Caught in My Web: Marine Technology

Image by Luc Viatour at Wikimedia Commons

For this edition of Caught in My Web, allow yourself to be amazed both by the range and depth of behaviors of marine animals, and by the incredible technologies we have used to learn these things.

1. Penguincams show that Gentoo penguins “talk” to one another while foraging and you can see some of the penguincam footage here.

2. Scientists built an 8-foot touchscreen for the dolphins at the National Aquarum in Baltimore and discovered they like to play “Whack-an-Angelfish”.

3. Using audio-recording tags, we learned that mother and baby humback whales “whisper” to one another to avoid predators.

4. Scientists created virtual reality holodeck for zebrafish.

5. Thanks to the fact that zebrafish larvae are transparent, scientists have discovered a way to image brain activity in an animal as it is behaving in real time. Humans may be cool enough to have developed this technology, but now we know that zebrafish have developed predator eversion strategies when they are still larvae.

What will we come up with next?