Sponge new to science revealed

The sponge discovered during the 2011 Seaweed East survey has been revealed as new to science.

This summer a group of marine conservationists undertook a pioneering attempt to survey the North Sea coast of the UK. The team, with funding from partners including The Wildlife Trusts, took part in surveys from Essex to Northumberland.

The survey recorded 352 wildlife species on the expedition. 126 of those were seaweeds – many species were previously unrecorded in the region and one species which was unknown to science, the purple Hymedesmia sponge, has been added to the list of marine animals in our waters. This colourful creature is an encrusting sponge so adopts the shape of whatever it covers, typically flint cobbles. The find was confirmed by Dr Claire Goodwin of National Museums Northern Ireland, an expert in the field.

Kirsten Smith, Living Seas Manager for the North Sea Wildlife Trusts said:

“This survey has thrown up some important finds, including new exciting species. These results will help us to understand more about our marine environment and help us to identify key areas in need of protection.

“The purple Hymedesmia sponge was found within a draft Marine Conservation Zone off the Norfolk coast. We urge the Government to designate sites such as this during 2012 to ensure our marine wildlife is protected for future generations

“You can help protect marine wildlife within your local area by signing up to The Wildlife Trusts Petition Fish campaign online and showing support for the creation of nature reserves under the waves, safe havens for marine wildlife.”

More than 20 people took part in the trip and travelled from The Blackwater Estuary in Essex up to Seahouses in Northumberland via Orford Ness (Suffolk), Sheringham and Hunstanton (Norfolk), Gibraltar Point (Lincolnshire), Flamborough Head and Robin Hoods Bay (Yorkshire) and Seaham (Durham).

A full list of the data from the survey is available to download below.

Read on...

Earliest animal traces solve time-gap mystery

17:07 11 May 2009 by Jeff Hecht

Meet the ancestors: blobs of gelatinous goo that were some of the first animals on Earth.

The fossil traces have been discovered in Canadian rocks some 850 million years old – potentially solving a major problem for the origin of animal life.

And going back in time another two billion years, evidence of the earliest known cave-dwelling organisms are offering a glimpse of how life left the seas and conquered the continents.

Ancient traces

The previous oldest animal fossils date from "only" 650 million years ago, although "molecular clocks" based on rates of genetic divergence indicate that animals should have originated about 850 million years ago. The new findings may therefore help solve the problem of the 200 million-year-gap.

Palaeontologists have looked long and hard for traces left by the first multi-celled organisms, fully aware that the soft-bodies might have left very few fossils.

The breakthrough came when Elizabeth Turner, of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, spotted odd patterns in the rocks of 850-million-year-old limestone reefs in the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada's Northwestern territory, and has spent the last 15 years, with Fritz Neuweiler of University Laval in Quebec, trying to deduce their origin.

Now Turner and Neuweiler, along with David Burdige of Old Dominion University in Virginia, have shown that the patterns match the distinctive textures found in reefs built by sponges.

Read full article at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17105-earliest-animal-traces-solve-timegap-mystery.html

Spider-Killer Wasp, Eyeless Crustacean Found

March 9, 2009--This spider-hunting wasp is one of 19 new species recently found in Australia--most of them in Western Australia state, considered a "hotbed of biodiversity," scientists announced.

The insects hunt down and paralyze spiders, which are later eaten alive by the wasps' developing larvae.

In all, scientists found 11 spiders and spider relatives, 3 crustaceans, 2 insects, a mollusc, a worm, and a sponge.

"The discovery of new species of life on Earth is an ongoing and exciting process," study author Mark Harvey, head of terrestrial zoology at the Western Australian Museum, said in a statement.

"The future of all life on this fragile planet depends on how quickly we can recognize, document, and describe new species," added Harvey, whose discoveries appeared recently in the journal Records of the Western Australian Museum.

