All right, your ominous click-bait title worked

I clicked on 4 Black Eggs Have Surfaced From the Dark Heart of the Ocean—With Alien Creatures Inside. How could I not? Fortunately, it was a truthful title. An ROV dived 6200 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean and found strange black eggs attached to a rock, and brought some to the surface (the operators have presumably never seen a horror movie. Don’t harvest the mysterious black eggs ever, and don’t bring them back to the lab.)

“Under a stereomicroscope, I cut one of them, and a milky liquid-like thing leaked from it; after blowing the milky thing with a pipette, I found fragile white bodies in the shell and first realized that it was the cocoon of…”

It was flatworms. Platyhelminths.

Niiiice.

Not at all Lovecraftian or scary, though.

Crow city!

At my mother’s house — there are American Crows everywhere. Big black birds that complain if humans step outside. Odin watches.

Unfortunately, I left the good camera at home and am reduced to iPhone photography.

The prey proves unable to read the mind of the predator

This is what Orcas do to Great White Sharks.

Face it, Orcas are pretty damned metal.

Let’s be honest: as much as we all love a shark, orcas are definitely in with a shout of earning the title of Most Metal Animal In The Sea. Firstly, they’re absolutely massive. Secondly, they feast on other animals. Thirdly, they wear corpsepaint. Fourthly, they’re nicknamed killer whales! The defence rests.

And don’t forget, the Orcas around Spain and Gibraltar have had enough and are out there thrashing yachts for sport.

So somebody came up with the ‘clever’ idea of trying to deter attacks by playing a death metal playlist over underwater microphones. Do you think it worked?

One unexpected tactic that is currently doing the rounds in the marine community is to blast heavy metal at the fearsome sea mammals. According to a new report in the New York Times, Captain Florian Rutsch and his crew found themselves in uncomfortably close proximity to a pod of orcas around the Iberian Peninsula earlier this month, and attempted to drive them off with a specially curated playlist of metal bangers titled Metal For Orcas. The mix included cuts by death metal mainstays such as Aborted, Dying Fetus and Ingested, and was played via an underwater speaker.

Unfortunately for the crew, it didn’t work: the orcas attacked the rudder of their catamaran, causing enough damage to leave the boat stranded and its occupants requiring rescuing via local authorities. Captain Rutsh described the situation as “scary”, adding: “No one knows what works, what doesn’t work.”

Hell no. That was a mix of music that was either going to attract them to a wild party, or was going to enrage them. If you really want to scare away Orcas, I’d recommend trying a mix of Kenny G and Enya first.

Nightmare nest

This thing is hanging in a tree near where I walk on the way to the lab. It’s bigger than my head!

That’s actually what I think when I walk by: “What if that fell off and landed on my head and I had to run around waving my arms?” A childhood watching Saturday morning cartoons has given me that expectation.