Hot stuff: hydrothermal vents power the ecosystem (Image: Dr Sven Thatje)

Hot vents in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean are crowded with cold, hairy crabs. Blind and surrounded by freezing water, they must huddle close to the vent chimneys that power their ecosystem.

from the University of Southampton discovered the new species, Kiwa tyleri, when his remote vehicle came across two fields of hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean. The crabs were hard to miss, with more than 700 packed per square meter.

“It was immediately clear that we had something,” Thatje says. “There are piles of them all over.”

Hair today: the Yeti crab’s bristles may help it cultivate bacteria (Image: Dr Sven Thatje)

Kiwa tyleri is a type of Yeti crab – so named because of the hair-like bristles that cover its body. Its hairy coat is thought to help it farm the chemosynthetic bacteria that thrive in the vent’s chemical exhaust.

It’s a confined existence. Away from the vent, the water drops to 0 °C or below, which paralyses crabs that stray from their heat source.

The crabs gather at the chimney bases to compete for the best farming spots.

Some crabs are more successful than others. A few large males climb up into warmer waters, Thatje says. “They probably farm but they also scrape up bacterial mats further up the chimney, which may be a nutritional advantage,” he says.

Journal reference: PLOS ONE,

(Image: Michael Quinton/Minden)

NORTHERN flicker sounds like something that might go wrong with your TV set in Manchester. In fact it is .

If you spotted one on a tree, you’d see a handsome bird with brown and black plumage. It’s only when they take to the air that they flash their unmistakable colours. erupting from its nest in Alaska is the yellow-shafted form of the species (Colaptes auratus), found across the east and north of the US and Canada. In the west you would see a red-shafted flicker.

But if you meet one up close and are still unsure what bird you are looking at, wait until it sticks out its tongue. It is thought to be , up to 12 centimetres in length. Woodpeckers’ tongues are attached differently to other birds, curling up behind the skulls – which are themselves specialised to withstand the intense mechanical shocks caused when the birds drum against a tree trunk.

(Image: Michael Quinton/Minden)

An urban legend claims that the flicker can use its monster tongue to catch bats as they leave their roost – but given that it mostly forages on the ground for ants and beetles, we don’t believe a word of it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Yellow flash”