Good morning.
Whitewater’s week ends with a partly sunny day, with high temps in the mid eighties.
You’ve probably wondered (and who hasn’t?) what a tarantula’s heartbeat looks like. Wired Science has the answer for which you’ve been patiently waiting, in a story entitled, “Tarantula MRI Reveals Strange Double Heartbeat.” Danielle Venton explains:
Spider hearts may contract in a unique double beat. By placing tarantulas in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, biologists from Edinburgh University made a video of a living spider’s beating heart.
“In the videos you can see the blood flowing through the heart and tantalizingly it looks as though there might be ‘double beating’ occurring; a distinct type of contraction which has never been considered before,” said Gavin Merrifield in a press release. Merrifield presented the research at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow last month.
See for yourself, in these photos, and the video link (above) —
Image credits: Gavin Merrifield