Nathan Johnson, a graduate student at Texas A&M-Galveston who also teaches in the marine biology department, and colleagues from Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Indiana University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have studied the complex ways animal movements have evolved over millions of years and through hundreds of species. Their findings have been published in the current issue of Nature Communications.

The team narrowed animal subjects down to 59 species for the study, and concentrated on ways each one is able to propel itself -- through air, land or water.

The key word appears to be "bend." One common trait they found was each creature being able to "bend" its means of propulsion, but only to a certain point.

"If you take the wing of a bird or a bat, or the fins on a fish or a manta ray, you find that their means of propulsion are flexible," Johnson explains. "They can move back or forth or sideways easily, or they bend. But this bending and flexibility will only go so far, and it can't bend any more.

"For example, the fixed wing on an airplane is not flexible, while nature has had millions of years to figure out the best way to do it better than we can. So we wanted to see if there any patterns to this flexibility.

"For most creatures, there is a certain angle that these propulsion devices will reach and won't exceed. It's not that they probably can't exceed these angles, but rather doing so is just not energetically efficient for them.

"There does seem to be a universal range of movement in the species we looked at, from the fruit fly to the humpback whale."

The team found that a 30 to 60-degree angle seems to be the magic range of how far animal propulsion can bend. "This appears to be especially true with bird wings, while insect wings typically bend slightly less than other organisms we looked at," Johnson adds.

Also, the researchers agreed that environmental factors could be a factor in the range of movement. And some species move almost identically to vastly different species; they found that much of the motion made by marine life is almost identical to that of birds -- that is, the fin of a fish moves just like the wing of a bird.

"We need to understand a lot of these motion patterns in much more detail," Johnson says.

"There are some current day tests being done with man-made materials to see if they can duplicate animal motion, such as some being done with jellyfish. The more we learn about animal propulsion and the way it's been developed over millions of years of evolution, the more it can help us with human engineering and how we can improve our own movement."

The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Beaked whales, a widespread but little-known family of toothed whales distantly related to sperm whales, are found in deep ocean waters beyond the edge of the continental shelf throughout the world's oceans.

"They are rarely seen at sea due to their elusive habits, long dive capacity and apparent low abundance for some species. Understandably, most people have never heard of them," says international team leader, Dr Merel Dalebout, a visiting research fellow at UNSW.

The study of the new species, Mesoplodon hotaula, is published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

The first specimen was a female found on a Sri Lankan beach more than 50 years ago.

On 26 January 1963, a 4.5 metre-long, blue-grey beaked whale washed up at Ratmalana near Colombo. The then director of the National Museums of Ceylon, P.E.P (Paulus) Deraniyagala, described it as a new species, and named it Mesoplodon hotaula, after the local Singhala words for 'pointed beak'.

However, two years later, other researchers reclassified this specimen as an existing species, Mesoplodon ginkgodens, named for the tusk-like teeth of the adult males that are shaped like the leaves of a ginkgo tree.

"Now it turns out that Deraniyagala was right regarding the uniqueness of the whale he identified. While it is closely related to the ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, it is definitely not the same species," says Dr Dalebout.

The researchers used a combination of DNA analysis and physical characteristics to identify the new species from seven specimens found stranded in Sri Lanka, the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati), Palmyra Atoll in the Northern Line Islands near Hawai'i, the Maldives, and the Seychelles.

The new specimens are held by various institutions and groups, including the US Smithsonian National Museum in Washington DC, the Island Conservation Society in the Seychelles, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The genetic analyses were conducted as part of an international collaboration with the US NMFS Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University.

The researchers were able to get good quality DNA from tissue samples from only one specimen. For the others, they drilled the bones of the whales in order to analyse short fragments of 'ancient DNA' relying on techniques commonly used with old sub-fossil material from extinct species.

The researchers also studied all other known beaked whale species to confirm the distinctiveness of Deraniyagala's whale, including six specimens of the closely related, gingko-toothed beaked whale.

"A number of species in this group are known from only a handful of animals, and we are still finding new ones, so the situation with Deraniyagala's whale is not that unusual," Dr Dalebout says.

"For example, the ginkgo-toothed beaked whale, first described in 1963, is only known from about 30 strandings and has never been seen alive at sea with any certainty. It's always incredible to me to realise how little we really do know about life in the oceans. There's so much out there to discover. "

Over the last 10 years or so, two other new beaked whales have come to light; both through research in which Dr Dalebout was involved. In 2002, Mesoplodon perrini or Perrin's beaked whale, was described from the eastern North Pacific, and in 2003, Mesoplodon traversii, the spade-toothed whale, was described from the Southern Ocean. Both species are known from only about five animals each.

With the re-discovery of Mesoplodon hotaula, there are now 22 recognised species of beaked whales.

The international study, jointly led by Dr Matthew Witt of the University of Exeter and Dr Sabrina Fossette of Swansea University, found that urgent international efforts are needed to protect the iconic species.

Between 1995 and 2010, a total of 106 leatherback turtles were satellite-tracked in the Atlantic and south-west Indian Oceans. Resulting information was interpreted along with knowledge on longline fishing effort and nine areas with the highest risk of bycatch were identified.

Maps of the turtles' daily locations revealed that Atlantic leatherbacks use both deep sea international waters (more than 200 nautical miles from land) and coastal national waters, either seasonally or year-round, in a complex pattern of habitat use.

More than four billion hooks were set throughout the entire Atlantic Ocean by industrial fisheries between 1995 and 2010 -- equivalent to 730,000 hooks per day.

Dr Witt, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall, said: "This study clearly stresses the transboundary nature of leatherback turtle seasonal movement and the multi-national effort necessary to design measures to protect this iconic species from fisheries activity. Significant efforts are urgently needed to bridge the gap between scientists and the fishing industry to ensure these and future findings are rapidly progressed into policy."

The study, published today (12/02/14) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that of the nine areas of high susceptibility for leatherbacks, four are in the North Atlantic and five in the South/Equatorial Atlantic.

Some of these areas are on the high seas, but they also fall within the Exclusive Economic Zones (the coastal water and sea bed around a country's shores to which it claims exclusive rights for fishing, oil exploration and so on) of the UK, USA, Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Senegal, Spain, Western Sahara, Angola, Brazil and Namibia.

Leatherbacks from the north Atlantic regularly use UK national waters, particularly during our summertime, whereas those from the south Atlantic move through UK overseas territorial waters of Ascension Island and Saint Helena during March to May while they migrate towards South America.

Professor Brendan Godley from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall is the senior author of the paper and co-founder of web based tools on the website Seaturtle.org, which facilitated this multinational study involving 12 countries from four continents.

He said: "The integration of these vast datasets clearly highlights areas where fisheries need to be subject to greater scrutiny. We must avoid the tragedy that could ensue where fisheries from wealthy nations negatively impact the marine biodiversity of developing nations, many of which are valiantly trying to protect their coastal and offshore environments."

Marlin attack video is a screen grab

Marlin attack photo is a screen grab

Giant Pacific octopus photo is a video screen shot

Still image shows giant Pacific octopus from the point of view of photographer David Malvestuto. His diving companion, Warren Murray, videotaped the rare encounter

Giant Pacific octopus photo is a video screen shot