Friday Cephalopod: Tremoctopus!

You get two today. No one's complaining, right?

Mamma?

Behold, the Goddess of the deep!

Beautiful creature. Any idea how big she is? I get no sense of scale from the video, and the short article doesn't say.

Wow. Trippy.

Did I not see some of that dress tearing off near the end? And red wings opening up when the submersible got too close...

I may not sleep well tonight.

That's amazing,what's going on there?
Is that trailing membrane some sort of a mantle that can be shed? I imagine it would either attract prey, or appear large to discourage predators.

What a magnificent creature!

My completely uninformed guess is that the shedding of part of her mantle is a response to a threat, something like those lizards that can lose and then regrow their tails. The lights of the ROV might have spooked her...

(again, only guessing, I really have no idea.)

Yeah I'm wondering what the big ol' veil thing is myself.

Slime takes wing and soars.

Joking, mostly. It's a beautiful beast, which is why it seemed a bit odd to keep thinking "slime" while watching.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592

Thats amazing. Kinda reminds me of a phoenix, with the blood-red color at the end.

Anyone actually know whats going on here?

That, sir, is clearly an aquatic witch.

So beautiful. Off to deep sea to see what that was about.

PZ, just wondering if you were aware of the book "What it is" by Lynda Barry. See:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Lynda-Barry/dp/1897299354/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UT…

It's a book about creativity and uses the metaphor of waking your inner "Magic Squid" It actually applies to nearly all forms of creativity and is quite unique." Amazon lists it as a "Best Book of 2008."

Prom dress.

... did it shed it's "tail" and immediately regenerate a new one at the end, or what was I seeing there? Something clearly broke off.

When the revolution comes, these guys will be head of mind control operations, right? They are more than qualified for hypnosis.

Is that what is known as a Veiled Octopus?

WOW !!!! I think I just had a feeling of overwhelming awe.
shudder

Answers (from a link at the Deep Sea News article):

http://www.tolweb.org/tremoctopus

More info at

http://www.tolweb.org/tremoctopus

Thanks for the link, BJN and A.B.
An extra-cool tidbit from there:

Young individuals carry broken tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war (jellyfish) on the suckers of the dorsal four arms. The borrowed tentacles, which have stinging cells, presumably have a defensive and/or offensive function.

And amazing photos here.

Spec-bloody-tacular!

I dub thee... wait for it... Peacoctopus!

Marcus - That's funny!

Awesome.

Salome had nothing on this beauty. Especially the accompanying music. I'd go down in a submersible to watch that any day!

It's got a built-in electronic keyboard. How awesome is that?!

Now I have that tune running through my head along with a memory of the octopus.

From Tremoctopus:

Large ocelli can be displayed on the dorsal web. This web and the slender tip of the arms can, apparently, be autotomized along visible "fracture" lines. The autotomized arms and membranes presumably wiggle to distract or cling to a predator while the octopod swims away.

Autotomy: "reflex separation of a part (as an appendage) from the body : division of the body into two or more pieces." There's a word I don't use enough.

Raivo Pommer
raimo1@hot.ee

LBBW-Bank krisehilfe

Die Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) wird fünf Milliarden Euro bekommen, um die Folgen der Finanzkrise abzufedern - in Form einer Kapitalerhöhung. Doch möglicherweise braucht Deutschlands größte Landesbank noch mehr Hilfe. Einem Bericht der Schwäbischen Zeitung zufolge benötigt das Institut zur Absicherung von risikobehafteten Papieren Garantien in Höhe von 16 Milliarden Euro. Die Bank wollte dazu am Freitag keine Stellung nehmen.

SPD-Fraktionschef Claus Schmiedel, der Mitglied im LBBW-Verwaltungsrat ist, sagte: "Die Zahl ist aus der Luft gegriffen." Man müsse sich darauf konzentrieren, nur die stark schwankenden Papiere abzusichern. "Denn jede zusätzliche Abschirmung kostet Geld und belastet die Gewinne." Den Umfang wollte er nicht nennen.

Wie die Zeitung aus der Bank nahestehenden Kreisen erfuhr, sollen die Papiere aus dem Kreditersatzgeschäft, die großen Schwankungen unterworfen sind, in eine Zweckgesellschaft ausgegliedert werden. Finanzkreisen zufolge soll es sich bei dem Volumen um etliche Milliarden handeln. Dadurch sollen sie die Bilanz der LBBW nicht mehr belasten.

