OK, I say uncle. Everyone’s been sending me the story of the hexapus, the six-armed octopus found in England. Sure, he’s cute…
…but I’m afraid it’s not that big a deal. It’s an ordinary sort of error — we know that cephalopod limbs develop from primordia that exhibit a pattern of fusion as it is, so an epigenetic error that causes either an excess of fusions or failure of arm buds to form isn’t a particularly dramatic event. Now, if they breed this octopus and find a heritable propensity for limb development failur, then I’ll be much more interested, since that means we’d be able to look at the mechanisms.
Now I have to get back to grading genetics exams…
Of course, it’s nothing new, in the film “It Came From Beneath the Sea” special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen famously quipped that their giant cephalopod was “a Quintopus”, because the budget would only allow for animating five limbs.
So, let’s keep an eye on this one, it may grow bigger than the Brooklyn Bridge, if it’s related.
:)
Yeah, every time I see a news story on a tentacled beastie, the Pavlovian mechanism in my brain shouts “PZ!” However, realizing that I must not be alone in this, I resist the urge to send you the link.
Sure, he’s cute…
…but how does he taste?
cripes, pz, jaded much?
here’s this wonderful individual, this unique fellow-passenger on spaceship earth, and you can’t even muster a yawn to greet him/her.
don’t you realize that every octopus is like a snowflake?
and this one even has six-fold symmetry like a snowflake?
I really ought to be grading too. Sigh.
Came across something funny tonight – “improv everywhere” – crazy performance art that leaves you laughing your head off.
Then I get to thinking:
improv everywhere
+
the Creation Museum
= hilarity. Flintstone suits optional.
:o)
back to grading….
*facepalm* Did anyone else read the subject line, see the pic, and think along the lines of:
SQUID-SERVANT HEXAPUS!!
Yes, master.
?
EVIL!
Oh PZ I sense that its becoming harder and harder to impress you with the wonders of the squiddly world. Would it help if I sent them an email and asked for a photo of it in a bikini?
Seriously, grading exams truly sucks. My first ever effort at marking exams was a first year physical geography tutorial exam where I’d given them a blank geo-political map of the world and asked them to identify 20 numbered countries.Truly remedial stuff but, truth to tell, I did it really to get an idea of what they were teaching in high school geography these days. Ok, so it was only worth 5% of their overall semester mark but to name Chile as the country of “California” and Japan as the country of “Antarticia”(sic) made my toes curl.It made me feel really old when they chipped me about it afterwards telling me that in geography they learn about “the environment and stuff” and they “don’t do maps anymore”. Christ, I’m only 38 but I remember having to freehand draw maps of Australia in class and woe beheld if we fucked up any part of the coastline..I’m glad I’m not teaching anymore.
Ok, off my soapbox now.
“Would it help if I sent them an email and asked for a photo of it in a bikini?”
Not sure I could fit a Bikini on it…How about a thong?? :-)
Carey Duckhouse (Blackpool, England)
I had my finger on the send button but decided to have a quick look at pharyngula first.
Yer no fun. We were hoping you’d have some kind of rapture.
Either u fail ur speling, or this is slowly developing into a LOLopus section.
Um, what about:
“O noes! Ol’ c wit put hex on.”
Either u fail ur speling, or this is slowly developing into a LOLopus section.
Um, what about:
“O noes! Ol’ c wit put hex on.”
Peter McGrath said:
To be fair he did say it was cute. Lets wait and see what happens when it breeds – lots of tiny little hexapuses hae got be worth an aww or two.
Bride of Shrek said:
Snap – I remember doing the same for the UK coastline (a map of the West Coast of Scotland can still give me flashbacks). I never did get what the precise point of this exercise was – was it ever explained to you?
The Back button is not my friend. =/ In the proper thread now.
“The attention-starved mollusc had to fasten himself to the glass of his tank before anyone realised, whereupon this photo was taken – very carefully, as flash photography can be fatal to highly light-sensitive octo- and hexapuses. ”
And the display is called “Suckers”… I, for one, welcome our new vampiric overlords.
I’ve always assumed it was to give crusty old geography teachers ( and what, did they have a factory somewhere that produced them at old age- I certainly never had one under the age of 60)a chance to have a quiet fag break ( and for our US readers, get your minds out of the gutter, “fag” means something else where we’re from). Other than that I saw no real value in it given we had the old standby of tracing paper and the trusty HB pencil if we were ever to have to draw a coastline of our country in an emergency situation…and of course it gives us the ability to say “back in my day…”.
I will give you kudos however, Scotland would be really shitty to have to draw.
Carey @#8
you’re lucky Mr Shrek is a Geordie and was able to translate. What we call a thong in Australia is what you call a flip-flop. For a moment I had bad images of you torturing some poor animal trying to get it to wear the latest in black rubber footwear. Realistically though both our suggestions are a bit silly. I mean how is one to dress a tentacled creature adequatley in a bikini or a thong? Now, a pair of crotchless knickers on the other hand might allow tentacular access of a previously undetermined nature. There’s a paper in that for you I think- just be sure to give me the necessary credit when you get the Nobel prize.
Bride of Shrek said:
That would make sense – although I always made sure I was at the back of the class so I wasn’t close enough to be able to smell whether this was in fact the case.
I know what you mean about the Geography teachers though – although mine were generally female I never had one under 60 either – is it possible they reserve “teaching geography” as something old teachers do just prior to retirement?
It is still pretty fascinating, and it can be used to give insight into how evolution can cause large physical change. After all, changes in the genome which make this kind of mistake more likely would produce an organism with a variable number of limbs, and further genetic changes may cause it to become fixed on a different number of limbs instead.
Thanks for the link to “Cephalopod development and evolution.” I suppose you realize that some night when you can’t sleep you could go back and add the logo for “Blogging about peer-reviewed science” to many of your old articles.
I haven’t read the whole article yet but I found one small “grammo” for you to correct. In the first paragraph after the image of the three-month nautilus (eighth overall), you have
Please change “are” to “is.” Each tentacle… is.
If you mentioned it in class, some apple-polishing grad student might volunteer to add “Peer-reviewed” logos to your old articles by pasting the code from an article that already has it.
My favourite Improv Everywhere mission is the No Shirts performance in New York’s Fifth Avenue Abercrombie and Fitch store.
One day I discovered in a store a series of marine creature plushes with creepy faces made by Russ Berrie. One of them was “Octavius the Octopus”, a very sad dude (you can see images of it googling toy stores). When I pick it in my hand I discovered why: he has only six arms. Of course I take it home, and from that day I know octopuses are 6-armed.
and for our US readers, get your minds out of the gutter
Mine can stay there though ’cause I’m Canadian, right?
OFF TOPIC
seeking help:
There’s a guy, Shaun Johnston, at this site:
http://blogs.earthsky.org/jeremyshere/2008/03/03/ben-steins-intelligent-design-movie/
who I think might be quote mining John Maynard Smith.
Shaun Johnston says Smith, in a 1989 essay titled “The Limitations of Evolutionary Theory,” admits “mutation” can’t be measured: “It is possible to measure mutation rates in very special circumstances in some microorganisms…. But in most situations, mutation rates cannot be measured….”
He goes on, always with those suspicious three dots, …, quoting John Maynard Smith. It smells fishy. It needs someone more up on mutation rates than I am.
Carey and Bride of Shrek: it’s not bikinis you need to worry about, this is Blackpool*. The wrong kind of Hen Night Party gets in there and it could be wearing a ‘Kiss me quick’ hat on its ceph.
*I don’t know if there is a US equivalent of the place.