YADVINDER MALHI
  • Home
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Blog
  • CV
  • Resources
    • Presentations
    • Lectures
    • MSc Dissertations
    • Data
    • Videos
  • People

Travels in ecosystem science

Some observations and musings from the field and the office.
​

To get regular updates on the science-focussed postings on this blog you can follow me on Twitter (@ymalhi)

What made that weird web thing in Amazon? Even scientists don't know 

5/9/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
From NBC News (found at Tambopata)http://www.nbcnews.com/science/what-mysterious-amazon-web-baffles-scientists-8C11073468

A bizarre-looking web structure has been found in the Peruvian Amazon, and apparently nobody knows what it is, not even scientists.


The strange formation resembles a tiny spire surrounded by a webby picket fence and is about 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) wide. Georgia Tech graduate student Troy Alexander first spotted one of these on the underside of a tarp near the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon. At first he thought it might have been an aborted moth cocoon, he wrote on Reddit. But then he found several more, all of which looked quite similar.

He posted the photos to Reddit and asked other scientists to help him out, besides making queries around the Tambopata Research Center, to no avail. His guess is that "there are eggs in the base of the maypole in the middle of the horse corral, though it might be something pupating," he wrote on Reddit. [See Images of Weird Amazon Web Structure]

Chris Buddle, an arachnologist at McGill University, said that neither he nor any of his associates know what it is. "I have no clue," he said. It's "a seriously fascinating mystery."

"I have no idea what animal made that," Norman Platnick, curator emeritus of spiders at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, told LiveScience.

So far, Redditors and others have guessed that it could be some kind of moth cocoon, an intricate defense for spider eggs or even the fruiting body of some type of fungus. 

Alexander fell in love with the Peruvian Amazon while on vacation there, he told Colossal, an art blog. So he asked his adviser if he could take a leave of absence to be a volunteer researcher. Shortly thereafter, Alexander flew back to Peru to work at the Tambopata Macaw Project, which focuses on parrot biology and conservation, he told Colossal.

If whatever produces this structure turns out to be a new species, it should come as no surprise — the world's rain forests are expected to perhaps contain millions of new species of arthropods (a group of animals with hard exoskeletons, which includes spiders and insects), according to various scientific estimates. One survey of arthropods in Panama's jungle, in an area about the size of Manhattan, found 25,000 species of insects, spiders and other arthropods, 70 percent of which were new to science. That study also found that there were 300 arthropod species for every one mammal species.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook orGoogle+. Article originally on LiveScience.



0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Yadvinder Malhi is an ecosytem ecologist and Professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford University

    Archives

    August 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Blog
  • CV
  • Resources
    • Presentations
    • Lectures
    • MSc Dissertations
    • Data
    • Videos
  • People