octopus

#2: A Truly Extraordinary Octopus

dr. dolittle — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 20:13:14 +0000

#2: A Truly Extraordinary Octopus

Who could forget the second most popular blog post so far this year. Seeing an octopus walk never gets old!
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I came across this amazing video on YouTube showing a species of octopus found in Northern Australia that is adapted to walk on land:

dr. dolittle Wed, 10/25/2017 - 16:13

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Life Science

biology

locomotion

octopus

popular

Fish @ 2:05: "What the Fuuuu?" lol, Awesome video

A truly extraordinary octopus

dr. dolittle — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 23:26:47 +0000

A truly extraordinary octopus

I came across this amazing video on YouTube showing a species of octopus found in Northern Australia that is adapted to walk on land:

dr. dolittle Sat, 07/29/2017 - 19:26

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1. Excellent gratuitous sound effects!

2. I know it's not, but the video has the kind of fake-looking shots that wouldn't seem out of place in a Japanese monster film. Unless that's intentional...

If they ever learn how to crack two rocks together, we're doomed........

I understand that Roman fish farms along the seashore used to have to contend with large octopuses that would throw themselves out of the sea and scurry over to the ponds where they could eat the captive seafood.

Does An Octopus Really Have Three Hearts?

gregladen — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 08:05:20 +0000

Does An Octopus Really Have Three Hearts?

Yes, Finding Dory is right about this.

Having multiple hearts isn't as odd as it might seem. Although one might be advised to keep one's brain and one's heart, as well as one or two other organs, separate when making important decisions, a heart and a brain are metaphorical of each other in this regard. Nervous systems can exist and function without brains, but in many animals clumps of neurons known as ganglia concentrate neural function. The same sort of electric and chemical interactions occurring across a network of neurons can have more complex functions when the neurons are grouped together. A brain is an extreme example of this. Similarly, blood vessels can have muscular tissue that contracts in a way that causes blood flow, as is the case with the arteries in human bodies. A heart is, in a way, a more extreme and complex version of that. So, worms, hagfish, and octopuses have more than one heart doing similar yet different things.

In the octopus, two hearts, called branchial hearts, pump blood through each of the two gills, and the third heard pumps blood through the rest of the body.

Time Lords, such as The Doctor, have two hearts, but the evolutionary background for this is unknown. However, it is likely that Time Lords and Old Ones have something of a history together.

gregladen Fri, 06/24/2016 - 04:05

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sorry boi u wrong, its 3.

its three dumb dumb

New species of octopus?

dr. dolittle — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 13:26:13 +0000

New species of octopus?

NOAA image of a possible new species of octopus discovered near Hawaii. Photo credit: AP, NOAA

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) think they have discovered a new species of octopus while exploring the ocean floor around Necker Island (near Hawaii). The octopus was found 4,290 meters deep. Interestingly, fins were absent from the pale octopus, which NOAA scientist Michael Vecchione noted was unusual for an octopus living at that depth. Moreover, its suckers were found to be in a single row on each of its arms, as opposed to two rows. These are characteristics common to octopuses that swim at shallow depths less than 4,000 meters deep.

Other unusual features of this ghost-like octopus were that it seemed rather unmuscular and lacked chromatophores (pigment cells) that are common to most cephalopods.

You can see a video of the octopus and additional photos on the NOAA website.

dr. dolittle Sat, 03/05/2016 - 08:26

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Octopus-inspired robotic device

dr. dolittle — Tue, 26 May 2015 13:29:35 +0000

Octopus-inspired robotic device

Speaking of octopuses, the ability for the animals to squeeze through narrow openings has inspired the creation of a new surgical robotic device that can squeeze into a patient's body.

An EU team created STIFFness controllable Flexible and Learnable manipulator for surgical OPerations, dubbed "STIFF-FLOP", made from silicone. Unlike conventional robots used during surgeries, the idea behind STIFF-FLOP is to be able to navigate around organs inside the body and minimize potential damage to healthy tissues. Its movements are controlled by pneumatic actuators. To create stiffness, they developed chambers filled with small granules that were flexible like balloons. Removing air from the chamber compresses the granules together creating the stiffness (think vacuum-sealed coffee, which happened to inspire the technique called granular jamming). Adding air, thus allows for more flexibility.

