Organisms
pharyngula | July 24, 2009Sepia
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 20, 2009This is not a very good picture, but it's because the subject is very, very shy. We have a, shall we say, rather untamed yard, very weedy, and we keep finding new little pals moving in. We've got rabbits everywhere, and lately, to our annoyance, pocket gophers are burrowing in our front yard, and we've been reluctant to murder them despite the gopher mounds. And this week, this guy moved in to a nice spot under our deck. He or she is good sized, almost knee-high as he stands like that, and he's out rummaging around in the yard fairly often, although he scurries back to his nest as soon as he…
pharyngula | July 17, 2009These are all the same species, even the same individual, from photographs taken within a short time as it was jetting away.
Abdopus abaculus
You can find a larger image on TONMO.
pharyngula | July 17, 2009I swear, there's a moment in this video where the octopus looks like it's trying to get intimate with Steve Leonard.
pharyngula | July 15, 2009I must thank the reader known to me only as CAC for sending me DVDs of the Inside Nature's Giants programs. I've been enjoying the dissections of an elephant and a whale in the evening — most of the organisms I cut into are millimeters long and require very sharp, thin instruments, so it's interesting to see ones that require hip waders and backhoes.
You should all lobby your local PBS stations and tell them these would be wonderful additions to the lineup! You might also suggest that broadcasting them during the dinner hour might not be recommended.
pharyngula | July 10, 2009Sepiadarium austrinum
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 6, 2009
Don't tell Jerry, but aren't pictures of baby kitties a cheap way to get some eyeballs? At least it's a nice story about a few animals coming back to the wilderness.
pharyngula | July 3, 2009Sepia officinalis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 2, 2009Everyone is sending me this video of a strange pulsing blob found in a North Carolina sewer inspection. It is officially creepy and disgusting, and someone from the SciFi channel is racing to make creature feature about it right now, I'm sure.
I have no idea what it is, but the explanations that it is a colony of either tubifex worms or bryozoans sounds reasonable. I want to see a sample of that thing put under a microscope.
You are now free to make jokes about <despised NC figure>'s colonoscopy exam in the comments.
The best explanation so far is from Deep Sea News: they're almost…
pharyngula | June 30, 2009There is a cool program available in the UK only titled Inside Nature's Giants, which is meant to be taken literally — they actually record the dissection of megafauna. The first episode is about delving into the guts of an elephant.
The bad news is that it isn't available outside Channel 4's broadcast area, so I can't watch it at home or here in Germany. You lucky Brits can tune in right now, though. Maybe it will make its way to youtube soon.
The good news is that it is also not available in Smell-O-Vision.
pharyngula | June 26, 2009Grimpoteuthis sp.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | June 19, 2009Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis male (top), Benthoctopus female (bottom)
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | June 19, 2009
How can anyone resist an article titled "Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode"? You can't, I tell you. It's like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there's that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything else.
Some organisms have evolved immensely long sperm tails — Drosophila bifurca, for instance, has sperm cells that are about 60mm long, or 20 times longer than the length of the entire adult body. The excessively long sperm tail is obviously not a structure that has evolved for better swimming;…
pharyngula | June 12, 2009Sepia pharaonis
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.