cephalopods
pharyngula | May 6, 2010That in future speaking engagements, unauthorized photography should be prohibited.
pharyngula | May 4, 2010I don't care what the last installment of the interminable thread was about — I have to show this horrifying clip of a gentle octopus's last moments beneath the jaws of ravening chordates.
OK, now talk about whatever you want…if you can.
(Current totals: 10,157 entries with 983,758 comments.)
pharyngula | May 3, 2010If only it were TrueType or Postscript, I'd be using this octopus alphabet all the time.
pharyngula | April 30, 2010Argonauta nodosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
jgoldman | April 28, 2010Say you're visiting Los Angeles and you have a sudden craving for Chinese food. Since you are only visiting, you might not be aware that nothing is open past, like, 10pm (not even coffee houses), but you get in your rental car and go driving around in search of your Chinese feast anyway. You try hitting up Panda Express, but no such luck. Of course they're closed. You try the neighborhood Chinese restaurant: closed as well. You get back in the car, and think to yourself "maybe the OTHER Panda Express will be open", but alas, it is not. You are ready to return to the hotel and just go to sleep…
pharyngula | April 25, 2010Over on the TONMO forums, an aquarist has been documenting the life of his octopus, "Legs". Legs was wild caught when only the size of a fingernail, and raised to healthy, thriving adulthood — with lots and lots of photos.
Legs just recently died, unfortunately, which is the sad reality of getting to know most cephalopods — they tend to be very short-lived creatures, many living for only a year. "The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Legs."
pharyngula | April 25, 2010Archy is speculating about Gould's idea that if you rewound the tape of life and replayed it, you might get some very different results…and he suggests that in a different world, molluscs could have replaced vertebrates as the dominant large metazoan. This is perfectly reasonable, but he chose to illustrate the concept, and my SIWOTI syndrome kicked in.
Noooo! He's got an arrow for a "large brain" pointing to an enlarged fleshy flap above the eyes. That's not where the cephalopod brain is located! They have a ventral nerve cord — the central brain would be deep, between the eyes and behind…
pharyngula | April 23, 2010I swear, half the photos I have of cuttlefish are of two or three or four animals getting it on.
Sepia pharaonis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 21, 2010Years ago, when my kids were little and easily impressed, we had a tradition of making pancakes on Sunday morning (better than church!). I'd sometimes go wild and make a mickey mouse pancake, or sometimes we'd have chocolate chip pancakes, but I never played around quite as much as Jim, who makes weird pancakes all the time. I like this one, for some reason.
pharyngula | April 17, 2010I showed you that video of an octopus stealing a camera, now here's one of an octopus trying to snatch a crescent wrench. Unfortunately, he is punished horribly.
Man, cuttlefish are brutal.
(embed code is buggy — here's a link if it doesn't load)
pharyngula | April 16, 2010This video focuses mostly on some bipedal chordate, but he's happy enough about cephalopods that it makes it all OK.
pharyngula | April 16, 2010Over on stuff.co.nz, there is a spectacular video of an octopus that grabs a diver's video camera and swims off with it. Much of the video is a surreal blur, because the octopus is all wrapped around the camera, but that just adds to the charm…and there are also plenty of shots of the beautiful animal as it and the diver wrestle.
I'd imbed the video here, too, but that site doesn't make it easy to extract the code, tangling it all up in javascript. That's when I realized the octopus's real intent: he wanted to make videos that were shareable and publicly accessible.
pharyngula | April 14, 2010The idea that he could have been half-human/half-alien is even more ridiculous than the idea that he could have been half-human/half-mollusc. Although…the concept is intriguing.
pharyngula | April 10, 2010Oh, no…it's a video of a sea lion brutalizing an innocent cephalopod.
It looks like this was made by attaching a camera to a sea lion. Am I wicked for thinking the next video I want to see is a sea lion slowed down by the clumsy gadgetry on its back, getting chewed on by a shark?
Yes, I am taking sides!
(Video moved below the fold because it seems to load every time the page is refreshed.)
pharyngula | April 9, 2010Sepia latimanus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | April 2, 2010Sepia officinalis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | March 26, 2010Uroteuthis chinensis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.