Source:

King's College, London

Videos from YouTube

dr. dolittle Tue, 05/26/2015 - 09:29

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interesting:)

Oh man... I saw this in a comic. Someone better get bitten by a radioactive spider soon.

.......Just to say very interesting story.

How the skin of an octopus senses light

dr. dolittle — Tue, 26 May 2015 13:04:33 +0000

How the skin of an octopus senses light

New research shows how octopus skin is able to respond to variations in light

dr. dolittle Tue, 05/26/2015 - 09:04

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Sounds like the octopus will become one big eyeball in time.

"Starting with a simple patch of light sensitive cells..."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

Giant red octopuses: Suspects in unexplained drownings in Oklahoma

dr. dolittle — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 11:49:03 +0000

Giant red octopuses: Suspects in unexplained drownings in Oklahoma

Could giant freshwater octopuses really be to blame for the many unexplained drownings in Oklahoma's lakes?

dr. dolittle Thu, 12/19/2013 - 06:49

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Well...Salmon can live in both fresh and salt water. But they have sophisticated organs of elimination. IDK. One things for sure, anything can happen in Nature.

I read about this in another article a while back. This is kind of shocking and a little weird.

God knows what else in lurking in the mysterious waters of OK. Or TN for that matter! We need more tv show like this!

Very large catfish are a more probable monster. The exist and are fairly common. I had a friend who fished the Arkansas River commercially. He later became a navy SEAL. He refused to swim in the river after encountering the giant catfish he'd seen.

I think a bull shark would be a better possibility than an octopus. They are well known to enter fresh water, and are documented to occur far inland.

not quite the most objective kind of video, let's be frank: kids drow in lakes and other swimming area all the time, sometimes right under the nose of an experienced lifeguard, but suggesting or speculating it's a giant octopuss is ludicrous, one could with the same lack of evidence speculate it's an underwater station of extraterrestial aliens.

Strange octopus found in Southern California

dr. dolittle — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:46:39 +0000

Strange octopus found in Southern California

: Image of female Argonaut. Photo from Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, taken by Gary Florin.

Photo by: Brittany Murray / Staff Photographer Daily Breeze

A rarely seen species of octopus was found this week by fisherman off the coast of San Pedro, California. The baseball-sized female Argonaut (aka: paper nautilus), pictured in the image above, normally lives in tropical and subtropical waters. She is now making a new home in the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. Not much is known about this mysterious species since they are difficult to maintain in captivity.

They are unusual among octopuses because the females have an outer shell that is used to store eggs as well as trap air bubbles allowing them to float on the surface of the ocean. Males do not have shells and are only about an inch long. To fertilize eggs, the males place a sperm sac on a tentacle and insert it into the female's shell. In the process, the tip of the male's tentacle is chopped off. According to aquarist Jeff Landesman, "You can tell how many times she's been fertilized by how many tentacles tips are trapped in her shell."

Similar to other octopuses that we have talked about in prior blogs (Octopus Smarts Caught on Video & The Ultimate Halloween Costume), Argonauts can produce camouflage. Moreover, some research suggests they may be able to learn from their environment, a sign of intelligence.

Sources:

The Daily Breeze

Cabrillo Marine Aquarium

dr. dolittle Fri, 10/19/2012 - 12:46

Tags

Life Science

argonaut

cabrillo marine aquarium

octopus

san pedro

Interesting! :)

is'nt it octopie not octopus's?

No - it's octopodes...

But octopuses is also acceptable...

Spidey Battles Doc Ock...at Brookhaven?

pgenzer — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:48:58 +0000

Spidey Battles Doc Ock...at Brookhaven?

It was July 1976. The nation was busy celebrating its bicentennial, a gallon of gas cost 60 cents, and the Yankees were heading for their first postseason in 12 years, but the real action was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, scene of a life-and-death battle between Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, and the Ghost of Hammerhead.

That's right, The Amazing Spider-Man #158 was set at Brookhaven, as the reader is informed, "on Long Island's thriving North Shore: Usually these quiet buildings are merely devoted to extensive research in the field of atomic energy, but today they are an arena, a burgeoning battlefield destined to witness combat of a most unlikely nature!"

