cephalopods
pharyngula | October 24, 2006Here's an interesting collection of scans from a defunct comic book called Action. It's rather grisly—most of the action seems to involve people being bloodily devoured by marine organisms—so don't look if you'd rather not see people getting pulped in a shark's jaws. This comic book was apparently shut down because of the outcry over the violence, but I see another reason:
Badly drawn squid, completely false information about their eating habits, and poor grammar ("liquidises"? Don't they know that the plural of squid is squid?)—clearly, the book's audience turned away from it in contempt…
pharyngula | October 20, 2006
This is probably very immature, but for some reason I really want this toy. I shouldn't argue with my inner child.
I need to know: if I printed out this sign on heavy stock and mounted it just below the stop sign on my street corner, would I be violating some kind of law?
pharyngula | October 20, 2006Argonauta nodosa
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | October 15, 2006How could I forget the big lady at the Natural History Museum? We also got to meet Archy.
Cute, isn't she? She was also impressive in person—that's one big squid.
pharyngula | October 13, 2006Amphitretus pelagicus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 30, 2006
Charity and art come together in a project to create structures out of canned food, which are then donated to food banks.
I fear I don't have a big enough supply of canned food to pull this off at my house, though, and I don't think we have the space, either.
pharyngula | September 29, 2006Planktonic octopus larva
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 26, 2006
It’s April (not anymore—it's September as I repost this), it’s Minnesota, and it’s snowing here (not yet, but soon enough). On days like this (who am I fooling? Every day!), my thoughts turn to spicy, garlicky delicacies and warm, sunny days on a lovely tropical reef—it’s a squiddy day, in other words, and I’ve got a double-dose of squidblogging on this Friday afternoon, with one article on the vampire squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and this one, on squid evolution and cephalopod Hox genes.
Hox genes are members of a family of genes with a number of common attributes:
They all contain a…
pharyngula | September 24, 2006Since Friday's cephalopod was a repeat (sorry, it's such a lovely picture that it caught my eye again), here's another to compensate.
Sepia pharaonis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 22, 2006Oh, boy…Boingboing mentions something squid-related and everyone sends me email. Should I mention that I brought up Squid Soap back in August? (Hah! That Doctorow fellow thinks he's so cutting edge. Poseur.) However, Craig Clarke just sent me some information on a holy cruciform-shaped scrub brush, and it seems to me that we have to get these two products together.
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If you're going to wash away the sins of the world, you ought to do it with squid soap, I think.
pharyngula | September 22, 2006Sepia pharaonis, male on the left, female on the right
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 16, 2006For a rather different kind of squid, here's a pretty image. There's also a mammal in the picture, which I understand some people might find not quite safe for work, so don't click through unless you can handle viewing an exposed superficial epithelium.
pharyngula | September 16, 2006
Whoa…watch this phenomenal video of the Vampire Squid. They've caught it feeding and using a few sneaky tricks to escape predators.
pharyngula | September 15, 2006We just had one of these!
Mendel's Garden #6
Friday Ark #104
Well, just to flesh it out a little more with some random links, here are some photos. I was told the second one made someone think of me (warning: body modification!). And, jebus help me, for some reason I thought this photo was very sexy. Or appetizing. I don't know, something in the midbrain flickered.
Oh, and several of us sciencebloggers were interviewed for an article by Eva Amsen on "Who benefits from science blogging?" It doesn't mention the benefit of people sending you pictures that tickle the cingulate.
pharyngula | September 15, 2006This has been a bountiful week at Chez Pharyngula, and I have received generous gifts from several readers. A full accounting lies below the fold.
Why, yes. Yes, I do.
Readers from Winnipeg visited the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre and reported on what they found there…and they sent me a t-shirt! The sentiment is perfect, and I know you're all jealous now. Hmmm. Winnipeg isn't that far from Morris, and I know lots of the faculty here make trips up that way (especially for the folk festival). Now I've got a few more reasons to pay a visit, even if it is the Bible Belt of Canada. Has anyone…
pharyngula | September 15, 2006Nautilus pompilius
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 13, 2006
Everyone knows the story of Konrad Lorenz and his goslings, right? It was a demonstration of imprinting: when young animals are exposed to a stimulus at a critical time, they can fix on it; Lorenz studied this phenomenon in geese, which if they saw him shortly after hatching, would treat him like their mother, following him around on his walks. Similarly, many animals seem to experience sexual imprinting, where they acquire the sexual preferences that will be expressed later on.
I just ran across a charming short letter about imprinting in cephalopods, and somehow the story seems so…
pharyngula | September 8, 2006Every week, someone finds something that reminds them of me, and they send it off in an email. I think that every day someone strolls through a fish market and the PZ-spot in their brain lights up like a Tesla coil, triggering odd associations that can only be relieved by grounding them out in an email message. Some examples are below the fold.
A reader got a nice 60s vibe off this image, and thought it was perfect for me. Or maybe it was the octopus…
This is a jigsaw puzzle spotted at COSI:
Phil saw an episode of Cthulhu's Clues on his hotel TV, and of course he thought of me.
Hillary…
pharyngula | September 8, 2006The latest issue of Science has a fascinating article on Exotic Earths—it contains the results of simulations of planet formation in systems like those that have been observed with giant planets close to their stars. The nifty observation is that such simulations spawn lots of planets that are in a habitable zone and that are very water-rich.
(click for larger image)Final configuration of our four simulations, with the solar system shown for scale. Each simulation is plotted on a horizontal line, and the size of each body represents its relative physical size (except for the giant planets,…