An amazing purple crab is one of four new species of the creature that have been discovered on the Philippine island of Palawan.

They are all variants of the colourful Insulamon freshwater crab and are unique to the island.

However, various mining projects pose a huge threat to them.

Around 50 per cent of the species living on Palawan are defined as endemic, which means they are exclusively native to the island.

‘In the Aqua Palawana research programme I am head of, we have been investigating the biodiversity of Palawan’s inland waters for over 10 years’, says Dr Hendrik Freitag from the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden.

‘This also included taking a closer look at the Insulamon crabs and we discovered four new species in the process.’

The reddish violet species of the Insulamon crab genus are the only varieties that are endemic to only one or a few islands.

The sea means these creatures are unable to spread elsewhere, as they depend on freshwater at all stages of their development.

Having been completely separated from their relatives, they have developed their own separate species and genera over tens of thousands of years.

‘We have proved that the only previously known type of Insulamon is restricted to the Calamian group of islands to the north of Palawan. The four newly discovered species live exclusively on the actual island of Palawan and make it a unique habitat’, says Freitag.

But this unique biodiversity is under threat. Several mining projects are to be conducted despite massive protests by people from all walks of life and against the resistance of indigenous peoples, according to a statement from Senckenberg.

Freitag adds: ‘The smaller the remaining natural habitat the greater is the risk to endemic fauna and flora. Even minor environmental changes can lead to extinctions.

‘It is all the more important to do research in this region and show that the biodiversity of these islands is unique and worth protecting. That’s why our next step is to investigate Palawan’s species-rich freshwater prawns’.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

Source: The Daily Mail.

His species is renowned for its ability to blend in, but this tiny critter is even better than most as the world’s smallest chameleon.

Balanced on the tip of a scientist’s fingernail in Madagascar, the-three centimetre reptile is no bigger than the flies that form his average-sized cousin’s lunch.

Scientists discovered four new species – called Brookesia micra – on a small islet just off the main island.

This particular chameleon is now thought to be one of the smallest reptiles on the planet.

Ted Townsend, of San Diego State University, carried out genetic testing on the new species.

He said: ‘Their size suggests that chameleons might have evolved in Madagascar from small and inconspicuous ancestors, quite unlike the larger and more colourful chameleons most familiar to us today.’

Source: The Daily Mail.

Because Mother Nature may in fact be an evil sorceress and not the unshaven, tree-loving, weed smoking hippie-woman we’ve all imagined, here’s an actual shot of a Brahmin-moth caterpillar taken by biochemist/photographer Igor Siwanowicz. WHAT. THE. F***? Why does it have all those freaky doo-dads? Will it kill you if you touch it? Where’s Spiderman when you need him? Please don’t say banging Mary Jane, please don’t say banging Mary Jane. ”Banging Mary Jane.” GAAAAAH — and I was just about to ask her out to coffee!

Source: Geekologie.

Species: Mesodinium chamaeleon

Habitat: seawater around Scandinavia and North America, chowing down on a new generation of slaves

Many animals transform themselves almost beyond recognition in the course of their lives. Caterpillars become butterflies and tadpoles become frogs, and if we couldn’t watch them do so we might not even suspect that the two stages were the same creature.

Spectacular as these shifts are, they are only shape-shifting. A tadpole and a frog are both animals, so both must take in food from their surroundings.

Not so Mesodinium chamaeleon. This newly discovered single-celled organism is a unique mixture of animal and plant.

M. chamaeleon is a ciliate – a kind of single-celled animal covered in hundreds of tiny “hairs” called cilia. It was discovered in Nivå bay in Denmark by Øjvind Moestrup of the University of Copenhagen, also in Denmark, and his team. Other specimens have since been found off the coasts of Finland and Rhode Island.

Ciliates using their hair-like cilia to motor around rapidly in water. Most get their food by eating other organisms, rather than by synthesising the nutrients themselves. This marks them as quite animal-like.

Some Mesodinium species are different, though. They engulf other microorganisms, generally algae called cryptomonads. The two then form a partnership: the algae produce sugars by photosynthesis, while the Mesodinium protects them and carries them around.

