Giant Australian cuttlefish
O Australia! I wish I could switch continents!
Friday Cephalopod: “It’s a giant orgy.”
Giant Australian cuttlefish
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
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.
One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits.
We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that are likely to have been present in that first bilaterian; we’re looking for the Last Common Bilaterian by finding the Least Common Denominators among living species. And one place to look is among the flatworms.
This really sounds delicious.
Hand-grilled in iron molds by cooks behind a large display window, the octopus dumplings are made from wheat flour paste mixed with fish stock, spring onions and boiled octopus chunks, and drizzled with a sweet sauce, dried bonito flakes and seaweed.
I could go for some takoyaki right now. Unfortunately, the bad news is that it’s from a story about introducing cephalopods as mass-market fast food in the US. If they became popular here, kiss a lot of beautiful molluscs good bye.
I’m going to have to advocate more vegetarianism, I’m afraid. Maybe we could indulge in some octopus dumplings on a few special occasions, but we’d be better off turning fruit and vegetables into the next big food fad.
<sigh> But seafood tastes so good…
Nooooooooo! Harriet is dead. At least she lived a long life, making it to the ripe old age of 176.
Two short articles in this week’s Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.
Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how they trap prey. Deinopoids spin dry fibers that they fluff into threads that adhere electrostatically to small insects; Araneoids secrete glue onto the the strand, which takes less work (no fluffing), and is much more strongly adhesive. The differences are enough to make one question whether there was a single origin of orb weavers, or whether the two groups independently stumbled on the same efficient form of architecture.
