Sexually frustrated sea snakes mistake scuba divers for potential mates
https://www.livescience.com/sea-snakes-m...mates.html
INTRO: A scuba diver off Australia noticed some odd behavior whenever he came into contact with male sea snakes: The venomous reptiles would coil around his fins, licking the water around him and even sometimes chasing him underwater. Now, he knows why: It was mating season, and the males thought he was a potential mate.
In a new study, the diver and another researcher analyzed 158 of these interactions with olive sea snakes (Aipysurus laevis) over several years in the Great Barrier Reef and found that interactions were more common during the reptiles' mating season. The sexually frustrated snakes also displayed elaborate behaviors that are often used during courtship between the sea serpents.
"Males are very aroused and active while looking for 'girlfriends,'" lead author Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and reptile expert at Macquarie University in Australia, told Live Science. But because the males can't tell the difference between female snakes and scuba divers, it can lead to some comical interactions, he added... (MORE)
Scientists are proposing a radical new framework to redefine life on Earth
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-resea...principles
INTRO: Sometime around 3.5 billion years ago, life on Earth was ignited into existence from molecular beginnings, and branched through time into the spectacular array of entities we know and love today. So goes the current line of thinking.
But we still don't even really have a clear definition of life. For example, is a virus alive? Or an entire forested ecosystem? Many aspects of an ecosystem are just as dependent on each other as organs within a body, after all.
So biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have "blinded us to additional general principles of life".
To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.
"Human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms," Kempes explains.
Based on their new definition, the researchers argue that life has emerged many times on Earth, and that we in fact are co-existing with many forms of current life.
Kempes and Krakauer's proposed framework has three hierarchical levels of constraints on what entails life, as illustrated below... (MORE)
RELATED (science daily): New theory of life’s multiple origins
https://www.livescience.com/sea-snakes-m...mates.html
INTRO: A scuba diver off Australia noticed some odd behavior whenever he came into contact with male sea snakes: The venomous reptiles would coil around his fins, licking the water around him and even sometimes chasing him underwater. Now, he knows why: It was mating season, and the males thought he was a potential mate.
In a new study, the diver and another researcher analyzed 158 of these interactions with olive sea snakes (Aipysurus laevis) over several years in the Great Barrier Reef and found that interactions were more common during the reptiles' mating season. The sexually frustrated snakes also displayed elaborate behaviors that are often used during courtship between the sea serpents.
"Males are very aroused and active while looking for 'girlfriends,'" lead author Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist and reptile expert at Macquarie University in Australia, told Live Science. But because the males can't tell the difference between female snakes and scuba divers, it can lead to some comical interactions, he added... (MORE)
Scientists are proposing a radical new framework to redefine life on Earth
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-resea...principles
INTRO: Sometime around 3.5 billion years ago, life on Earth was ignited into existence from molecular beginnings, and branched through time into the spectacular array of entities we know and love today. So goes the current line of thinking.
But we still don't even really have a clear definition of life. For example, is a virus alive? Or an entire forested ecosystem? Many aspects of an ecosystem are just as dependent on each other as organs within a body, after all.
So biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have "blinded us to additional general principles of life".
To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of "life" to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.
"Human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms," Kempes explains.
Based on their new definition, the researchers argue that life has emerged many times on Earth, and that we in fact are co-existing with many forms of current life.
Kempes and Krakauer's proposed framework has three hierarchical levels of constraints on what entails life, as illustrated below... (MORE)
RELATED (science daily): New theory of life’s multiple origins