Friday Cephalopod: That’s a freakin’ huge tag


Poor cuttlefish: they’re getting tracked, their camouflage to no avail. But man, that’s a big tag.

Get Adobe Flash player


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.

Comments

  1. ChasCPeterson says

    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.

  2. ralfmuschall says

    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

  3. 00930er says

    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?

  4. unluckyalf says

    “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.