Justin: No.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Shall we go back and see the dung museum again? Well, I don’t know or reckon that it changed much, but …
Kirsten: I don’t know if you are interested in that kind of stuff.
Justin: I will go. I would go. I will go.
Kirsten: If that is what you are interested in you can find parts of the northern Arizona University collection at the International Wild Life Museum in Tucson, Mesas, and the Mesa South West Museum in Mesa, and The National Museum in Paris.
Justin: Wow. Then I’d go there.
Kirsten: So if you are in the area.
Justin: Next time, I’m in Paris I’d go check it.
Kirsten: Right. Right. [Laughs].
Justin: Oh my goodness! This is, okay, great website to go to and it is www.topp.org and you should just go there. I don’t need to do the story.
Kirsten: No!!
Justin: Okay, satellite tracking and acoustic sensors are giving researchers insights in the behavior and lifestyles of amongst other marine creatures, the white shark.
Kirsten: Oh! Yes, we like the shark.
Justin: Yes, very elusive, very mysterious white shark. Researchers from several institutions have joined their efforts in tracking marine life in a project called “tagging of Pacific predators or TOPP,” which I think they have gone beyond predators now.
They have attached more than 3000 tags to sharks, seals, whales, tunas, squids, turtles, and albatross birds and other things. Now they are just starting to tag everything up. They are just going crazy with it.
Kirsten: Tag crazy.
Justin: Yes. It is like surfers that had come back ashore with these radio receivers tagged to their necks. These TOPP researchers – oh that’s clever. They get to call themselves TOPP researchers. These TOPP researches are getting a glimpse of …
Kirsten: (unintelligible) psychology.
Justin: Of pelagic, pelagic? Ecosystem from the California current to the north pacific at a daily and seasonal time scale, and you can actually see this on the website because they do the live tracking. They kind of update.
Kirsten: Oh that is neat. See you can see actually what is happening with the animals, where they’re going and …
Justin: You can see and it’s – you see them- the trick to it is a lot of this is the satellite stuff comes when the creatures are sort of – like the sharks for instance are tracked by satellite but only when they are like real close to the surface -can they get a snapshot of them.
But they have these other sort of acoustic tags that they can – pick up all along the coast, so any time they are along the coast, they get a real clear picture of where they are and then as they got to see sometimes they get lost.
But you can actually take a little tag of this little animation of some of the different creatures they have tagged and you can link it to like Myspace or to your website and it will have like the name of like say the turtle and what speed it is traveling right now.
Kirsten: Right
Justin: …and where it is and like right now on mine I have got this blue fin tuna it is like cruising near Tokyo, so I am very concerned about it right now.
Kirsten: [Laughs] No turtle fin soup! Come back. Come back.
Justin: Come back. Come back. No it is not a turtle. It is a tuna I have got a tuna that is over there.
Kirsten: Tuna, Oh!
Justin: Yes, I am worried about my tuna right now.
Kirsten: I like tuna.
Justin: Yes. But anyway, what they have noticed is that the sharks have….they come okay here we go. So where do they go? So they hangout along the continental shelf and like eat sea lions for a while. And then they get sort of full, I guess, and they head back out to sea.
Through tracking the TOPP team has found that there are two distant destinations that the sharks favor – both of which they visit on an annual travel timetable.
So they go back to the same spots each winter and come back again. Each winter the white shark head out from California coast. Some go to the Hawaiian Islands. Right? They hang out there snack on surfers.
Kirsten: [Laughs].
Justin: Most however…
Kirsten: Yummy!
Justin: Head to another hotspot out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is located roughly 1300 miles from the main land about half the distance to Hawaii and few hundred miles south of the direct route and it has dubbed the “white shark café” but that is just what they are calling it. They don’t actually know why so many of the sharks congregate there.
Kirsten: Oh really!
Justin: They don’t know yet.
Kirsten: Yes. A lot of time, they are along the travel path of a lot of the – like sharks, great white sharks, hammer head sharks, and seals and other aquatic large animals – the tuna as well like a lot of these animals they travel along the sea mounts.
And so there are these areas of the ocean where the ocean floor rises up, and it becomes, I guess, closer to the surface of water so there is more light at the top and there is also a lot of smaller fish and other sea life that congregate around these points.
Justin: Yes.
Kirsten: And so they become a sort of feeding grounds for things like great white sharks and hammer heads and that kind of stuff. And it is also something I learned from a shark expert once is that hammer heads with their really interesting heads they use like electromagnetic signals. And great white sharks do the same but hammer head seemed to be especially good at it and they tend to home in on the sea mounts because they have – there is some kind of because there is such a larger amount of earth there or something it tends to …
Justin: Electromagnetic wavy thing going out there.
Kirsten: Yes, tends to bring them in, yes you know it is very fascinating.
Justin: One thing is this: they head back to the same neighborhood along the coast though these sharks, I mean, each have their own little kind of area that they like to go back to.
Kirsten: Yes
Justin: And they do it every year.
Kirsten: Yes. That is like you know that is the yearly vacation that you go on. [Laughs].
Justin: And also, yes, of course, they found that now also that there are different groups of sharks in the Pacific. The sort of eastern Pacific do not mix with the western Pacific sharks.
Kirsten: Oh!
Justin: And they have been isolated for quite some time much like there of course is an Australia, Africa, there is a whole different variety of white shark that never mixed with the pacific shark. Right?
Kirsten: Wow! So they kind of stay to their own subspecies.
Justin: Yes they sort of do …
Kirsten: (Liked) their own populations.
Justin: They sort of stake out a territory and just sort of continue to hang out in that area and don’t really travel beyond it.
