That's a photo of a coral slurping up a passing jellyfish. For some reason, I find it vaguely disturbing, and have no idea why my wife would select it.
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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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More articles by PZ Myers can be found on Freethoughtblogs at the new Pharyngula!
Mary's Monday Metazoan: Strange diet
Category: Organisms
Posted on: November 23, 2009 9:33 AM, by PZ Myers
Find more posts in: 
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Comments
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | November 23, 2009 9:46 AM
Bill Cosby could do a commercial for this.
"There's always room for Jell-O"
Posted by: --E | November 23, 2009 9:46 AM
Disturbing? That's amazing!
How cool must it feel to be the people (the scientists in the article) to first observe and record an unprecedented behavior? I'm not a scientist, but this is the sort of thing that makes me envy you guys.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | November 23, 2009 9:48 AM
OY! This you post, after all those comments over the weekend? Paging
Dr. FreudGeorgia O'Keefe!Posted by: Ian | November 23, 2009 10:02 AM
Sushi!
Posted by: octopod
|
November 23, 2009 10:08 AM
Well, personally I suspect she picked it because it's HOLY CRAP SUPER AWESOME.
::goes to read the paper::
Posted by: Michelle R | November 23, 2009 10:08 AM
It's sorta sexy!
Posted by: Levi in NY | November 23, 2009 10:15 AM
I didn't know you could blow bubble gum bubbles with a vagina...oh wait, that's coral and a jellyfish?
Posted by: octopod
|
November 23, 2009 10:16 AM
I see, it's a mushroom coral. Those things are freaky -- they are soft and not attached to anything, so they can get up and move around at night!
Also, good job turning the picture vertically for maximum...er...vulvoidity?
Posted by: JackC
|
November 23, 2009 10:36 AM
I think I knew a girl in the Philippines that could do that...
JC
Posted by: Jerry | November 23, 2009 10:42 AM
Disturbing? At least it's a jellyfish and not a squid.
Posted by: Stewart | November 23, 2009 11:32 AM
The BBC site has some cool pics of deep sea critters atg the moment including a rather fetching Octopod
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8374306.stm
Posted by: Glen Davidson
|
November 23, 2009 11:36 AM
A jello shot!
The coral's just partying.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: IaMoL | November 23, 2009 12:02 PM
And Bill Dauphin,OM beats me to my first reaction.
My second thought; "I've seen pingpong balls launched and even smoke rings - but I've never seen anyone blowing bubbles..."
(The double bubble people are gonna be a little ambivalent about this as an advertising gimmick)
Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
|
November 23, 2009 12:21 PM
Which one is the metazoan?
And that's scary. What's next? Rocks that get up and eat stuff?
Posted by: recovering catholic | November 23, 2009 12:22 PM
I think the Trophy Wife is a very kind person (she must be to put up with you, PZ), and she is responding to a reminder in an earlier post from a reader who gently reminded us that metazoans include much more than mammals...
Posted by: WMDKitty | November 23, 2009 12:44 PM
...vagina dentata?
I'm a woman, and -I'm- certifiably squicked by that rather... yonic... imagery.
Posted by: Thanny
|
November 23, 2009 1:08 PM
No, no, no. What's *really* disturbing is seeing time-lapse footage of one coral colony extruding its guts to digest a neighboring (hence competing) colony of a different species.
All that was left was bleached calcium deposits.
Posted by: Seinfeld Humor | November 23, 2009 1:08 PM
SILI: Let me understand, you got the jellyfish, the coral and the metazoan. The jellyfish goes with the coral. So, who's eating the metazoan?
OTHERS: Why don't we talk about it another time.
SILI: But you see my point here? You only hear of a jellyfish, the coral and a metazoan. Something's missing!
TROPHY WIFE: Something's missing all right.
PZ: They're all metazoans. The coral eats all of them.
SILI: That's perverse.
Posted by: Pen | November 23, 2009 2:21 PM
coral eat jellyfish!!!! wow!
Posted by: not a gator | November 23, 2009 2:25 PM
(He said, disingenuously, with a certain artless grace.)
Paging Dr. Freud! Paging Dr. Freud!
(This lezbo thinks it's an awesome image.)
Posted by: not a gator | November 23, 2009 2:31 PM
Stewart: Octopod? Pah. That sea cucumber was rockin'. Although apparently it has yet to evolve a non-fugly mouth/gut. (They eat and poop with the same orifice. Which is why they're so gross. No butterflies--like their lovely hermaphrodite androgynous sexy nudibranch cousins--they.)
Posted by: Sandra S | November 23, 2009 2:49 PM
"For some reason, I find it vaguely disturbing, and have no idea why my wife would select it."
If you hadn't said that I wouldn't have noticed the freudian theme...
Posted by: Blind Robin | November 23, 2009 2:59 PM
can anyone say "Georgia O'Keeffe" ?
Posted by: shonny
|
November 23, 2009 4:15 PM
Maybe the corals could be trained to eat box jellyfish, on which there's an interesting article here:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/11/16/rspb.2009.1707.full
The Aussie ones are not the friendliest of critters!
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | November 23, 2009 5:21 PM
Blind Robin (@23):
I can.
Posted by: Copernicus | November 23, 2009 5:46 PM
A good example of how mushroom (or plate or disc) corals are single mouth, single polyp corals and also how large it must be given that the medusa of moon jellies (this is genus Aurelia but possibly any one of ten morphologically identical species) can be as large as 30 to 40 cm across!
Posted by: porco dio | November 23, 2009 8:37 PM
pz it's dogdamn beautiful... you have little class... at least she makes you look good...
Posted by: Bill Dauphin, OM | November 24, 2009 12:19 PM
porco dio (@27):
An PZ has little class why? Because he made a sexual reference related to something beautiful? Why, exactly, should sexuality and beauty be mutually exclusive?
Posted by: Tammy | November 24, 2009 2:46 PM
Hey... that looks like, uh... an ORCHID...
Posted by: diet plans | December 16, 2009 6:41 AM
Y wldn't blv ths bt I hv spnt ll dy rsrchng fr sm nf bt ths. Y'r lfsvr, t ws fntstc rd nd rlly hlpd m t. Thnks gn,mdfst dt pln