cephalopods

Monterey Bay Aquarium
What it's like to be an octopus? This review of Peter Godfrey Smith's book, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, captures perfectly why I've been fascinated by them -- they're the closest thing to aliens we've got. Unlike cetaceans – whose sentience it is possible to imagine, partly because they demonstrate our mammalian connections so vividly and physically – cephalopods are entirely unlike us. “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds…
Is anyone else seeing this picture and immediately wondering what molecules regulate the orderly dispersal of those well-distributed pigment cells? BBC
MBARI If you need more cephalopods, from the same source:
Apparently, flamboyant cuttlefish are born looking snazzy. Monterey Bay Aquarium
No. This is not what I look like naked. CBS News
It's Friday of the second week of classes. I'm already frazzled and worn out -- I get home at night, slump into a stupor, and fall asleep by 10. This is not good, especially since I don't have this excuse: sex makes squid exhausted. All I'm doing is teaching, teaching, teaching. Clearly the squid are wiser than I am.
Sometimes, you just don't want to know about the lifestyles of the tentacled. MBARI The vampire squid lurks in the eternal midnight of the deep sea and a cloak-like web stretches between its eight arms. When threatened, it turns inside out, exposing rows of finger-like projections, called cirri. Vampire squid eat mostly “marine snow”—a mixture of dead bodies, poop, and snot. The soft cirri help the animal transfer food to its mouth, seen here in the center of the frame. Uh, yum?
The video spares you the worst of it: they also insist on beginning every meal with a round of poetry.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Jeannot Kuenzel What a squid egg mass looks like if you step back a bit:
Underwater Photography Guide
Just follow the simple steps in this video.
You'd think Octopolis would be a lovely place, but then you discover it's a junk-covered slum where the octopuses are engaged in street warfare.