cephalopods
pharyngula | July 7, 2010You're reading this over breakfast, right? Just want to be sure I've caught you at an appropriate moment.
The story is simple: scientists have figured out how deep sea squid, which lack a modified arm for sex, copulate. It's obvious now — the males have an enormous penis, as long as their whole body. It just hasn't been easy to notice in the typically dead, flaccid, often somewhat decomposed state of many deep sea squid specimens.
The morbid part is that scientists caught a live specimen of Onykia ingens — well, dying specimen, actually — and they started cutting open the mantle, which…
pharyngula | June 25, 2010A "psychic" octopus named Paul is predicting the outcome of World Cup games, some Germans claim. I don't believe it. Why would an octopus be at all interested in a game where you can't use your arms?
I don't believe in precognition, but I do think octopuses are smart. It's more likely that Paul is sneaking out of his tank at night to read the sports magazines, and then makes informed decisions about likely results of the matches.
pharyngula | June 21, 2010People are always asking me, "Why squid?" Here's why.
The cool thing about biology, though, is that you could pick any taxon and make a video about how awesome its members are. Squid just have the advantage of the exotic, living in environments unfamiliar to humans, and so they leap out at us as particularly weird and alien.
(via Success is not an option)
pharyngula | June 18, 2010Sepioteuthis sepioidea
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | June 15, 2010I make an appearance on Monster Talk, a podcast about monsters, with Robert Price, who in addition to being an excellent critic of religion, is also an authority on HP Lovecraft. So of course we talk about the Cthuloid Menace. The download is supposed to be here, but for some reason I can't find it — if anyone else puzzles it out, leave a comment.
pharyngula | June 12, 2010Warning: this anatomy lesson is completely bogus.
I have tried the rum this is advertising — how could I not? Cephalopods and pirate drink, you know — and it's not bad. But then, it is rum, and there isn't all that much art to it.
pharyngula | June 9, 2010The Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center has an Octo-Cam trained on a giant Pacific octopus — I just checked and the beast is cruising about.
Although…they also have a warning on the site that heavy visitor loads put a strain on the server. I may have just broken it.
pharyngula | June 7, 2010
Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he's crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins' suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye.
But I haven't mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front.
Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up…
pharyngula | June 4, 2010Before:
Megalocranchia fisheri paralarva
After:
Megalocranchia fisheri adult
Figures from ToLWeb and Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 28, 2010Sepioteuthis lessoniana
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 26, 2010
Well, more like great-great-many-times-great-aunt of all squid, but it's still a spectacular fossil. Behold the Cambrian mollusc, Nectocaris pteryx.
(Click for larger image)Reconstruction of Nectocaris pteryx.
This was one of those confusing, uninterpretable Cambrian animals, represented by only one poorly preserved specimen. Now, 91 new specimens have been dug up and interpreted, and it makes sense to call it a cephalopod. It has two camera eyes — not arthropod-like compound eyes — on stalks, an axial cavity containing paired gills like the mantles of modern cephalopods, and a flexible…
pharyngula | May 21, 2010Nototodarus hawaiiensis, Hawaiian flying squid
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 19, 2010Argonauts are odd animals. They rather resemble a nautilus, but they aren't particularly closely related to them; their closest cephalopod relatives are the octopuses. Females have a thin shell and scoot about in the water column, but the poor males are all dwarfs, rarely seen, with no shell.
What is the shell for? It seems to be a chamber for holding a bubble of air that the animals use to maintain neutral buoyancy. I'm a little surprised that this was a surprise, though — the analogy to the chambered nautilus is obvious, and all the photos and videos I've seen of them suspended in…
pharyngula | May 14, 2010Oh, yes, I know whenever Boing Boing posts something with cephalopods in it — I get a tsunami of email telling me to post it right now. All right, since I'll get no work done until this is purged…here's an octopus killing a shark.
pharyngula | May 7, 2010Sepia tokioensis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.