cephalopods
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 | September 2, 2016"Well, Johnny, when a mommy squid and a daddy squid love each other very much…"
"But Mommy, did that one just bite the other one? And are those little bits of squid in the water?"
"Holy Mother of God, Johnny, don't look! Don't look! They're eating each other!"
"Yes, they are, Mommy, and there is no god."
New Scientist
pharyngula | August 26, 2016It's a quiet, lonely life for a squid in the deep, just drifting along, dangling a pair of lines, hoping to snag dinner.
There are two videos of this squid, one from 2014 and another from 2013.
pharyngula | August 19, 2016I mean, really. This team of 'scientists' hijacked a valuable research submersible, strapped their gadget to it, and sent it cruising to a depth of 900 meters in the Pacific Ocean just to catch this goofy-looking purple thing.
Listen to these people…buncha giggly teenagers.
I'm a bit annoyed that they went to all this trouble to find it, and then they apparently were all out of pokeballs.
pharyngula | July 29, 2016He had several, because all the cool scientists like cephalopods, and they're still bottled up and preserved in museums.
Sophie Wiltshire
No word on the status of Darwin's pet cat.
pharyngula | July 8, 2016This is kind of awesome: cephalopods only have one kind of photoreceptor, so it was thought that they would be only able to see the world in shades of gray. Those amazingly clever camouflage tricks they pull? That was just matching intensities and textures, fooling our eyes. But now someone has figured out a way they could see color, and special bonus, it also explains those funky weird pupil shapes, like you see in the cuttlefish eye to the right.
They use chromatic aberration! We think of chromatic aberration as an imaging problem -- it's caused by the fact that the degree refraction of…
pharyngula | July 1, 2016The theme of this year's con is "…and how do we GET there", which means we really should have a session on octopus locomotion.
pharyngula | June 10, 2016
Who among you has taught or studied vertebrate anatomy? I have. It's cool. Skeletal and muscular anatomy are weird, though, because we so take the principles for granted that we're often not aware of it. We can move because we have a jointed framework, a collection of levers that are moved by the contractions of muscle fibers, which have distinctive attachments and insertions via tendons on those bones (or, in some cases, the muscles attach to sheets of connective tissue called fascia). The musculoskeletal part of anatomy classes consists of a lot of memorization of muscles, their origins…
pharyngula | June 3, 2016Kate Fenhalls
As I just explained, however, the erotic possibilities will remain unexplored.
