• Question: whats the wierdest thing you've ever studied

    Asked by arthur13 to Allan, Angela, Diva, Harriet, Nathan on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Harriet Groom

      Harriet Groom answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      The weirdest thing I have studied was probably a virus called XMRV (xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus – weird name to start!). Some scientists found it in people with prostate cancer and so lots of people started to work on it to see if it had a link to disease. After two years of lots of scientists frantically working, it was found that the virus wasn’t in people at all. Actually someone was growing human cells in a mouse (something that is sometimes done in science) and the mouse virus hopped into the human cells. These cells were in the lab and got mixed up into the patients’ samples which is how the original scientists found it. Very weird but we worked it all out in the end!

    • Photo: Nathan Langford

      Nathan Langford answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      One of my friends studied something really weird – shrimp vision! There is an amazing type of crustacean, called the stomatopods, that have actually evolved eyes that can completely analyse the polarisation of light – not just colour and brightness, like humans. They have a whole different type of eye function. The researchers believe this helps the shrimp to navigate, avoid predators and communicate with other shrimp!

      Check out the picture at this link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002190?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002190.g003

    • Photo: Diva Amon

      Diva Amon answered on 3 Jul 2012:

      Hey arthur 13,

      The weirdest things I have ever studied are most definitely a type of crab called Kiwa or the yeti crab! they are only found in the deep sea at very special habitats called hydrothermal vents which are underwater volcanoes sort of. There have only been three species found so far! Here is a pic of one:
      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0309_060309_yeti_crab.html

      You can see that they have really hairy arms – there is a reason for this. The vents where they live have hot fluids full of metals and chemicals gushing out of them rather than lava like typical volcanoes. These crabs have a special type of bacteria which live on their hairy arms and need to be bathed in the warm water for the vents so they can use the chemicals to grow. The crab does this by doing a funny dance with his arms in the hot fluids. Here is a video of what it looks like:

      Once the bacteria are kept in the fluid, they continue to grow and reproduce and this is what the crab eats! It’s like it has a grocery or farm on his arms! Pretty amazing! A pretty funny point related to this is that one of the other yeti crab species doesn’t have hairy arms but instead has hairy bum and hairy chest! Here is a pic:
      http://deepseanews.com/2012/05/hoff-crab-tattoo-awesomsauce/large/

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