Organisms
pharyngula | January 27, 2017It'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.
pharyngula | January 13, 2017Sometimes, 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?
pharyngula | January 6, 2017
The video spares you the worst of it: they also insist on beginning every meal with a round of poetry.
pharyngula | December 9, 2016 Jeannot Kuenzel
What a squid egg mass looks like if you step back a bit:
pharyngula | October 21, 2016You'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.
pharyngula | October 14, 2016You knew that one beneficiary of over-fishing (it removes competition) and climate change (they like it warm) is that cephalopod populations are booming, right? Those of us who love the little beasties also have appreciate that they are a portent of coming oceanic doom.
Spooky.
pharyngula | October 10, 2016
Little known fact: like Costa's hummingbird, the facial plumage has an iridescent underside that I can flash with muscle contractions.
pharyngula | September 12, 2016It's called a Black-Waved Flannel, but none of us are fooled. We know where that came from.
It's probably finished consuming its brain meal and is looking for a new host.