Loligo forbesi
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.
Wired has a pretty gallery of images from the recent Colossal Squid necropsy. If you’ve ever wondered what a pile of squid guts would look like on a table, here you go.
It’s too bad the images aren’t quite large enough to use as wallpaper on my laptop.
Oh, and those colors—that’s exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.
I love bats — they’re almost as glamorous as squid. So I am greatly dismayed to learn that there is a virulent bat illness spreading out of the northeast US, a serious die-off that has as one of its symptoms a fungal growth that has led to calling it “white nose syndrome”. Bats are behaving oddly, starving to death, and dropping dead.
Earlier I was complaining about the limited imaginations of television executives, who do such a poor job of translating science to the screen. Here’s a story full of drama and tragedy, with photogenic stars (the bats!) and scientists doing real, serious investigative work to solve a mystery. Wouldn’t that make for great television if done well?
Since I saw Iron Man last night (short review: AWESOME!!!), I thought I’d try to find a cephalopod with a similar red and gold color scheme…and didn’t get very close. But this one does have the sleek look of a rocket-propelled machine, so it will have to do.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Watch the communal spawning of squid off the California coast.
It’s the last thing they do: one huge orgy of mating, and then they collapse, spent and dying.
The title gets the principal objection of any creationist out of the way: yes, this population of Podarcis sicula is still made up of lizards, but they’re a different kind of lizard now. Evolution works.
Here’s the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km2, and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km2, which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.