See photos at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/photogalleries/new-species-australia-pictures/index.html?source=rss

Ancient sponges leave their mark

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

Traces of animal life have been found in rocks dating back 635 million years.
The evidence takes the form of chemical markers that are highly distinctive of sponges when they die and their bodies break down in rock-forming sediments.

The discovery in Oman pushes back the earliest accepted date for animal life on Earth by tens of millions of years.

Scientists tell Nature magazine that the creatures' existence will help them understand better what the planet looked like all that time ago.

"The fact that we can detect these signals shows that sponges were ecologically important on the seafloor at that time," said lead author Gordon Love, from the University of California, Riverside.

"We're not saying we captured the first animal; we're saying they're an early animal phylum and we're capturing them when their biomass was significant."

Tiny creatures
Researchers can usually determine the presence of ancient life in rock strata by looking for the fossilised remains of skeletons or the hardened record of the creatures' movements, such as their footprints or crawl marks.

But for organisms deep in geological history that were extremely small and soft bodied, scientists have had to develop novel techniques to uncover their existence.

One of these newer methods involves detecting breakdown products from the lipid molecules which act as important structural components in the cell membranes of animals.

Over time, these will transform to leave a molecule known as cholestrane; and for sponges, this exclusively takes the form known as 24-isopropylcholest ane.

Dr Love's team found high concentrations of this biomarker in rocks located at the south-eastern edge of the Arabian peninsula.

They were laid down in what would have been a shallow marine environment at least 635 million years ago.

"Even though there must have been sufficient oxygen in the water to maintain the metabolism of these primitive animals, I think their size would have been restricted by oxygen being nowhere near modern values," the UC Riverside researcher said.

"We're probably talking about small colonies of sponges with body dimensions of a few millimetres at most. They'd have been filtering organic detritus in the water column."

Icy planet
The discovery is fascinating because it pre-dates the end of the Marinoan glaciation, a deep freeze in Earth history that some argue shrouded the entire planet in ice.

Scientists often refer to the term "snowball Earth" to describe conditions at this time.

So to find animal life apparently thriving during this glaciation seems remarkable, commented Jochen Brochs, from the Australian National University, Canberra.

"If there really was a snowball Earth, how did those sponges survive? The full snowball Earth hypothesis would predict that the oceans were frozen over by 2km, even at the equator," he told BBC News.

"Only at hot springs could any organism survive but it is questionable that you would have sponges in a hot spring. I haven't made my mind up about snowball Earth but perhaps these sponges are telling us something about this glaciation."

Dr Love's view is that the presence of these animals puts limits on the scale of the ice coverage.

"I believe there were areas of what we might call refugia - areas of open ocean where biology could go on. And in this case, it could be evidence that we had some sort of evolutionary stimulation of new grades of organisms as well."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Meet the ancestors: Earliest evidence of life suggests humans descended from sponges 635million years ago

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:01 AM on 05th February 2009

Chemical traces left behind in 635 million-year-old rocks are the earliest evidence ever found of animal life on Earth, researchers said today.

An analysis of molecules in the ancient stones from Oman revealed a form of cholesterol only produced by sponges.

The findings, published just days before the 200th birthday of naturalist Charles Darwin, are also proof that simple organisms MUST must have existed before evolving into more complex creatures, the scientists said.

'Basically we have found a thread of that evidence that he predicted should be there,' said study leader Roger Summons, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

'There is a great wealth of evidence these sponges were the first multi-cellular organisms to exist.'

It suggests the creatures existed before a monstrous ice age that occurred around 630 million years ago. Many scientists believe the frozen periods spurred the development of complex forms of life, Professor Summons said.

These simple forms of animal life came about 200 million years before land plants appeared on Earth, he added.

The first single cell bacteria and other similar forms of life appeared around two-and-a-half billion years ago.

The oldest visible fossils of animals found in rocks are 580 million years old.

However, the findings from the paper published in the journal Nature show that looking at molecular evidence is key to better understanding evolution, Professor Summons added.