E2science

The ocean below sea level can be broken up into different "life zones" as follows:

The neritic zone is a region of open water directly above the continental shelf, and is the most productive area in the ocean. It is on the epipelagic level.

The oceanic zone is the water that spreads out from beyond the continental shelf.

The epipelagic zone is one of the highest and most photic (well-lit) zones. Sunlight allows organisms to thrive such as zooplankton or phytoplankton. This, in turn, attracts many fish and other marine life that would feed on plankton.

The mesopelagic zone is a euphotic (semi-lit) one where the collection of organisms mentioned above feed on plankton. The usual depth for ambient light to start fading from the water is about 1000 meters below the surface. The first visible color to fade is the red spectrum.

The bathypelagic level is another euphotic zone that starts at about 4000 meters under sea level. The water starts to become colder, and the last colors to fade are green and blue. Photosynthesizing plankton begins to absent itself as darkness sets in, and modified creatures that don't solely eat plankton or need light habit this zone.

The abyssopelagic zone is typically 9000 meters underwater and is completely aphotic (devoid of light). Sea life that requires no light lives down here, and can usually make its own light through a process known as bioluminescence. Autotrophic organisms that dwell around deep-sea vents are found instead of photosynthetic ones.

The benthic zone is composed of the ocean floor and upper sediment, and also completely aphotic.

You would think that squids would be happy just to be odd-looking, funny-eyed, ink-squirting, many-armed, tenacious predators and superb camouflage artists. It would be reasonable to assume that being able to regenerate their arms and tentacles, complete with hooks and powerful suckers, would be enough for them. You might suppose that they would be satisfied with their fearsome reputations and the numerous legends told about them. But no, in their never-ending quest to become the most bizarre creatures on the planet, they had to go one better: they had to invent jet propulsion. The little showoffs.

How It Works: All cephalopods use jet propulsion, but squids are undoubtedly the best at it and are built almost like fighter planes to make propulsion more efficient. Water is drawn in from the free edge of the mantle and expelled through a siphon, or funnel, on the squid's underside. First, the mantle walls expand to draw the water into the mantle cavity through the collar of the mantle, while the siphon is closed. The head is then pulled towards the body, sealing the intake with a set of matching ridges and depressions, and valves extending from the sides of the siphon. The mantle cavity's strongly muscled walls then contract sharply, driving water at high speeds out the siphon. The flow of water can be controlled through a muscle valve just inside the siphon's opening, and the siphon can also be aimed forward or backward by the squid.

These jets are extremely powerful, and using them, squids are capable of swimming at amazing speeds. Common Pacific squids can travel at 5 to 8 MPH. Larger species have been seen moving at around 20 miles per hour, occasionally overtaking ships. When moving at these speeds, the arms are held tightly together, turning the squid into a highly streamlined cigar shape, and the fins are held close to the body. Note that when jetting, most cephalopods tend to swim backwards - body forward, tentacles at the rear - although they can move in either direction by turning the siphon.

Strandings: This habit of swimming backwards at high speed is not always a healthy one. While squids have an extremely wide angle of vision, they cannot see directly to the rear, and squids quite often strand themselves in shallow water. To make matters worse, when they do strand themselves they tend to react by working their jet at the highest pressure, with the siphon pointed seaward, driving themselves firmly into the sand. Even when they are picked up by humans and flung back into the sea, they immediately jet themselves back toward the beach and wedge themselves into the sand again. It seems that squids, while more impressively designed than octopuses, are hardly the brightest of the cephalopods.

The "water bug" is also known as the "Giant Water Bug". Our North American species is Abedus herberti.  

Water bugs are in the order Hemiptera, the so-called "true bugs;" their family is Belostomatidae. There are approximately 100 species in the family. They live primarily in North America, South Africa and India. In North America, Abedus herberti is located throughout Arizona and portions of adjacent states and Mexico. They live in freshwater streams, and prefer those with vegetation.

Appearance, habitat and eating habits

This thing is a monster by any measure. Giant water bugs are approximately 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) in length. Some species in the tropics grow as long as 4 inches (10 cm). They have one pair of tiny, almost inconspicuous antennae located snugly below their compound eyes. The water bug's mouthparts are elongated into a beak-like structure with which it pierces its prey and sucks out the insides.

The body is brown, flat and oval, giving them an appearance similar to that of a giant cockroach (to whom they are not particularly closely related). They seize prey with their front legs; their other two pairs of legs are flattened and fringed with hair to increase their surface area and are used like oars in the water. Adults have two pairs of wings, but they rarely fly (fortunately - do you want a giant cockroach-like predator, some 4 inches long, flying at your face?). They fly only when forced to relocate because their waterhole dries up or they run out of prey.

Water bugs breathe air, like other bugs. They have a breathing tube which sticks out the end of the abdomen.

Water bug larvae eat small aquatic invertebrates, while adults prey on any small animal they can handle, including insects and other aquatic invertebrates. They also hunt vertebrates such as tadpoles, salamanders and small fish, and sometimes, gruesomely enough, adult frogs. The bugs insert enzymes into the prey, which turns the prey's insides into liquid, which the giant water bug can suck up. They simply suck their prey dry. They will also bite the feet or other body parts of incautious human swimmers or waders.