Such hybrid organisms are animals and plants at the same time. One such species, M. rubrum, only eats red algae and is often found in the algal blooms that form the famous red tides.

These hybrids play merry hell with our attempts to classify organisms into neat groups. “The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely,” Moestrup says. Instead, many microorganisms may be animal and plant at once, or switch between the two, like M. rubrum.

The new M. chamaeleon breaks yet another barrier. It is halfway between a pure animal and a hybrid.

M. chamaeleon takes in algal cells, just like M. rubrum, but it doesn’t keep them permanently. Nor does it digest them immediately, as a hungry animal-like organism might. Instead, the cells remain intact for several weeks before being broken down, during which time they keep producing sugar by photosynthesis. M. chamaeleon also changes colour depending on whether it is hosting red or green algae or both.

“It is quite unusual,” says Moestrup. Other Mesodinium species either retain their captured cells for ages or digest them immediately.

The ability to take in other cells and put them to work is called endosymbiosis, and is one of the most important inventions in the history of life. Some 2 billion years ago, a single cell swallowed a bacterium and used it as an energy source. The descendants of the enslaved bacterium eventually became the mitochondria that now power all complex cells, including ours. Without endosymbiosis, there wouldn’t be any multicellular life.

While the first endosymbiosis may have been a lucky chance, the process now seems to be common, at least among the more complex single-celled organisms. Some are so good at taking in cells that over the years they have switched symbionts. “It happens quite regularly,” Moestrup says.

M. chamaeleon may offer a snapshot of how endosymbiosis developed: the organism is still on the road from simply eating other cells to keeping them alive within itself.

Source: New Scientist.

My Two Cents: Warning! This video contains graphic images, specifically Skeletor Pelosi and hippies. End Two Cents.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

Let me start this bitch off with a bang and keep it real, Earth Day is lame as fuck. It is a stupid ass tradition that pretty much forces the whole world to participate in this anti-human “we’re all evil” hippie asshole festival. I don’t know about you but I’m not a hippie nor do I want to be forced to party with them and plant a fucking tree to replace the one I cut down because I thought it was in the way. Wait, I think you plant a tree on Arbor Day. Why do we have two of these stupid hippie holidays? One of them is fucking more than enough! Besides, have you ever been around a hippie? They talk stupid, act stupid and reek like the area between the ball sack and the asshole of a sweaty gorilla.

You see, it is not global warming, pollution and deforestation that we need to worry about. The real enemies here are the crazed anti-human eco-fascist environmentalists who want to force us to put the rights of a leaf before our right to freedom and our right to live. Why do I say such insane and outlandish things? It’s pretty easy to have this opinion when you’re sporting a fair amount of common sense like myself.

Environmentalists aren’t concerned with a clean Earth and making the world better. They are about “saving the planet” but they want to save it from the evolution of the human mind. They want to limit humanity and its greatness by punishing innovation and technology. Earth Day itself isn’t a celebration of the planet, it is a call to arms against human beings, the greatest thing on this planet.

It has become the “Great Holy Day” for sick sadistic eco-nuts that worship the Earth like religious zombies. They feel the void due to a lack of Jesus and can’t handle it, so they have their green religion to help make them feel relevant. Why can’t they be more like me? I have a lack of Jesus and I’m just fine. Well, that’s because I stopped having faith in an imaginary friend and started having faith in myself. Environmentalists have no faith in themselves; they are sad shitty joiners looking for a morally superior, holier-than-thou cause to make them feel important. Their parents failed to give them enough love.

You can’t look at Earth Day without looking at why it even exists. It was created over 40 years ago by Senator Gaylord Nelson, who was an environmentalist. Yes, Gaylord. It grew in popularity from its creation in 1970 and all the hippie leftovers from the 1960′s latched onto it like hideously disgusting barnacles. The hippie leftovers created a large movement towards “saving the planet” and Earth Day was a seemingly harmless way to get the country to participate and learn about environmentalism.

