau.



Palau is a popular dive tourism location, a site for many scientific studies, and a Pacific island trailblazer having established a shark sanctuary that covers the entire island. But with all this aquatic visibility, no one had ever seen this species of eel before. A kind of half-eel, half-fish, the newly discovered creature has anatomical features that distinguish it from the current 800 species of eel today.



With a second upper jaw bone and only 90 vertebrae, features only found in fossilized specimens from the Cretaceous period, it is also unique because it has a full set of gill rakers - a cartilaginous feature found in most bony fishes - and not eels - that aid in filter feeding. The new species' lineage as a true eel was determined by examining its mitochondrial DNA.



"We believe that such a long, independent evolutionary history, [...] retention of several primitive anatomical features and apparently restricted distribution, warrant its recognition as a living fossil," said Dave Johnson of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the research team's published paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.



The research team likened the eel, named Protoanguilla palau, to the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish known only in the fossil record until living examples were discovered in the late 1930s. The researchers theorized that the Palau eel likely appeared 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic period.



Johnson emphasized, "The discovery of this extraordinary and beautiful new species of eel underscores how much more there is to learn about our planet. Furthermore, it brings home the critical importance of future conservation efforts - currently this species is known from only ten specimens collected from a single cave in Palau."

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef: colorful yarn and complex math to save coral reefs at the Smithsonian

To get people to appreciate the importance of ocean conservation to the future of this planet, we must highlight the importance of the oceans to our own future as well. Making this human connection can take many forms, from intellectual presentations to a more tactile approach . . . like crochet.

Crochet?

On October 16th, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, an exhibition opens that connects the very human art of crocheting with the complexity of shape and design of coral reefs. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a project started by the Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring, will be on view in the Institution's Sant Ocean Hall through April 24th of 2011. By utilizing crocheting to produce amazingly realistic representations of various corals, the exhibit helps to make very real what some may perceive as beautiful but unreal and other-worldly.

At the core of the exhibit is the use of hyberbolic geometry - a mathematical theory of lines, curves and their relationships that manifests itself in natural forms like corals and can be effectively represented in crochet. It's a good thing too, because just reading about hyperbolic geometry can give you a headache, or at least leave you slightly dazed and confused.

Originally conceived by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, and supported by Quiksilver Foundation, the Embassy of Australia, and the Coral Reef Alliance; the exhibition is remarkable in its detail and realism. And like the organisms it replicates, it is dynamic and growing, as the Smithsonian provides other crochet artists with the opportunity to contribute to the reef.



The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef- it's organic, it's colorful, and it's mathematically complex. Just like real coral. It's cared for by humans, just like the real coral reefs need to be. Because If not, it's sad to think but colorful yarn may be all that's left to remind us of one of the ocean's greatest treasures.
Learn more at the Smithsonian website.
Read about hyperbolic geometry.