The plot: After surviving a near-fatal fall from a helicopter at the hands of Doctor Octopus, Spiderman learns that the villain is "holding some old lady hostage out at Brookhaven Labs." Spidey speeds to the scene, where Octopus has taken Aunt May and is keeping the Suffolk County SWAT team at bay while he builds an atomic device to destroy his arch nemesis Hammerhead. Hammerhead had become a ghost following an atomic explosion in an earlier issue and vowed revenge on the Doctor.

Spiderman initially fights with Octopus inside the reactor-like structure where he's holed up, freeing May and knocking the equipment around. Then, after the Doctor explains his intentions, Spidey helps reassemble the machinery and they lure Hammerhead's ghost inside. The plan backfires when, instead of vaporizing the ghost, the machinery brings Hammerhead back to human form. The issue ends with Hammerhead, named for his steel-alloy skull, seizing Aunt May and preparing his escape.

Some key panels from the issue are reproduced below.*

*Copyright Marvel Comics

pgenzer Wed, 11/10/2010 - 06:48

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Pop Culture

Aunt May

Brookhaven National Laboratory

hammerhead

octopus

The Amazing Spider-Man

7 Questions with... Zen Faulkes

jgoldman — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:35:00 +0000

7 Questions with... Zen Faulkes

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you.

Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the origin of new behaviors. He is currently working mostly with decapod crustaceans, with a particular emphasis on the unusual crayfish Marmorkrebs. In addition, he writes the blog NeuroDojo, the Better Posters blog, and organizes Markmokrebs.org, where there is also an award-winning blog.

I realize I haven't yet written about any of his research, technically, but I did write about a paper on spatial learning in octopuses that he contributed to as an undergraduate research assistant.

Figure 1: Doctor Zen in front of one of his better posters.

Jump behind the fold for the interview, and enjoy!

1. To start out, could you tell my readers something about yourself? Could you tell us a little about your academic and/or scientific career trajectories?

I did a lot of stuff that hinted that I might be a biologist. I grew up in the country in rural Manitoba, chasing snakes and reading dinosaur books. I had a great biology teacher in school, who taught me a lot about science and introduced me to Tom Lehrer.

I started my research career as an undergraduate working with octopuses in the middle of the bald-headed prairie at the University of Lethbridge. In a psychology department. (My career's always had a sense of the absurd about it.)

I went to the University of Victoria, and did my doctoral work there with Dorothy Paul, where I started the transition into biology. Post-docs with Gerry Pollack at McGill University and another with David Macmillan at the University of Melbourne followed, before I was hired at my current institution in south Texas.

2. Some people decide that they want to work with animals, and then find a particular research program they like. Others are interested in a particular empirical question, and discover that animal research is one of the best ways to approach that question. Why did you decide to become involved in animal research?

I was shanghaied by Jennifer Mather.

I was taking an undergraduate class from Jennifer, and I stopped into her office to talk. She mentioned that she going to get some octopuses shipped in from a colleague, and that she was thinking about studying octopus walking.

I said, "That sounds interesting."

Before I know it, the door is closed behind me, I've been seated in a chair, and I'm being told, "Right, here's what we're going to do...," and I was unexpectedly swept into the world of cephalopods.

(It may not have happened exactly like that, but that's what it felt like.)

3. What have been some of the most interesting or challenging projects you've worked on, in the course of your animal research?

My doctoral research was challenging, because I didn't have an undergraduate degree in biology when I started working towards a graduate degree in biology. That was doing things the hard way. It was worth it, though.

I'll nominate research on the loss of escape-related neurons in slipper lobsters under the "interesting" category, because that project arose from pure luck. I said, "Let's just have a look at these neurons," and they weren't there.

4. Can you tell me a little more about the non-existence of escape neurons in the lobsters? Why should they have been there, and what did you find out from the fact that they weren't?

Escape-related giant neurons had been found in a lot of different crustaceans, and there were obvious advantages for having them, mainly predator escape. Based on those two facts, people predicted that any decapod crustacean with a large tail should have these escape-related giant neurons.

You can make reasonable explanations for why some species wouldn't have some of these escape neurons. Hermit crabs live in shells, so are unlikely to attacked from behind. It makes sense that they don't have escape-related neurons that respond to attacks from behind like crayfish do.

In some species, though, it's very hard to come up with good hypotheses for why some species are missing these neurons. I did publish a review where I suggested that the loss of these neurons may have been a catalyst for new "experimentation" during evolution. But I'm still trying to sort out what it all means.

