While I’m announcing a few carnivals, I’ll remind all of you readers in West Central Minnesota that there will be a Drinking Liberally tonight at 6:00, in Old #1 on Atlantic Avenue in Morris.
Otherwise, for those of you trapped in the virtual world…
It’s been three years since I visited Washington state, and Kerry of Federal Way just had to make me homesick by sending photos from the West Coast Chainsaw Carving Competition. I’ve been there before! It’s fun and noisy.
It’s just as well I didn’t go this year: I would not have been able to resist this.
I don’t think it would have fit in an overhead storage bin, either.
Carl Zimmer tells us all about the recent big dodo find, in both the pages of the Grey Lady and a podcast. He’s a master of multimedia, that guy.
Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that’s another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they didn’t. The lesson was that if you wanted to learn how your brain worked, often the most fruitful approach was an indirect one, using comparative studies to work out the commonalities and differences in organization, and try to correlate those with differences and similarities in function.
At about that time, I also discovered the work of the great physiologist, JZ Young, who had done a great deal of influential work on the octopus as a preparation for studying brain and behavior. (Young, by the way, went by the informal name “Jay-Zed”, and there you have another clue to my affectation of using my first and middle initial as if it were a proper name.) It was around then that I was developing that peculiar coleoideal fascination a few of the readers here might have noticed—it was born out of an appreciation of comparative biology and the recognition that cephalopods represented a lineage that independently acquired a large brain and complex behavior from the vertebrates. To understand ourselves, we must embrace the alien.
Young’s attempts to understand mechanisms of learning in memory in the octopus were premature, unfortunately—they have very complex brains, and we made much faster progress using simple invertebrates, like Aplysia, to work out the basics first—but it’s still the subject of ongoing research. I was very pleased to run across a general overview of the octopus brain in The Biological Bulletin.
It’s a bonus movie for the Friday Cephalopod: the octopus is a master of camouflage.
O Australia! I wish I could switch continents!
It’s got bats, it’s got clever giant albino centipedes, it’s got sudden death: it’s the perfect lunch hour movie for Pharynguloids.
Maybe half of my audience here will be familiar with this problem. You’re a man, and you’re hauling this massive, ummm, package around in your pants everywhere you go. Other men fear you, while the women worship you…yet at the same time, your e-mail is stuffed to bursting with strange people making friendly offers to help you make it even bigger. It’s a dilemma; you think you would be even more godlike if only it were larger, but could there possibly be any downside to it? (There is a bit of folk wisdom that inflating it drains all the blood from the brain, but this is clearly false. Men who are stupid when erect are also just as stupid when limp.)
A couple of recent studies in fish and spiders have shown that penis size is a matter of competing tradeoffs, and that these compromises have evolutionary consequences. Guys, trash that e-mail for penis enlargement services—they can make you less nimble in pursuit of the ladies, or worse, can get you killed.
Some of you may recall a movie of mating slugs I mentioned before…now here’s a site with photos of the act.
In case you’re baffled, the strange translucent blue sheets hanging down are the interwined penises of the two slugs. Don’t they make a beautiful couple?
(Thanks, Craig Clarke! Does your mother know you browse the web for molluscan porn?)
There are always a few strange leads to cephalopod miscellany in my mailbag…people have this odd idea that I like tentacled molluscs. So here we go, a few strange things on the strange ol’ internet.
This t-shirt is anatomically incorrect! I’m not sure what that thing is, but it’s no cephalopod I’ve ever seen. Although I suspect he’s wondering what that strange pink beast does with those two stumpy tentacles.
I wish I had a giant squid at my dinner table. At least it’s anatomically more reasonably drawn.
There are an awful lot of knitters with a strange fascination with cephalopods.
