Tool or fish ingenuity?
"While exploring Australia's Great Barrier Reef, professional diver Scott Gardner heard an odd cracking sound and swam over to investigate. What he found was a footlong blackspot tuskfish holding a clam in its mouth and whacking it against a rock. Soon the shell gave way, and the fish gobbled up the bivalve, spat out the shell fragments, and swam off. Fortunately, Gardner had a camera handy and snapped what seem to be the
first photographs of a wild fish using a tool." (Not everyone agrees that this constitutes tool use, says the article, in part because the "tool" isn't something that the fish can actually manipulate.) 7-10-11
Hundreds of new reef creatures found in Australia
Survey teams recently snapped a variety of soft corals growing near Lizard Island in Australia...Called soft coral because they lack the hard skeletons of reef-building corals, up to half of the 300 species found in the three locations studied could be new to science... the ones shown above are just a sampling. 9-18-08.