Clearly an Antarean Merperson.

No snark, just . . . awed silence.

SquidProCrow is an excellent nym.

Ooh!

Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Abso-fuckin-lutely amazing. Beats the fuck out of the puerile natterings of Pete on another thread.

What gives? No one has mentioned Spawn's cloak yet? I thought you folks were nerds.

Let me guess... Australian?

Magnifique!

To echo Weemaryanne, neato spiffy keen!

Superheroine of the cephalopod world, she has a cape and everything!

Wow! WOOOOW!!

Da Mollusca rulez!

An underwater aurora.

Silk pulled through the water.

And it lives and has business to attend to.

Every discovery like this, of something really different, makes me feel just a bit more secure. The more complex the warp and weave of life, the tighter we are knit into the fabric of the universe.

I'm smiling right now.

E Pluribus Unum

One of the few cool things I've seen here. One point on the "I'll come back again" ratings.

It's like Spawn's cloak!

Damn that was freaky awesome.

I love coming here.

And no your highness and mighty PZ, no one is complaining. we will dutifully read and watch whatever you post.

I don't know what other people's reasons are but i'm addicted.....

Is that the proper euphemism for having no life?

I....slack-jawed amazement.

How completely sinister and wonderful.

OK, I have to admit some ignorance here.
How do you know it's a female?

By the size. The male is very, very much smaller. According to Wikipedia, this creature has the greatest sexual dimorphism of any non-microscopic animal. Mass ratio is 40,000:1.

The blanket is part of its autotomic predator avoidance strategy.

Its common name is blanket octopus.

NO! It's creepy ... and beautiful.
This is a very show-off species, does some persist just for that reason?

That is the second most beautiful thing I've seen today. In a couple of hours, I'll wake up the first and share it with her. Thank you so much for introducing me to something this amazing and wonderful. It's an amazing feeling to be awed by the beauty of the natural world.

Richard Dawkins may have his castle, but he don't have this one! Where in Oklahoma can I see this?

Why red?

Or is it a means of hiding in the deep, rather than a warning colour?

Thanks, Big City.

Sili, yeah. Lots of deep sea critters are red, and the leading hypothesis is that it's to hide. The red color in some others that are mostly clear is to hide whatever bioluminescent dinner they just had.

This pisses me off so much, especially in reporting that should know better:

Males are ~100 times smaller than females.

Friggin idiots. Maybe their blood pressure is 10 times lower and their body temp is twice as cool as well. Mind pointing out where the reference point is?

Now I see where the idea behind the look and movement of some of the underwarer aliens in "Abyss" comes from.

Ah, that was lovely. I saw it last night after spending the day at an orchid expo, and somehow it all rhymed beautifully. So many gorgeous, various, amazing ways of being alive.

O the world is so full of a number of things
I am sure we should all be as happy as ... biologists!

Indeed, i agree with Ron here. Becoming a biologist
was the best decision what i ever made.
Being so close to understand how life works never
ceases to give me happiness.

Fascinating! What evolution can produce is truly wonderful.

The rest of humanity is missing out by keeping their heads stuck inside old books!

What's going on? Well, the link tells us that these beauties probably only deploy their wings when frightened and being pursued.

So what we have here is the oceanic equivalent of a romantic Victorian heroine fleeing a fate worse than death across the wild moors in her tearing and trailing silken wedding dress.

It is probably dark.

And stormy.

Noni

PZ, you can post vids like that all day long and I doubt if many here would complain. There have been some awesome previous Friday Cephs, but this one has to be the very very best for a long time. I just watched this SuperCeph slackjawed with awe, FSMdamn I love this planet.

And a big thanks to those who posted additional links.

Squid pie?

http://skippyslist.com/2007/07/09/cephalopod-surprise/

Tip of the hat to Bruce Schneier @ http://www.schneier.com/blog/

/es

Not only is it a beautiful animal but it plays wonderful music. I wonder what evolutionary function the music serves this octopus or squid?

I had never heard of this creature before. Cephalopods truly are spectacular.