86 A Yeti Crab Discovered

A furry-looking crustacean discovered on the floor of the South Pacific Ocean at a depth of 6,500 feet is so unusual that it has earned itself a brand-new taxonomic family: Kiwaidae. The six-inch-long white crab is eyeless, and its claw arms are covered with hairlike filaments filled with what are most likely symbiotic bacteria. Joe Jones of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute codiscovered the crab—which he calls Yeti, after the mythical abominable snowman—while he and his colleagues were exploring hydrothermal vents using the submersible vehicle Alvin.

Jennifer Barone

88 Super-Ants Fly by Force of Mouth

Hollywood may have run out of ideas about how to reimagine Superman, but nature has not. This year biologists published a study of super-ants that fly by biting against the ground so hard that they shoot themselves into the air. To generate the necessary force, they prop apart their large, pincerlike mandibles with a latch on their heads, tense their muscles, and release the latch. The mandibles then accelerate together at a terrific rate, like the sudden movement of a person's finger during a snap. High-speed 70,000-frames-per-second video analysis of the bites shows that the ants have the fastest self-propelled strike in the animal kingdom, beating even the snapping shrimp.


Amos Kenigsberg

Antsy for more to read about ants? Check  out the secret life of ants.

91 Cancer Morphs Into New Life-Form

More than 20 years after University College London's viral oncologist Robin Weiss read about an odd, sexually transmitted cancer in dogs, he has turned up surprising clues about its origin in a canine ancestor hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years ago.


Courtesy of Perry Bain
The tumors, which appear on dogs' genitals, seem to get passed along during mating; some early genetic evidence had hinted that the tumors migrated from dog to dog, as if transplanted. To find out, Weiss and veterinarian Claudio Murgia collected and analyzed the DNA of tumor specimens (above) from dog breeds all over the world. None of the tumors matched the DNA of the dogs they had been taken from. Instead, the cells proved to be descendants from a single original tumor that has been spreading via body fluids and sexual contact from one dog to the next over generations. The tumors are a medical curiosity, constituting the oldest-known mammalian cell line in existence, as well as a novel type of parasite so unusual that it may not fit into any current classification.

Similar cancer lines could exist in other animals, including humans, but Weiss expects that they are rare. Most cells from a foreign donor, such as in transplanted organs, are targeted by the immune system, but "this one has found a way to suppress the immune system of its hosts long enough to let it be passed along," he says.

Jocelyn Selim

97 DNA Boosts Panda Count
A new census based on DNA analysis of panda feces suggests that there may be 3,000 giant pandas living in China, twice as many as was previously thought. Prior to this study, counting pandas was as much an art as a science: Pieces of bamboo in panda droppings were inspected for bite marks to distinguish individual bears. But nibbles from different pandas may look similar, so researchers tended to underestimate the population, according to conservation geneticist Michael Bruford of Cardiff University in Wales. "We are not saying the panda is out of the woods," he says, but with conservation efforts "the long-term prognosis is much more favorable for the future of the species."

Jennifer Barone