Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium

It’s December, and Squidmas is coming. Maybe you’re like me, and the kids have all moved out, so you’re thinking having a little intelligent life at home would be nice. Or maybe you’re kids are still home, and you think they’d love a pretty pet. Or maybe you just love cephalopods, as do we all, so you’re thinking, hey, let’s get an aquarium and an octopus! What a fun idea!

One word of advice: NO. Don’t do it. You can’t just rush into these things.

Here’s a positive suggestion, though. Start reading TONMO, the octopus news magazine online, regularly. If you haven’t been reading it already, you aren’t worthy of owning a cephalopod anyway. If you start dreaming about tentacles, then maybe you can consider feeding your obsession by planning to get a cephalopod of your own.

Second positive suggestion: buy a copy of Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Colin Dunlop and Nancy King. This is essential. All in one place and in a very practical way, it describes all the important information you’ll need to successfully keep a cephalopod in your home, and it may discourage all but the most fervent. Here are a few of the reasons you should not try to keep cephalopods, gleaned from this book and my reading of TONMO.

  • They are difficult to raise. You will need a well-maintained salt water aquarium, which with all the apparatus required can be quite expensive, and you will need to invest a fair amount of time every day in maintenance. This is a job for a serious aquarist.

  • They need live foods. What this means for most of us is that you’ll need two tanks — one for the octopus and another to raise the octopus’s food.

  • A cephalopod’s life is one of heart-breaking brevity. They do not live for long, even in the wild, so no matter what, you’re going to have a pet funeral every six months to a year.

  • There are few species that you can keep. Most can’t live in the confines of a tank, a few are very dangerous, and many are rare, and it would be unethical to strip natural environments of these precious specimens.

  • It will eat just about anything else you try to put in the aquarium. The cephalopod and its food will be the only creatures you will have.

  • Forget keeping one as a pet—a cephalopod in the house is your Lord and Master, and you will serve it everyday. Forget those silly ideas that this will be your little pal, it is going to rule you.

If you aren’t yet discouraged, then you know your proper place in the universe and can consider getting a cephalopod. In order to figure out how to do so, you will first have to buy this book: it contains all the information you will need to proceed. Plus, it’s beautifully illustrated with photographs of the beloved class, so you’ll enjoy reading it, and it therefore makes an excellent Squidmas gift. Then what you may do is purchase a salt-water aquarium and supplies, but at first you should only raise something boring, like damselfish. Master the art of maintaining a stable aquarium for at least a year, and then you may consider obtaining a cephalopod for it. Conceivably, then, you could have one for next Squidmas. But don’t even dream of it yet.

Kodos or Kang?

I’ve always wondered where this strange meme of one-eyed cephalopods came from — here’s a poster from the heyday of B movies that suggests it has been around for at least 50 years.

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That’s from a site with a collection of old movie posters, that brings up old memories. I used to pedal my bike over by the old Vale movie theater in Kent right after school to browse the coming attractions. Most were pretty forgettable, but when it was always exciting to discover one of these cheesy posters (and the cheesier the better) heralding a monster movie for the Saturday matinee. A lot of these look very familiar.

Oh, and if the theater didn’t offer us any tacky thrills, there was a Saturday afternoon movie series on the TV that would fill in for us, giving us an education in quality film from the 40s and 50s that featured cheap makeup and clumsy costumes.

Colbert and Buttars

The war on Christmas is heating up. Look: here’s Colbert mocking atheists. He sneers at our atheist Christmas cards, and even laughs at our letters to our families.

And then there’s Chris Buttars of Utah. Somebody get the memo to him, stat — doesn’t he know that the War on Christmas is to be waged with humor and sarcasm? He’s taking it seriously! There is a bit of humor there, though. Advertisers and legislators in Utah — Utah! — don’t seem to be taking him very seriously.

Ebert on Expelled

I hadn’t realized that Roger Ebert had so far neglected to review Expelled, but he has now belatedly rectified that omission with a wonderfully scathing sneer at the movie. Here’s a taste:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

I don’t think he liked it.

So…is this supposed to be something to make atheists happy?

Sometimes the Christian death cult really creeps me out. There is a museum exhibit called Celebrating the Lives and Deaths of the Popes that seems to be particularly heavy on the “death” part. It’s got exhibits to give you the “true sense of attending a Pope’s funeral”, replicas of the geegaws dead popes are dressed up in, and crypt and coffin reproductions. All very morbid and intensely repulsive — do good Catholics actually savor the rituals wrapped around the corpses of their popes?

Good for Washington!

My old home state, Washington (uh, I’ve got the right one, right? This isn’t DC, I hope), is waging the war on Christmas, as is appropriate for one of the most godless states in the country. The FFRF has put up a sign nestled among the religious symbols at the Capitol:

At this season of the Winter Solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

I’m impressed with the guy who put up a nativity scene, too: he says the atheist sign doesn’t bother him, and that free speech is great. That’s what we need more of — mutual elbow room and tolerance.

Oh, and there’s also a tree, only it’s not a Christmas tree. It’s the Capitol Holiday Kids Tree. I like it.

Not everyone is happy, though: one cranky commentator spills a little bile, and then ironically snarks about the holiday spirit. So not everyone in the state is enlightened, but then there are always a few kooks on the fringe.

Wack-a-mole opportunity in Madison

I know there are a lot of smart people at UW Madison who will be a bit dismayed to hear this: an IDEA chapter is forming in Madison. The IDEA clubs are the sad little organizations that the Intelligent Design wackaloons form on college campuses to spread their nonsense. They don’t seem very effective — they produce people like Casey Luskin and Sal Cordova, so one might argue that they actually help us by dumbing down the opposition — but they are kind of embarrassing to have around.

Anyway, this group is going to show some silly ID movies, “Where the evidence leads” (irreducible complexity proves evolution is wrong!) and “The Privileged Planet” (god is real because we don’t fall up!) on December 4, 10, 18 and in January at the Madison Public Library. They will have discussions afterwards in which they try to defend bogosity.

This could be great fun for the rational folk in Wisconsin. Get a group together, show up for the movie, and tear it down afterwards. Make ’em struggle, then go out for a celebratory beer afterwards. Report back if you do it!

MAJOR CORRECTION: this isn’t in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s Madison, South Dakota. They are easily confused, one is to the west of me, the other to the east.

This Madison contains Dakota State University — I’m sure there are avid science students there ready to play wack-a-mole, too.