New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered(news.nus.edu.sg) |
New species of “supergiant” isopod uncovered(news.nus.edu.sg) |
These things are cool.
If you skim-read the article, you might end up with a very different picture in your head.
> collected off the southern coast of West Java in Indonesia, from a depth of between 950 and 1,260 metres
the specimens were not 1km long.
> skim-read
I then went back to read the sentence properly, but thank you for including the missing part for those who didn't read the article.
I had no idea something like this size and related existed in the sea! Incredible! I wonder now what the evolutionary tree looks like.
Edit: Corrected Family -> Order - oops! Thank you pvaldes.
Are there theories about this phenomenon? Does this explain the historically atypical size of the dinosaurs? Why doesn't it continue to happen? For example, why aren't there giant robins (birds) or tiny ones? Is there not a single eco-system ever where this would be an advantage?
From another article on the same discovery
Humans tend to exterminate them.
Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.
I imagine deep-sea is an ecosystem that doesn't get disrupted often. Little new introduction of species. Little human intervention.
Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know much about this stuff.
It seems there is an opportunity here, crouching like a cat, to dedicate one of this new species to Hayao Miyazaki. Bathynomus ohmu seems an pretty convenient name also. Maybe the next.
> Of course if they had survived to even antiquity, yes, we’d probably have hunted them to extinction.
Often it wasn't even hunting. New Zealand's various giant ground parrots weren't THAT delicious. We introduced invasive species which did the extermination for us, in that case (and many/most bird-y cases, at least).