Stories by Jennifer Frazer

Just how big is a giant squid? Not quite as big, perhaps, as you might think. This fabulous new graphic from the Deep Sea News crew and several other scientists represents *a lot* of research to find out the true largest sizes of 25 ocean creatures of giant repute.

There comes a depth at which even fish struggle to survive the titanic pressure. But that depth is only found at the few places on Earth that lie below 27,600 feet of water, where the weight of the water warps piscine proteins and crushes cells.

Author's note: This is the latest post in the Wonderful Things series. You can read more about this series here. One of the more under-appreciated and ingenious machines evolved by plants is the cavitation catapult of leptosporangiate ferns.

Today I have a small biology present for you courtesy of a new series of short videos produced by PBS Digital Studios and KQED San Francisco.

Bacteria propel themselves with corkscrew tails anchored in rotary motors. That may seem surprisingly mechanical for a microbe, but it is a system that has been wildly popular and conserved across billions of years of evolution.

The organisms that cause us untold suffering can also be astounding works of art, sculpted by evolution into elegant, deadly packages. Such is the case for the trypanosomes, the protists I discussed last time as the source of Chagas Disease, but which also cause sleeping sickness in Africa.

The kissing bug may have the most misleadingly cute name in entomology. It bites, rather than smooches, its victims around the mouth or face.

Risk may still be low, but findings lead scientists to call for better studies

Author's note: This is the latest post in the Wonderful Things series. You can read more about this series here. It is startling how different the larvae of fish can be from the adults that produced them, as I wrote in a blog post a few months ago.

Though plankton drift with the ocean currents, that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of any movement. Many of them can move to find food or mates, and they do so in some surprising and sometimes entertaining ways.

A few months ago I wrote about some mystifying mathematical and geographic tiles I encountered at the National Tile Museum in Lisbon, Portugal.

“Amborella trichopoda (3173820625)-2” by Amborella_trichopoda_(3173820625).jpg: Scott Zona from USA derivative work: Bff – Amborella_trichopoda_(3173820625).jpg.

Foreign mitochondrial genes outnumber the Amborella plant’s own six to one

It defies belief, but a 180 million year old fern fossil unearthed in Sweden is so exquisitely preserved that it is possible to see its cells dividing.

One of the most astounding events of my life was immediately preceded by one of the scariest: I turned out my dive light in the ocean at night.

The biting midge Culicoides (Trithecoides) anophelis Edwards is a predator of engorged mosquitoes, which was first described by Edwards in 1922 [1].At least 19 mosquito species in the genera Anopheles, Culex, Aedes and Armigeres have been documented as hosts of C.

Microscopic soil organisms could reveal the story of a corpse

On Tuesday I wrote about my experience diving in a deep-sea submarine, but going on right now are two live-streaming deep-sea expeditions that allow you incredible access to the deep sea from the comfort of your own home.

I heard a screwing noise as the hatch of our sub was sealed. A bright orange hose from topside that had been inserted into the sub to blow fresh air as we loaded had been removed, and the interior felt warm and damp and close.

For at least the last 15 years, I have dreamed of travelling to the deep sea. If you read this blog regularly or have ever watched a documentary about the deep sea, you understand why.

It’s not every day a new animal is discovered that could shake up the roots of animal taxonomy and simultaneously form its own new phylum, the top classification in the Animal Kingdom, but today is such a day.

In the comments of the following video on Youtube, a viewer asks, “Is that a real video ? Or Cgi ?” What you will see in this video is very much real, but I can see why someone might get confused.

Until relatively recently, the fungus Malassezia was thought to have one favorite home: us. As the dominant fungus on human skin and sometimes-cause of dandruff, the yeast Malassezia was thought to live a simple if sometimes irritating domestic existence humbly mooching off the oils we exude.

People who lack the gardening bug often regard flowers like fashion models: pretty but boring. Jens Petersen, the man who gave us the groundbreaking photographs of fungi in “The Kingdom of Fungi”, which I reviewed here in March, has a new book of photographs (still available only in Danish, unfortunately, and called Blomsterliv — “Flower [...]