Sepiadarium austrinum
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
Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it.
Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. “It really didn’t put up much of a fight,” he says. “Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that’s about it. It certainly wasn’t grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea.”
As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about Antarctic toothfishing for a New Zealand TV station (that’s Chilean sea bass to you and me). He was able to capture a good bit of footage of the squid being hauled in. Bennett confirms that a production company in Auckland bought the footage, though he declines to specify what he was paid. An official with the Ministry of Fisheries told NEWSWEEK that offers to buy the footage had been pouring in and that some were “longer than a telephone number.” Bennett said that a documentary featuring the coveted footage should be released sometime in April.
We also learn about the future fate of the specimen.
Once aboard, the squid was lowered into the ship’s cargo hold and put on ice for the next two weeks as Bennett and his crew chugged 1,700 miles back to the southern coast of New Zealand. The squid remains frozen solid as preparations are being made to hand it over to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. That should happen on March 11, O’Shea says. But first, museum officials have to figure out how to store the thing. “The problem is we haven’t seen it yet,” says museum spokesperson Jane Keig. “We need to get it here to see how we’ll preserve it.”
That won’t be easy, says O’Shea. “We’re dealing with a 450-kilogram frozen lump of flesh. We’ve got to have a specially designed tank constructed.” O’Shea estimates that it could take up to four days for the squid to completely thaw out, a delicate process that will leave him and his colleagues only a small time frame in which to take samples and examine it. Still, those precious minutes could prove more valuable than years worth of colossal squid research. “The scientific value is enormous. It’ll more than double our knowledge,” says O’Shea, who hopes the research will shed light on the species’ hunting and mating behavior, its age and its intelligence (which O’Shea already suspects to be fairly negligible). The brain of a 275-kilogram giant squid is only about 20 grams and shaped like a doughnut, he says, “There’s not a lot of comprehension going on up there.” Might the colossal squid be brighter than its smaller cousin? “Doubtful,” says O’Shea. “In all likelihood, it’s one of the stupidest creatures in the sea.”
Now that’s just mean.
The last time I hosted the Circus of the Spineless, I just did a series of photos—invertebrates are wonderfully photogenic. Here we go again, with another collection of gorgeous images of crunchy, squishy, slimy, tentacled, multi-legged, no-legged creatures.
A reader sent me a link to this myspace page (don’t quail in horror just yet!) called Bark, Hide and Horn—it’s by some folkies, and includes some songs. Love songs about mating molluscs and ants and various invertebrates! It’s very romantic. Listen if you’ve long had a lingering suspicion that you were born into the wrong phylum, or if just appreciate love no matter what the species involved are.
Consider it some theme music for the Circus of the Spineless, which will be appearing right here later today.
Halkieriids are Cambrian animals that looked like slugs in scale mail; often when they died their scales, called sclerites, dissociated and scattered, and their sclerites represent a significant component of the small shelly fauna of the early Cambrian. They typically had their front and back ends capped with shells that resembled those we see in bivalve brachiopods. Wiwaxiids were also sluglike, but sported very prominent, long sclerites, and lacked the anterior and posterior shells; their exact position in the evolutionary tree has bounced about quite a bit, but some argument has made that they belong in the annelid ancestry, and that their sclerites are homologous to the bristly setae of worms. One simplistic picture of their relationship to modern forms was that the halkieriids expanded their shells and shed their scales to become molluscs, while the wiwaxiids minimized their armor to emphasize flexibility and became more wormlike. (Note that that is a very crude summary; relationships of these Cambrian groups to modern clades are extremely contentious. There’s a more accurate description of the relationships below.)
Now a new fossil has been found, Orthozanclus reburrus that unites the two into a larger clade, the halwaxiids. Like the halkieriids, it has an anterior shell (but not a posterior one), and like the wiwaxiids, it has long spiky sclerites. In some ways, this simplifies the relationships; it unites some problematic organisms into a single branch on the tree. The question now becomes where that branch is located—whether the halwaxiids belong in a separate phylum that split off from the lophophorate family tree after the molluscs, or whether the halwaxiids are a sister group to the molluscs.
What’s happening in the Antarctic? Researchers are looking at seabed changes that result from global warming.
The researchers catalogued about 1,000 species in an area of the Antarctic seabed where warming temperatures are believed to have caused the collapse of overlying ice shelves, affecting the marine life below.
“This is virgin geography,” said expedition member Gauthier Chapelle. “If we don’t find out what this area is like now following the collapse of the ice shelf, and what species are there, we won’t have any basis to know in 20 years’ time what has changed and how global warming has altered the marine ecosystem.”
Here’s what’s cool: lots of photos of these creatures.
You all remember Violet, the jar-opening octopus, I’m sure—well, Violet is also quite the fierce predator. I would suggest that keeping a pet octopus is not a wise decision if you happen to be an arthropod.
Speaking of hugging your squid today, A colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, has been caught — it’s about 10 meters long and weighs about 450 kg. The place to go for all the information is TONMO, of course; I’ll just share some of the pretty pictures with you.
