cephalopods
pharyngula | July 21, 2011This video may not be to everyone's taste — it's pretty awful. This is an octopus dish served in Hakodate, in which the poor raw cephalopod is presumably dead, but when soy sauce is poured over it, it's triggered to writhe its tentacles.
I do not approve. Either it's cephalopod torture if it's still alive, or soy sauce is the secret ingredient for zombie reanimation*. And then…no one eats zombies. That's just disgusting.
*I am considering adding a new suggestion to my funeral instructions, though.
pharyngula | July 13, 2011OK, everyone writing to me about this, this shirt is the last thing I need to wear. I already have an image problem, this will just make it worse.
pharyngula | July 12, 2011That's not hyperbole. I really mean it. How else could I react when I open up the latest issue of Bioessays, and see this: Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules. Just from the title alone, I'm immediately launched into my happy place: sitting on a rocky beach on the Pacific Northwest coast, enjoying the sea breeze while the my wife serves me a big platter of bacon, and the cannula in my hypothalamus slowly drips a potent cocktail of cocain and ecstasy direct into my pleasure centers…and there's pie for dessert. It's like the…
pharyngula | July 8, 2011I think you've seen this video before, but take it to heart this time. Just watch the slow gentle build, let your mind cool, savor a scene from the mysterious deep dark sea.
This is the way my drugs have made me feel all afternoon. I could be that coleoid.
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pharyngula | July 8, 2011A diver found a swarm of cephalopods huddled in fear of predators, and managed to get some spectacular photos.
(via Boing Boing)
pharyngula | July 1, 2011Found twitching off the coast of Florida, thrown onto a big blue tarp, and viewed by a parade of spectators tromping by and saying "Eww, ick" at my naked dying/dead flesh.
Give the mighty beast a bit of dignity, please!
pharyngula | June 20, 2011Since I ran into this on that furry blog, I knew it had to go here. A perfectly distilled 8 minutes of nothing but the Kraken scenes from Pirates of the Caribbean — no plot, no dialog, just tentacles everywhere. Yay!
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pharyngula | June 17, 2011Swim away! Don't antagonize the shark!
You should also be afraid because the ocean is apparently full of literate predators.
pharyngula | May 17, 2011You will be entertained by this strange collection of cephalart.
(Warning: there are a few bare breasts in the collection. Wait…molluscs? Breasts? Why do mammals always muddle things up with their mammary obsessions?)
pharyngula | May 17, 2011Oooh, the miracle of childbirth: watch a clutch of octopus eggs hatch.
O. vulgaris hatchlings hatching from Richard Ross on Vimeo.
pharyngula | May 15, 2011Since I previously expressed my disappointment in the "squid in space" experiment that will be going up on the space shuttle, I've received a rebuttal from the lead investigator of the project. Fair's fair; here it is.
Dear Dr. Myers,
I am the lead investigator on the Squid in Space project and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. I have read your description of the project in your blog and I feel that it is incomplete and missing the major point of the experiment. As you can imagine one doesn't like to have their work labeled as "Bad Science" so I wanted to take this…