Organisms
pharyngula | July 31, 2006There is now a web page dedicated to the Neoceratodus cause. If you haven't yet fired off a letter to oppose the destruction of the lungfish's habitat, there's a sample letter there to help you get started. It's not too late to make your voice heard!
pharyngula | July 30, 2006Carel Brest van Kempen has posted one of his paintings of Cambrian animals—be sure to click on it to get the larger size. I wish I had a pet anomalocarid in my aquarium.
pharyngula | July 30, 2006
Assuming that none of my readers are perfectly spherical, you all possess notable asymmetries—your top half is different from your bottom half, and your front or ventral half is different from you back or dorsal half. You left and right halves are probably superficially somewhat similar, but internally your organs are arranged in lopsided ways. Even so, the asymmetries are relatively specific: you aren't quite like that Volvox to the right, a ball of cells with specializations scattered randomly within. People predictably have heads on top, eyes in front, arms and legs in useful locations…
pharyngula | July 28, 2006
Since I shared one paper describing how cephalopods attack, here's another showing step two: what to do with your prey once it is snared by your suckered limbs. Here's a sampling from a video sequence of an octopus reaching out to grab some food and bring it back to the mouth:
Sequence of video images taken during a fetching movement. Yellow arrow, food item; blue, black and red arrows indicate distal, medial and proximal 'joints', respectively.
The interesting thing going on is that it configures its arm to form a "stiffened, articulated, quasi-jointed structure" with three segments and…
pharyngula | July 28, 2006
If anyone is interested in writing a Lovecraftian horror novel and getting all the details just right, I recommend this paper by Kier and Leeuwen. They used a high-speed camera to capture exactly how a squid, Loligo pealei, strikes and seizes its prey. Isn't it beautiful?
In the first frame, you can see the animal poised with its arms and tentacles pointed like an explode at the target, a shrimp. Then, as the squid slides forward, the two tentacles race forward with impressive speed (these frames are 10msec apart; the whole sequence occurs in a bit more than a tenth of a second), and the…
pharyngula | July 28, 2006Octopus bocki
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 26, 2006
I got a request to help identify this bizarre creature. I'm guessing it's a slug caterpillar, from the family Limacodidae, although I couldn't possibly narrow it down further, and could be completely wrong. Whoever was filming it can be heard telling someone not to touch it—which is a good idea. These things shed fine hairs that can cause a painful allergic rash.
It's kind of cute, anyway.
I think the collective wisdom of the internets has convinced me that it is a puss caterpillar, Megalopyge opercularis.
pharyngula | July 26, 2006
People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of details. For example, we often hear homosexual behavior reduced to being a "choice," the product of a "gay gene," a "sin," or something similarly absolute and irreducible…suggesting that it is part of a diverse spectrum of sexual behaviors with multiple causes and that different individuals are…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006Yunnanozoans and Xidazoon…there are some very pretty early Cambrian critters on display at Sinanthropus.
pharyngula | July 24, 2006That army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids idea? It looks like it might be old hat. Owlmirror found an old and rather crypticJapanese print of armored warrior cephalopods…and there's a much, much higher resolution image of the same at that link. I can't quite make out what they're fighting, though…an army of dumplings? Meatballs? Who reads Japanese out there?
pharyngula | July 23, 2006
I have no idea what the cephalopods flying over the city have to do with the ecological message in the small print, but heck, it's a cool picture anyway.
Maybe it has something to do with octopuses swimming over flooded cities, but they look airborn to me.
pharyngula | July 22, 2006Seattle is experiencing a surge of homicides (which are probably not statistically significant in number.) Seattle is also experiencing a surge of squid. Some irresponsible journalists are suggesting these two observations might or might not be linked.
These scurrilous allegations should be addressed by a trustworthy source, like The Typing Octopus. I mean, seriously, the murders are on dry land, with guns. I'd suspect the Sasquatch before I would some disgruntled cephalopod…and even there, the fact that the victims weren't slammed with hurled tree trunks should let Bigfoot off the hook.
pharyngula | July 21, 2006Some light reading, and otherwise…speak your mind in the comments.
Friday Ark #96
I and the Bird #28
Skeptics' Circle #39
pharyngula | July 21, 2006The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week's issue of Nature. Remember, it's not too late to keep the pressure on.
Dam project threatens living fossil
Lungfish face extinction, say environmentalists.
We are about to lose a key piece of our evolutionary history, warn biologists. They are campaigning to save the Australian lungfish, which they fear could be sent extinct by an enormous dam planned for southeastern Queensland.
The hefty, muddy-brown fish (Neoceratodus forsteri) is thought to have survived virtually unchanged for at least 100 million years, making it one of the…
pharyngula | July 21, 2006Octopus vulgaris, brooding eggs
I SEE the sleeping babe, nestling the breast siphon of its mother;
The sleeping mother and babe—hush'd, I study them long and long.
Walt Whitman
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | July 20, 2006This fish has an absolutely perfect name: the Rosy Lipped Batfish.
It isn't much better in Latin, either. Ogcocephalus porrectus. No wonder it's scowling.
pharyngula | July 18, 2006
Carl Zimmer wrote on evolution in jellyfish, with the fascinating conclusion that they bear greater molecular complexity than was previously thought. He cited a recent challenging review by Seipel and Schmid that discusses the evolution of triploblasty in the metazoa—it made me rethink some of my assumptions about germ layer phylogeny, anyway, so I thought I'd try to summarize it here. The story is clear, but I realized as I started to put it together that jeez, but we developmental biologists use a lot of jargon. If this is going to make any sense to anyone else, I'm going to have to step…
pharyngula | July 16, 2006They even show up on the weather radar. I think a weather report that predicted a chance of buzzing clouds of arthropods would be cool.