Given the size and ferocity here, this is not a bug for the faint of heart. To say the least.

Reproduction

Sex among water bugs is the lady's idea. When so motivated, she approaches the male and begins the courtship ritual. The two will spar together for a while, not unlike human undergraduates, actually. However, no human male goes the next step: to ensure that he is the father, the male will copulate with the female and allow her to lay the eggs on his back. He will only allow her to lay a few eggs after each mating. This ritual continues until the male's entire back is covered with approximately 150 eggs.

This is where the lady drops out. The father takes care of the eggs, frequently exposing the eggs to air to prevent the growth of mold or other aquatic organisms. Eggs take approximately three weeks to hatch.

Immature water bugs, or nymphs, look similar to their parents. Nymphs go through five instars (various forms of arthropods between molts) over eight to 10 weeks before becoming adults. The bugs themselves live about a year, total.

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PHYLUM: Arthorpoda, SUBPHYLUM: Uniramia, SUPERCLASS: Insecta, CLASS: Pterygota, ORDER: Hemiptera, FAMILY: Belostomatidae

Science is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal which appeals to a cross-disciplinary audience. It is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is based in Washington, DC. It was first published by a member of the AAAS from 1880-81 (funded, interestingly enough by Thomas Edison), ceased publication for one year, and started again in 1883. It suffered some hardships, financially, until 1894 when it came under the ownership of James McKeen Cattell in 1894. The psychology professor brought the journal under the auspices of the AAAS officially that year, and edited the journal for the next fifty years.

The papers published in Science are generally shorter than those in normal scientific publications. There are several categories of papers that are published in Science. The principal papers in the journal are called Research Articles. Research articles are roughly 4500 words long, and are expected to present a major advance in the scientific field in question. These articles may have up to six figures or tables, and may cite up to 40 references. In recent years, authors have been permitted to supplement the material in research articles with information kept online. Reports are more numerous than research articles, and can be up to 2500 words in length. These papers normally present important new information with broad significance. They may have up to 4 figures and tables, and may cite up to 30 references. Again, online information may supplement the publication.

They also publish even shorter reports, called Brevia (~800 words) and Technical Comments. Brevia may have one illustration, and are intended to summarize recent research results, and a more thorough publication likely occurs in another journal. Interdisciplinary research is favoured in the selection of brevia. Technical comments are only published online, and discuss papers previously published in Science. They are normally accompanied by a reply from the authors of the paper being discussed.

Other sections in the journal include Editorials, Book Reviews, Essays, Perspectives and Reviews.

The journal has a very high impact factor, and is one of the two best-known interdisciplinary scientific journals (it is second, in IF, to Nature). Given its interdisciplinary and prestigious nature, the journal gets numerous submissions and rejects upwards of 90 percent of the papers it receives.

The journal, along with its articles, can be found online at http://www.sciencemag.org. (Beware www.sciencemag.com, which takes you to what can only be called a domain name squatter).

Science has been one of my main interests since I was in second grade, and over the years I have had at least a passing interest in many different branches of science. Recently, I have tried to think about what I consider to be the overarching principle of science. What separates science from non-science?

There has been much written about this, some of it here. There are many different definitions of science, with some debate amongst different proponents. Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein (supposedly) almost came to blows over the issues, and while the prospect of the two fighting with a poker over logical positivism might be entertaining, the dense terminology used to debate induction, deduction, logic and utilitarianism, and many of the other buzzwords that surround the philosophy of science, are something of interest only to a few. And, if I can make a generalization, they are perhaps not something that working scientists are that concerned with.

Coincidentally, however, it was Wittgenstein that provided one of the best analogies for how to describe science. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein uses the example of the word "game", and its many contexts. Solitaire, tennis, jump rope, Candy Land, tag, golf, Sudoku and water polo are all games. Some games are competitive, some games are not. Some games are played with others, some are played alone. Some games involve physical activity, some do not. Some games involve luck, some involve skill, and some involve both. Further examples could be given, but the point is fairly obvious: there is no single definition that precisely fits everything that might be a "game".

And I have finally decided that science is the same way. There is no single definition that covers everything that might be described as "science". Some science is experimental. Some science is observational. Some science involves things that can be handled and built, and is therefore of utilitarian interest. Some science is very speculative. Some science involves almost solely abstract mathematical models, while some science just involves noticing obvious daily phenomenon. Some science deals with universal laws, while other science describes unique items or events. For example, it is a scientific observation that I saw a group of Stellar's Jays last week, in the Sapphire Mountains. It is scientific speculation to imagine that planets surrounding stars in the Magellanic Clouds would be mostly made of silicon and oxygen, with relatively small iron cores. And it is scientific calculation to compute the force of the gravitational attraction between two neutrinos a light year apart. In the first case, I am observing a unique event, and am not formulating a hypothesis. In the second, I am using known facts to guess at unknown facts, which I have no way of confirming or falsifying. And in the third, I am using mathematical laws to calculate a force that is too small ever to be observed directly. All three of these examples are parts of scientific activity, and yet they have little in common with each other, and no single overarching principle.

In other words, science is not a single, definable activity or discipline, but rather a term we used for a group of interrelated activities. While it may seem like a poor answer, I do believe, to paraphrase a supreme court justice, that the only real definition of science is "I know it when I see it".