Considering it was a leftist movement, it wasn’t hard to get this crap in public schools where the masses could be indoctrinated from the very beginning of their educational process. They always made me participate in this idiot holiday when I was in elementary school and that was before Earth Day was even an international phenomenon. I was just taught that Earth Day is something we celebrate because (insert scary environmental threat here) was real and we had to appreciate Mother Earth and repent our green sins. I didn’t know it at the time because I was like 7 and shit, but I was being indoctrinated with green guilt and the pseudoscience faux-fact that mankind was evil and not respecting the rock it was raping like drugged Vegas hookers.

When I was in 4th grade, Florida Governor Bob Martinez came to my school to celebrate Earth Day. I was all excited because he was the governor and I had never met a politician before. He wasn’t even a Democrat but apparently he had bought into the Earth Day scam. It was 1989 and the Republicans had already become victims of this anti-human epidemic. Oh, how the epidemic would evolve.

Earth Day and the environmental movement are part of a long-term plan. This is a plan to make money. While they attack big business, technology and innovation, they have become a big business and utilize technology and innovation in their own way. The environmental movement has poisoned government and now eco-fascist bureaucrats have implemented governmental regulation and meddling that stifles the market and every industry in it. The environmentalists practice the worst kind of crony capitalism.

Now these eco-fascists want to force us to conform to the threats of global warming, now known as “global climate disruption” because the term “global warming” just doesn’t fly anymore. Why the change? Well, we have had record cold winters lately. However, the whole cold thing is caused by the whole warming thing or so they say. They can never get their story straight. Just like the oceans are going to rise a hundred and seventeen feet in six weeks but Al Gore, the greenie messiah, is buying beach front property. The hypocrisy between their scary rhetoric and their actions is pretty clear to anyone not wearing green goggles.

To give you an idea of how evil this movement is here is an excerpt from environmentalist philosopher Paul Taylor’s book “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”:

The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!

In 1989, biologist David M. Graber wrote this in the Los Angeles Times:

Human happiness (is) not as important as a wild and healthy planet…Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

In response to these two insane passages, Dr. Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote:

Such is the naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable.

Pretty profound shit, eh? Dr. Berliner’s statement is spot on. These eco-tyrants are calling for the death of mankind! Whether they have completely succumbed to green guilt or they are evil architects working the minds of the masses into accepting a green police state doesn’t really matter. The fact is, the essence of this movement is pure evil.

Environmentalists put scrub jays, fire ants, mice and trees before homebuilding, industrial development, practical energy sources, medical research and human ingenuity. If they had it their way we’d all be living like Ewoks in hippie communes worshipping snails. Environmentalism is the enemy of humanity. Therefore, I refuse to ever celebrate their anti-human holiday, Earth Day.

I hate the fact that kids in public schools and many private schools are seemingly forced to participate in the festivities. Unfortunately, most parents and people in general are completely ignorant to the real green agenda and are already buying into the green message. God forbid they leave behind a giant carbon footprint. All that carbon must be horrible to trees since that is what they breathe naturally. I mean, oxygen is horrible for humans, right?

The thing is, the fucking Earth has been here pretty much forever. Humans have been on this planet a fraction of that time. Man made global warming is bullshit and even if we are slightly warming the globe, big fucking deal. It is a massive and complex ecosystem that can self-correct and adapt. The Earth goes hot and cold all the time and not because of man. The global warming data.. sorry, global climate disruption data has been manufactured by dishonest scientists. This fact has been out for quite some time now, yet the masses and the media like to ignore it because no one wants the truth, they just want to believe in the romanticism that comes with “saving the planet”.

The weather changes and species die without human intervention. Nature does its thing. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be conscious of what we do. We have to be responsible and respectful to our environment but we don’t have to be fascist fucking morons. The world isn’t going to end tomorrow because you forgot to recycle that tuna can. In fact, the world won’t even notice.

All this movement is, is a way to control you. The green disease starts in your mind and before you know it, they own your body. In a green utopia, there would be no innovation, no human rights, no progress and no future. They want your bodies and they want your money. Sounds like the ultimate system for tyranny to me and there are more of you that are on board with it than those of us who aren’t.

So if you love tyranny and hate human rights, celebrate Earth Day. If you hate that shit, kick a fucking tree in the face. End of rant.