geekosystem

Between traffic, crowds, and inane drive-time DJs, you might think nothing could make your commute worse. Think again. According to an officer of the New York subway system, a planned train line extension in the city could be plagued by an unexpected menace -- electric eels. Just how the eels would get to New York from their mostly tropical homes remains a mystery, but as someone who rides the New York subway every day, I can confirm that it wouldn't really surprise anyone.

The deep ocean has all the coolest creatures. Fish with bioluminescence, giant isopods, gulper eels. If it's weird, glowing, or inhabits your nightmares, Earth's depths probably has it. But have you heard of the Ocellated Ice Fish, the deep-dwelling aquatic vertebrate in the Antarctic Ocean that has completely transparent blood? It's not scary, but it is exotic and its unusual physical traits don't end there, either.

A team of researchers is making the best of a bad situation and trying to use the lasting effects of radiation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactor to help environmental conservation efforts. In the years since the meltdown, marine biologists have found traces of radiation from the meltdown in bluefin tuna as far afield as California. That radiation, though, could help marine biologists map the ill-understood migration routes of the tuna. That better understanding of the life cycle and habits of the bluefin could be brought to bear in efforts to protect the valuable food fish from overfishing, a growing concern for pretty much every tuna species.

With Valentine's Day around the corner, plenty of us are getting our annual harsh reminder that finding love can be really, really hard. We might like to say it's not so, but the fact is, whether you're a guppy or a human, looks count for a lot in the dating game. Like most things, though, looks are all relative -- the worse looking the crowd we find ourselves in, the better looking we seem to be. According to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science B, guppies  looking for love long ago perfected the mating tactic of surrounding themselves with specimens less attractive than they are, a tried and true human trait on display in bars across the world every weekend.

Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Genetics believe they've captured a world first video -- images of a thought making it's way through the brain of a zebrafish. It's not a particularly complicated thought -- essentially 'Hey, that looks like it could be food.' -- but the fact that the team has imaged the very stuff of even simple thought for the first time is really kind of amazing -- not unlike magic. Keep reading to see the video of this unprecedented look into the mind of a zebrafish.

People become scientists for a lot of reasons. Because they enjoy solving the mysteries of the universe, or want to make the world a better place to live, or just because it's a career that helps them finish the death ray they're working on in their basement. These are all noble reasons for wanting to do science -- especially the death ray thing -- but none of them is the best reason. The best reason to become a scientist, clearly, is so you can strap small cameras to Adelie penguins and make videos about their lives under the sea like the one you can watch below.

With the holidays still fresh in our mental rearview mirrors, most of us have some fairly fresh memories of sitting down to meals so big we had no business trying to consume them. All of our piled plates have nothing on this pike, though, which died in a valiant, if misguided, attempt to consume an entire zander -- a fish almost as big as the pike itself.

Customs agents in Hong Kong busted an ambitious smuggler carrying about $1 million worth of illicit cargo, including dried endangered seahorses and crocodile meat. Though it's an abhorrent crime and we hope the folks behind it are locked up for a good long time, as poachers should be, we can't help but grant the smugglers points for common sense. After all, if you're going to try and smuggle a crocodile into a place, it's really best to do so once someone more capable has already converted the creature into a series of steaks and fillets. Anything else just sounds exceptionally dangerous.

We assume the reason people don't take the time to engage in a thorough, extensive study of the anglerfish is because one can't go five minutes without getting nauseous looking at the thing. Really, it's that aesthetically repulsive. In spite of the anglerfish's horrendous visage, the world does know a few things about its natural behavior and other nuggets of knowledge that may walk that fine line of being too much information. Enter YouTube user zefrank1 and his groundbreaking documentary on the runner-up for most disgusting aquatic life form to swim Earth's vast oceans. After the sea cucumber, of course.

Beautiful though they may be, let's get one thing straight -- the world's oceans and rivers are basically giant, terrifying bottomless pits full of things that wants to eat you, like great white sharks and giant squid and sea lice as big as your fist. Considering how many things that live in the ocean should inspire fear in your heart, but if it's being bitten by something that scares you the most -- and that is, in our estimation, utterly understandable -- then you should be most terrified of piranhas, which have a stronger bite, pound for pound, than any other fish in history. On the bright side, though, you can be glad that the megapiranha, which is not just a C-minus movie monster but a variety of piranha that is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, is now extinct and can no longer bite you. Thank God for small mercies, right?

We've brought you stories about some of the more interesting techniques animals will go to to improve, even slightly, their chances at breeding. Heck, you barely need us for that -- head down to your local watering hole any Friday night and you'll no doubt get to glimpse folks going to some lengths for the chance to land a mate, even (or especially) just for one evening. A study published online today in the journal Biology Letters suggests that we may have a winner in the "weird ways to get freaky" sweepstakes, though. Researchers studying the Atlantic molly, a small tropical fish related to the guppy, found that some smaller, less dominant examples of Atlantic molly manhood have developed a curious mating tactic -- to improve their chances of breeding with a female, they will first copulate with other males to demonstrate their sexual fitness.

It is at this point fairly well uncontroversial to state that yes, man evolved from apes. What many don't know, though, is that evolution goes much further further back, to when one fish-like common ancestor rebelled against the status quo, hauled itself up onto terra firma, and over the course of generations, grew limbs, consequences be damned. A study led by Dr. José Luis Gómez-Skarmeta and Dr. Fernando Casares of the CSIC-Universidad Pablo de Olavide-Junta de Andalucía in Seville, Spain, suggests that the administration of an extra copy of  the gene Hoxd13 in the fin of an embryonic zebrafish yielded the same sort of fin-to-limb development that would likely have seen during the evolution of ancient fish into land-based vertebrates.

Pelvicachromis taeniatus may sound like an exotic name, but you've probably seen these dwarf cichlids in your local aquarium before. The fish normally dwell in African rivers, but are also popular as fish in domestic aquariums. When they're being fed floating food pellets, though, one of their most interesting evolutionary developments is going to waste. It turns out these cichlids hunt with a highly developed sense of infrared vision.

Identifying fossils is hard work. They are very old, pretty beat up, and more often than not represent only a fraction of the animal actually being represented, from which paleontologists work to recreate a model of the actual creature. Considering that's like building a model of a human from a chunk of your spine embedded in rock for 10 million years, we can forgive some inaccuracies. But even we had to scratch our heads at today's news that the fossilized primate Arrhinolemur scalabrinii -- "Scalbrini's lemur without a nose" -- is not a noseless lemur. Or a primate. Or a mammal. It is, in point of fact, a fish.

This is an underwater structure built about 80 feet underwater off the coast of the southern Japanese island of Anami Oshima. Considering no one had ever encountered anything like it, diver and underwater photographer Yoji Ookata was at a loss to explain what had built the circular, repeating, and clearly geometric structure. The architects of this feat of underwater engineering were discovered by Japanese broadcaster NHK, and the answer to what built the six and a half foot wide structure is at once mundane and really impressive.