Kirsten: That is really fascinating. Oh! What was the next cool story that I wanted to talk about? There is a study that has come out of Tel Aviv University suggesting that heavy cell phone use might increase the risk of salivary gland cancer.
Justin: Huh?!
Kirsten: Yes. So a lot of the studies so far that looked into cancer risk and cell phone use, they’ve focused on cancers of the brain solely.
This study looked at 500 Israelis who developed the salivary gland cancer and 1300 healthy controls and compared them and they found that those who used the phone against one side of the head for several hours a day were 50% more likely to have developed a salivary gland tumor within those.
Justin: The salivary gland that’s…
Kirsten: That’s the next thing. It is a very rare form of cancer, so the chances in the first place are incredibly, incredibly slim like 0.01% or something like that, I mean it is …
Justin: Yes and …
Kirsten: So it is just if – of that 0.01% who might get it may be if you use your phone a lot you are like 50% more likely out of that so it is like…
Justin: May be, may be because if you on the phone that much …
Kirsten: …slightly raised.
Justin: May be your rate is increased by talking?
Kirsten: [Laughs].
Kirsten: You are talking a lot so may be it dries out your mouth too much?
Justin: You just over work and that …
Kirsten: And get just overworking the salivary gland?
Justin: May be that is what is really going on and I don’t know. That is just a goofy thing.
Kirsten: [Laughs]. It is good. You don’t know.
Justin: But I mean if you are talking more hours a day than anybody else and it just could be…
Kirsten: Yes. It is a correlation. This one study, however was a very small study and the most definitive study to date is out of Denmark and it looked at 420,000 individuals and it found no risk of almost any cancers.
I think they looked comprehensively across the board, and they didn’t find any increased risk of cancer with cell phone use. So, there is this one really big study that didn’t find any risk.
Now, we are looking at a very small specialized study that has found the risk in a very rare form of cancer, I think the jury is still out. We really don’t understand enough yet about whether or not the cell phones who -cell phones the problem is that they emit in radiofrequencies and the problem…
Justin: So do we. We are emitting right now. Sorry.
Kirsten: We are emitting. That’s right. We are, we are.
Justin: Sorry excuse us.
Kirsten: Sorry, my nerves are just going crazy today. But anyway the problem is that when the cell phones …
Justin: I meant the giant radio tower – broadcasting.
Kirsten: Oh the radio, I thought you meant us right here. But we are. Okay. What I was going to say is that the cell phones when they are out of range or they get – they are further and further away from the cell phone tower, they have to, they emit a stronger and stronger signals to try and meet the cell phone tower that it is trying to reach.
So that is part of the problem so if you are in an area where the coverage is not that good and you are using the phone a lot and that is what they are probably looking at.
Justin: Wow!
Kirsten: I don’t know. It is all up in the air and nobody knows for sure.
Justin: Something else that nobody knows for sure. But now they are knowing because it is a new discovery – a new find in Science – a giant frog fossil from Madagascar dubbed Beelzebufo.
Kirsten: Oh my goodness that is funny. [Laughs].
Justin: Beelzebufo or the “frog from hell”.
Kirsten: [Laughs].
Justin: … has been – Devil frog has been identified by scientists from University College London, in Stony brook New York. The discovery of the 70 million year old frog fossil of a kind once thought unique to South America lends weight to new theory that Madagascar, India and South America were linked until the late age of dinosaurs.
Kirsten: Oh!
Justin: And they are calling this a frog and its some sort of – it is very hard to tell a frog from a toad if you are not somebody who knows frogs from toads but there are some actual differences.
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: But this new frog resembles living horned toads as the squat bodied, huge head, and wide mouth like the pacman toad and things are just indigenous to South America but it is over there in Madagascar. [Laughs]. The body length not counting the legs, no legs in this body length of 16 inches!
Kirsten: Oh my god!
Justin: Just the body
Kirsten: That is huge.
Justin: And weighted at least 10 pounds making more than twice the size of its largest living relative today.
Kirsten: Wow!
Justin: The fossil enters itself into Madagascar and history alongside dinosaurs, giant snakes, and plant-eating crocodiles. Huh?!
Kirsten: Plant-eating crocodiles?
Justin: I didn’t even know that existed.
Kirsten: Vegetarian crocodiles.
Justin: Professor Susan Evans of the University College London. “This frog is a relative of today’s horned toad would have been the size of a beach ball, short legs, big mouth”.
If it shared the aggressive temperament, the sit and wait ambush tactics of living horned toads, it would have been a formidable predator on small animals. Its diet would most likely have consisted of insects, small vertebrates like lizards but it is not impossible that Beelzebufo might have even munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs.
Kirsten: Whoa! Beelzebufo I love that. I think I am going to just end up saying that randomly all week long …
Justin: Beelzebufo.
Kirsten: …because it is just so funny.
Justin: Our discovery of a frog strikingly different from today’s Madagascarian frogs and a kin to the horned toad previously considered an endemic to South America lends weight to the controversial paleo-bio-geographical suggesting yes that Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent and South America were linked well into the late cretaceous and suggested initial spread of such beast began earlier than proposed by more current estimates.
So a frog fossil making some serious waves on the way the planet was put together some 70 million years ago. Crazy.
Kirsten: I love it. All from a big frog. That is toad frog.
Justin: It is a frog because it …
Kirsten: No it is a toad.
Justin: … no it’s a frog.
Kirsten: Bufo, bufo…
Justin: I know, I know but they’re calling it a frog and I think the reason is it was likely a hopper.
Kirsten: Ah.
Justin: Still because like toads walk but they say it resembles – but may be they are calling it a frog because there are only frogs that have been in Madagascar. There are not toads there and that is why they are calling it a frog. It is kind of hard to tell. I’d have to see a picture of it.
Kirsten: [Laughs].