One Nanaimo, B.C., resident had a swim to remember last month when she came across an octopus and a sea lion locked in battle. In a three-and-half-minute video that now has over 300,000 views, Lindey Bryant captured the scene in the Strait of Georgia, off the coast of Vancouver Island, which showed the large marine mammal thrashing and writhing in the water. Seemingly in distress, the sea lion was in the middle of hunting a particularly tricky prey — a large octopus. 

According to marine biologist Sherry Tamone, the octopus is able to “wrap itself around the head of the sea lion and bite pretty fiercely. Their beak looks a bit like that of a parrot and each bite delivers nasty chemicals.”

The challenge for a sea lion is to swallow an octopus without the octopus getting its eight arms around the sea lion’s head, something the sea lion will attempt to overcome by taking off one octopus arm at a time. 

Shine bright like a cucumber

A new book by a group of experts in their respective fields, titled The World of the Sea Cucumbers and published by Elsevier Science, has shone a light on deep-sea sea cucumbers — and the sea cucumbers have shone a light right back.

For the first time, 10 deep-sea species of sea cucumber have been shown to have previously unknown luminosity, suggesting an underestimated level of diversity. Deep-sea sea cucumbers have been lighting up oceans since the Jurassic period about 180 million years ago and far outshine their shallow-water relatives, which often appear drab in comparison. The book illustrates the fantastic colours on display with photographs taken using a deep-sea probe equipped with a specialized camera.

According to Nagoya University professor and contributor Manabu Bessho-Uehara, the researchers involved in the book hope readers will gain an understanding that, despite living in the deep sea, sea cucumbers will face likely heightened impact from humans via commercial drilling and exploitation.

Dinosaur demise

Did they go out with a bang? University of McGill researchers have challenged the current understanding of dinosaur extinction by unearthing a link between ancient volcanic eruptions and a subsequent period of climate change — known as a volcanic winter — that may have beaten the asteroid to the punch.

The research team studied a series of eruptions that occurred in the Deccan Traps — a vast plateau in western India formed by molten lava — some 65 million years ago and 200,000 years prior to dinosaur extinction. Erupting about one million cubic kilometres of rock and releasing sulfur into the atmosphere, they may have played a key role in cooling the global climate at the time. 

“Climatic conditions were almost certainly unstable, with repeated volcanic winters that could have lasted decades, prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs,” says McGill professor in Earth and planetary sciences and study co-author Don Baker. “This instability would have made life difficult for all plants and animals and set the stage for the dinosaur extinction event.”

Mapping the white bison