Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse : Queenly Beauty Under The Indian Ocean

Here's a little information about a rare kind of aquarium fish - Bluestreak cleaner wrasse. Aquarium lovers will fall in love of the electric beauty of this fish. This is one of those immensely beautiful species of cleaner wrasse that are found on coral reefs in the Indian Ocean. Marine aquarists will surely love this wonderful fish.
  

Bluestreak cleaner wrasse
 Labroides dimidiatus

Family: Labridae (Wrasses)

Distribution: Indo-Pacific, Red Sea and East Africa to the Line, Marquesan, and Ducie islands, north to southern Japan, south to Lord Howe and Rapa islands.

Description: The Common Cleaner Wrasse is also known as the Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse Inhabits the coral rich areas of inner lagoons and sub tidal reef flats to seaward reefs and can grow up to 3.9 inches. The Common Cleaner Wrasse has different color patterns; some are dark in color with a silver stripe, while others are white with a dark band and a bright yellow spot at the tail. The Cleaner Wrasse is well known for its cleaning behavior, it establishes a cleaning station. A protogynous hermaphrodite Stays in these stations where other fish come to be cleaned of unwanted parasites and develops a symbiotic relationship with the other reef fish by cleaning them. The cleaner wrasses begin their lives as females of a group of 6-8 cleaner wrasses with one male, the rest are females or juveniles. The dominant female changes its sex when the male dies, an phenomenon known as sequential hermaphroditism. With a most intriguing dance these are amazingly beautiful specimen in an aquarium but like all other Cleaner Wrasse the sustainability in captivity is very less. This is a high maintenance fish. This fish has Medium resilience, minimum population doubling time 1.4 - 4.4 years

Environment: Cleaner Wrasse needs a tank of about 30 gallons or more with abundance of space to hide and swim. It relishes gravel or sand. Water quality should be high with 1.020-1.025, pH 8.1 - 8.4 and Temperature should preferably be 72 - 78° F.


Feeding: Common Cleaner Wrasse is a carnivore fish, it prefers diets consisting of chopped sea foods, brine shrimp, and live black worms. It should be fed at least three times a day.

Behavior: They are peaceful in nature. It usually swims singly, in pairs, and in groups. Some adults solitary and territorial

Compatibility: Cleaner wrasse develops a symbiotic relationship with the other tank mates. Kept together they develop compatibility with the tank inhabitants.

Rare Limlebless Amphibian Discovered:

National Geographic titled this news as "Disarming Discovery". Researchers have discovered a not-seen-before limbless amphibians that resemble much a worm or a snake, which they actually aren't. The photograph was shot by S.D. Biju, showing the soil-burrowing, limbless amphibians guarding a brood of eggs. This discovery has opened up a new horizon, as this creature is totally new to the science, according to the studies. This newly found animal represents an entirely new amphibians—family (that was not documented by science so far) and acts as the next very vital chapter in genetics and species. According to findings announced today by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. this discovery is the next major level up in genus and species in the scientific naming conventions.
 It's native is northeastern India. The worm-like creature is one of the 6 potentially new species that belongs to a mysterious group of animals falling under "Caecilians" family - Christened Chikilidae ("Chikila" is the name for caecilians, give by the local tribes). Interestingly, Caecilians' closest relatives live over 7,000 miles away from India, in the tropical Africa, according to a report delivered by the research team.

Brookesia Micra - World's Tiniest Chameleon Discovered

The photograph was shot by Frank Glaw; all credit to the photograph of this world's tiniest chameleon breed goes to Mr. Glaw.

Unmatched among the chameleon species, Brookesia micra (B. micra), the planet's smallest chameleon species was discovered on the African island country, Madagascar. The flora and fauna of Madagascar have been evolved into some really weirdest styles, amd structures. Where else on this planet, other than Madagascar, can you find over 70 distinctives types of lemur? It is this place that you can find a variety of Lemur one that calls like a siren of the cops' vehicle. World's largest chameleon h\was discovered here at Madagascar, and yet this is another weirdest off all discoveries - the world’s smallest chameleon, Brookesia micra that has an average length, of little over an inch. With a length of around 2.9 centimeters from snout to tail, the Brookesia micra is considered as the world's tiniest reptile ever discovered. It is so tiny that it can just perch on the tip of a match stick at ease.

According to the researchers this unusually small new species of chameleon indicates the extreme cases dwarfism on this island. Researchers think that the organisms here at this African island country of Madagascar have shrunk in dimension due to lack of resources on this place. According to the study leader Frank Glaw of Germany's Zoological State Collection said in a statement, "the extreme miniaturization of these dwarf reptiles might be accompanied by numerous specializations of the body plan, and this constitutes a promising field for future research."