5. What do you think these sorts of "non-findings" (or more precisely, negative findings) contribute to the literature?

"Non-findings," as you put it, are undervalued and misunderstood. Let me give you an example of each.

As an example of undervaluing "non-findings," everyone agrees that replication is critical to science. Being unable to replicate a finding should be important, because it points out false positives or uncontrolled variable. But the editorial system is slightly geared towards protecting the published literature (see "How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps (PDF)").

As an example of misunderstanding "non-findings," some people say providing evidence for a negative statement is harder than providing evidence a positive statement. This isn't true. "There is no rhinoceros in my office" is a negative statement, and it's easy to decide if there is or isn't a rhino in my office. But if people expect a rhino in your office, then people (reviewers) can get very creative in explaining why you missed the rhino.

I understand the bias against "non-findings" at some level, because there's always an easy way to explain something "missing" or "absent": that the researcher is incompetent. When a researcher tries to get DNA for the first time and gets nothing, you don't conclude that the student found an organism without DNA. You hypothesize that this person made a mistake.

6. How does blogging (and other social media) play into your career? Given that tenure/tenure-track research scientists have so many responsibilities, why do you take the time to blog and engage with the broader online science community?

Blogging has probably hurt my career in some ways. I could have written at least a couple of books for the amount of time I've put into blogging. And a book still has way more cachet than a blog. Scientific journals review even modest books, but not blogs.

Why I started blogging are not the same reasons I continue to blog. I was inspired by Neil Gaiman's blogging, and how he demystified his writing process. It seemed to me that exposing the scientific process might also be valuable for people interested in that. I may not have done great job with that personally, but the resource created for academics by people blogging about their experiences is phenomenal. An undergraduate can find out the deal-breakers in personal statements. A scientist who has just been offered a tenure-track position can find out what you might be able to negotiate for. Tenured faculty can get new insights into what's going on in review panels for granting agencies.

I keep blogging for a lot of reasons. First, I can reach more people than I can without it. I reach a few hundred students a year by teaching classes; I can reach almost that many people in one day by blogging.

Second, the immediacy of a blog is liberating and addictive. Scientific writing is a long process with a lot of people telling you to change things. I love being able to write something and just put it up, having to please nobody but myself. If I want to change it, I can. I don't have to live with typos forever!

Third, I feel I'm engaged in an experiment in scholarly publication. I want to see what a sustained effort in blogging can do for me as a scholar. How far can I push it? Can I build a readership? Can I write something that someone will find enjoyable or useful or eye-opening? Can I (or anyone, really) create a body of blogging work that gets recognized as being as substantive as a monthly magazine column or a book?

And, of course, I have different blogs, and there are different reasons I keep up each of those.

I write the Marmorkrebs blog to try to build up a research community.

I write the Better Posters blog because it was necessary. I was and am sick of seeing ugly posters, and the blog fills a niche that needed to be inhabited.

7. What advice would you give to an aspiring scientist who would like to become involved in animal research?

I don't have advice so much as a plea.

There are so many species that we know almost nothing about besides that it exists. For instance, for one project I was working on, I tried to find what colour a species was. You would think that would be pretty basic information - but I couldn't find it anywhere in the scientific literature. And we're going to lose a lot of species before we learn anything about them.

I don't want to say we know "enough" about rats or fruit flies, because that makes it sound like I'm disparaging that research, and I'm not. But we know a lot about those species, and there's no shortage of people who want to learn more about them.

I beg you, please give some thought to studying one of the hundreds of thousands of animals that we know almost nothing about.

Thanks for your time, Zen! I hope my readers find your thoughts and experiences and interesting as I have.

jgoldman Fri, 07/30/2010 - 02:35

Tags

Academia

Animal Research Interviews

octopus

Other Sea Critters

Good interview!

Damn, another couple of blogs to add to my follow list. Where am I supposed to get time to read them all?

Seriously though that's a very nice interview, and I was particularly impressed by the discussion of "non-findings" in question 5. Far too little is done to ensure that negative results are published, sometimes with serious consequences (e.g. clinical trials going ahead when they should not have), and the scientific community needs to do more to solve this problem. After all somebody has paid for this work to be done. There are serious suggestions in the UK that a register of animal experiments should be set up similar to that for clinical trials, this approach, combined perhaps with online publication, may help prevent valuable data from disappearing.