Poor cuttlefish: they’re getting tracked, their camouflage to no avail. But man, that’s a big tag.
Oops. That was annoying — I can’t get that BBC player to work on my machine at all. It’s annoying, too, because their archaic embed code is frickin’ ginormous. Here, if you can’t see it either, is a completely different cuttlefish video.
That’s not a cuttlefish tag. This is a cuttlefish tag.
That is a big tag. And there’s no transmitter, it’s logging temperature and pressure and they need to get it back to download it (good luck). I hope they made it neutrally buoyant.
No tags but cuttlefish porn.
OK.
BBC region-locks a lot of their content; that might be the issue.
I take it back – it’s running fine for me on their site.
Make a swap of their equipment and you get cuttlefish with lasers on their heads!
I can see the video OK, but I live in the UK. Some stuff on the BBC is only available to UK viewers, so that may be the problem.
The BBC embedded player works here (in .de), but I was unable to extract+download video streams from BBC with reasonable effort – they dynamically embed an XML file that contains an authorization code (to get at the RTMP stream) which expires after a few seconds, and I was too lazy to continue beyond this point.
I found the video (at 360p) on youtube where everything is downloadable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=367xs8Pbw3I
Internet Explorer worked for me.
Great vid plays well on Safari / Mountain Lion.
Does anyone else find the narration terribly sexist?
– males “throwing weight around”
– “dainty females”
Was there more in the documentary?– is the full thing at BBC? Can you link out please I can’t find it.
Their sexual reproduction sounds fascinating, it’s quite rare in vertebrates for males exclusively to guard and raise offspring but I know little about invertebrates. Is it common?
PZ, can you enlighten us please?
What’s a good reference to read — pref. a journal article so I can get it from my college library quickly — reviewing comparative reproductive strategies in cuttlefish and other invertebrates? And theories on how this evolved — their males are much larger, typically that’s seen in a species where males mate-and-go, most species I know where males help or entirely raise young tend to be similarly sized to females of the species.
And their behavior seemed pretty intelligent. Do they pass the self-recognition test?
“Was there more in the documentary?– is the full thing at BBC? Can you link out please I can’t find it.”
This was part of a local news broadcast not a documentary.