While discussing more about this amazing creature, Glaw said said that it is not an easy task to find them. He said, for such a tiny reptile, "up into the branches" means just a 4 inches off the ground, shich makes it really unnoticeable. "However, once spotted, the tiny lizards aren't tough to catch," Glaw said. He added, "They are sleeping and you can just pick them up. It's like picking a strawberry. They do not move at all at night."

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Hello All Animal Lovers Across The Globe,

We peeped in to wish you Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. Let the grains or peace, love and hope be sprinkled on you and let my animals and their lovers have a great life ahead.
We are grateful to have you as our audience, and shall be honored to have this nice relationship maintained throughout the life!

National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative

This Haloween reveals scopes for kids to cause an uproar with National Geographic’s Big Cats initiative

Howdy buddies? Here’s an interesting information that you are going to surely like – especially if you are an animal lover. Halloween is right here and people – especially kids have already gone gaga over their most favorite Halloween activity – trick-or-treating! Yes… And guess what? National Geographic has invited families to help through every kid’s favorite Halloween activity – trick-or-treating by the way of Trick-or-Treating for our favorite animal – the Big Cats. This is really an appreciably step towards a good cause, where kids can cause an uproar by collecting change with their candy to save these incredible animals.

 

National Geographic's Bog Cat Initiative on Halloween 2011

You can get to know more about the initiative at www.causeanuproar.org, which is currently redirected to http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/big-cats/. Here you can get special treat boxes, find big cat facts, cat-o-lantern instructions and so much more that can make this Halloween 2011 an ever memorable episode of your life! Kids, who love animals, have been revealed with opportunities to cause an uproar with National Geographic’s Big Cats initiative.

Big cats are disappearing at a fast pace. And it’s now the time to act for all of us on the Earth, including our kids. What better than Halloween that National Geographic could have chosen to help kids to help spread awareness for the planet’s one of the loveliest creatures - big cats? There’s no better way than this that could have been selected to spread the word about the plight of big cats. You can find adorable resources for Trick-or-Treat here

Can Animals Comprehend And Plan For the Future?

This is what I have been thinking for quite some time, but hadn't have that time to search for this info on the web. The last week I could manage to scoop some time out of my bustling schedule and got to learn about whether animals can perceive time and whether they can plan or comprehend things they might come across in future. I have made a post on my dog blog regarding how dogs perceive time. This post is all about whether animals are able to learn and plan without having an understanding of time.

Compared to us (human beings) animals have abilities to understand time to lesser extent. Humans have two distinctive abilities to comprehend time, viz. (1) ability to remember the sequence of events that had occurred in the past, and (2) ability to analyst the requirement that we may come across in the future. Experiments on working memory tests on animals have shown that animals also have these two abilities, but not as extensively as humans.

Researchers have experimented on the working memories (short term memories) and reference memories (long term memories) of animals in order to test how do animals remember the sequences of evens. Good news is that the animals performed quite well in those tests, but the researchers concluded that their memory faded out at a fast rate. According to the scientist William Roberts, who had experimented on animal memories, "animals were probably learning going from weakest memory to strongest memory, rather than actually 'learning' or 'remembering' a sequence."

Some of the other scientists who have been working on the similar kind of experiments, found that monkeys and pigeons did fairly good at the reference memories, which is the long term memories, in which they had been tested to check how well they could remember a sequence after a delayed time span between learning and testing. In this regarding Roberts said that they required extensive training session to learn these sequences. Roberts said, "the ability did not come naturally to them." Hence the researchers have concluded that animals would perceive time, but in a different way from humans. Compared to human beings animals have been seen to have a relatively less reliable and less sophisticated memory that help them to remember of sequence of events.

At the same time the researchers concluded that animals do not have good abilities to anticipate future needs, with which the researchers have drawn the conclusion that animals do not have any concept of future. Experiments on rates and pigeons have shown that they "chose a smaller immediate reward over the larger future reward", which directly proved that animals do not have ability to comprehend and plan the future. Another experimentation on primates had been carried out given a choice of "One (1) banana" and "Two (2) bananas". The primates picked the larger quantity - that is two bananas. Now when experiment had been carried out once again with five (5) and ten (10) bananas, in which the primates chose the lesser quantity, that is 5 bananas. Researchers William Roberts concluded that animals try to satisfy their immediate hunger, and do not have the ability to plan for the future.

Now all these experiments and their conclusions seem to be quite convincing. But if animals do not have the ability OR is they have less sophisticated ability to comprehend and plan for the future, why and how do ants tend to collect and gather enough food stuff before they go to hibernation during the winter?