cephalopods
pharyngula | July 18, 2008Hapalochlaena maculosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 11, 2008Sepioteuthis sepioidea
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 7, 2008They're handing out Rubik's Cubes to octopuses. This is good training in logic and pattern recognition, and the next step will be to hand them wrenches and welding torches and put them to work assembling underwater habitats for mankind (so think the deluded hu-mans anyway — they'll actually use them to build lasers and water-filled assault tanks). Brilliant!
Oh, wait. Never mind. It's actually simply a test for handedness among the octopuses, and they don't actually expect them to solve the puzzles. Darn. That's not as exciting.
The reason they don't expect them to solve the puzzles, of…
pharyngula | June 27, 2008Octopus kaurna
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
edyong | June 27, 2008For humans, sight is the most important of senses but only after we are born. Within the womb, surrounded by fluid, muscle and darkness, vision is of limited use and our eyes remain closed. But not all animals are similarly kept in the dark.
Cuttlefish develop inside eggs that are initially stained black with ink, but as the embryo grows and the egg swells, the outer layer slowly becomes transparent. By this time, the developing cuttlefish's eyes are fully formed and we now know that even before they are born, they can use visual information from the outside world to shape their adult…
pharyngula | June 26, 2008You have got to love cephalopod researchers. A rotting carcass, possibly of Architeuthis, is found in California — shredded by sharks, missing its eyes and most of its arms, torn by shrieking seagulls, described as bruised, battered, and chewed up — and the scientists are all "Helloooo, Nurse!", and you can just imagine one of their hind legs doing a spastic tarantella and their eyes zooming out big as saucers. Heaven for a squid-fan has to be slimy, ripe, and wrapped in long, ropy tentacles, I think.
pharyngula | June 23, 2008That smart guy, Carl Zimmer, has written an article on those smart molluscs, the octopus. I like that his conclusion is that we can't really judge their intelligence, because it is different than our own.
That's the same answer I give to questions about the existence of intelligent life in the universe. I suspect that it's there (but rarer than most astronomers seem to think — intelligence is an extremely uncommon adaptive strategy here on Earth, as is probably likewise elsewhere), but that it will be radically different in intent and action than our own, as different as we are from a squid,…
pharyngula | June 13, 2008Nautilus pompilius
(from Nature 453, 826 (12 June 2008) — doi:10.1038/453826a; Published online 11 June 2008)
pharyngula | June 2, 2008
We're all familiar with Pavlov's conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the unconditioned stimulus and a new stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, that they would learn to associate with the tasty, drool-worthy stimulus — a bell. Afterwards, ringing a bell alone would cause the dogs to make the drooling response. The ability to make such an association is a measure of the…
pharyngula | May 26, 2008The Aussies love to brag about their exotic fauna, so I probably shouldn't inflate their egos further, but they've done it again: they've netted another ginormous squid. This one is about 6 meters long, and 230 kg.
They always look so flabby and pathetic when they're shown flopped down dead on a boat's deck, don't they? It's like having human funeral viewings where they soak the body in a lake somewhere for a week — it's neither pretty nor representative.
pharyngula | May 23, 2008Octopus cyanea
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 16, 2008Loligo forbesi
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 15, 2008
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.
Superficially, squid eyes resemble ours. Both are simple camera eyes with a lens that projects an image onto a retina, but the major details…
pharyngula | May 9, 2008Wired has a pretty gallery of images from the recent Colossal Squid necropsy. If you've ever wondered what a pile of squid guts would look like on a table, here you go.
It's too bad the images aren't quite large enough to use as wallpaper on my laptop.
Oh, and those colors—that's exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.
pharyngula | May 9, 2008Octopus marginatus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | May 8, 2008After all, the big squid are washing up on Puget Sound beaches, so I, too, feel the call. I'm going to have to make the journey.
It also helps that the Northwest Science Writers Association has invited me to come out and give a talk. I'll be speaking on 2 June at the Pacific Science Center on communicating science, somehow. I think I'll also be spending several days visiting family and friends…and maybe some of those poor lovely tentacled denizens of the Sound who find themselves stranded on the shore.