Organisms
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 22, 2016Australian Geographic
The Thorny Devil and I have exactly the same expression right now.
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 | August 17, 2016Tridens flavus
It grows to 1 or 2 meters tall, and it blanketed the land one time, when Indians tried to fight the government.
pharyngula | August 10, 2016We drove by fields of sunflowers the other day, which was a nice change from the usual endless fields of corn and soybeans.
NPR
And now I see that Caine also has sunflowers on her mind.
pharyngula | August 8, 2016Because if you are, you might not want to watch this video of Bryan Fry collecting sea snakes. There's one scene where he's got a fist full of multiple venomous snakes all writhing about that might give you the heebie-jeebies.
pharyngula | August 3, 2016In honor of the nomination of Donald Trump, the corpse flowers are blooming all across the country. It's actually a blessing; the stench of rotting flesh obscures the reek of the putrescence rising from the Republican party.
pharyngula | August 1, 2016This is a pseudocolored image of nematocysts firing.
HHMI
In case you prefer the video…
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 18, 2016BioGraphic
Watching carefully, I noticed that two other activities added to the commotion: sloughing of skin and defecation. Like other whales, sperm whales shed skin on a regular basis. This may be a mechanism to reduce the risk of infection and to rid the animals of external parasites. As the whales rubbed against one another, the physical contact dislodged flakes, sometimes entire sheets, of skin, which floated in the water like a blizzard of translucent dandruff.
Group defecation also seemed to play a prominent role. When a dozen or more whales defecated simultaneously, it created a…
