Comments

  1. F. Cephalopod says

    “where’d you get those peepers?”

    Why from my genetic code and developmental embryology! Where else Dr. Myers?

  13. Thunderbird5 says

    @ #7 – Looking in…falling in…

    -sort of like the end of Disney’s megabuck turkey “The Black Hole” when IIRC Norman Bates and Maximillian Schell ham up one of those Trekist fling-arms-up-and-twist and-fall-over-consoles fight scenes and so manage to steer themselves and company into the titular space whirl. This movie had been a bitter letdown IMH(then 12 yrs old)O but the ending was beyond cool. Go into the ‘hole’ and there’s Evil Robot Maximillian (name coinkidink) – with The Baddie imprisoned inside his carapace – atop a rock as the camera slowly pans out to reveal whole canyons of rock and fire and shadowy slave lines of The Condemed; all set to the superb climax of John Barry’s wonderful score.

    There is no hell – whether through aa black hole or else – but there is this eye.

  14. Evangelatheist says

    Maybe someday we’ll be lucky enough for Just Born to make cephalopod peeps with big peepers just like that!

  17. i_am_toast says

    I’m not sure how many UK readers you have here but I let out a little cheer that the new Red Dwarf episode aired (UK time) Friday night had a giant squid in it.

  18. astrounit says

    Wow. Now THAT’s a big reflective ‘aureole’ around an eye!

    I don’t know what biologists call that feature. (Can anybody clue me in?) – it’s intriguing. I’ve seen it in many a marine critter. I don’t know what biologists understand about how such a surrounding reflective mantle (I am assuming, from my usual impressions, to be typically slightly concave) would assist vision.

    The only useful mechanism I can think of for such a large reflective (and, I am assuming, from every example I’ve seen, slightly CONCAVE)annulus is that the light coming from distant sources will be reflected BACK into the water, and the slightly concave shape of it will tend to make a relatively “bright spot” near the “focus” some distance from the eye, but the brightness of that illuminated focus point would be very sensitive to the orientation of that critter’s eye with respect to a light source…thus making it a potentially useful sensory amplifier to determine what is potentially threatening at very low light levels…

    Just a thought.

  20. Happy Tentacles says

    Yes, the ‘Red Dwarf’ Cephalopod was very pretty, but I’d have liked to have seen more of it. There aren’t enough TV programmes that include giant squid as an integral part of the plot. Cutting off those tentacles seemed very cruel.

  21. 'Tis Himself says

    Go into the ‘hole’ and there’s Evil Robot Maximillian (name coinkidink) – with The Baddie imprisoned inside his carapace – atop a rock as the camera slowly pans out to reveal whole canyons of rock and fire and shadowy slave lines of The Condemed; all set to the superb climax of John Barry’s wonderful score.



  22. Number8Dave says

    Hey, look! An enoploteuthid for the Friday Cephalopod! I spent two years of my life peering at these things through a microscope (plus a few collecting trips off the continental shelf) for my MSc thesis!

    As to the question of why such silvery eyes, I think it’s probably for the same reason that many pelagic fish have silvery sides. Most of the squid is translucent, but the eyes are opaque, and produce a significant silhouette against the albeit dim ambient light. Enoploteuthids are big on Not Being Seen – note the big photophores under the eyes and the scattered smaller photophores on the ventral surfaces of the mantle, head and arms. They adjust these to exactly match the intensity of light filtering down from above when viewed from below – in this way their silhouettes are almost obliterated.

    Sorry for the late posting – I normally check Pharyngula every day, but just back from my Easter holiday.