That in future speaking engagements, unauthorized photography should be prohibited.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I don’t care what the last installment of the interminable thread was about — I have to show this horrifying clip of a gentle octopus’s last moments beneath the jaws of ravening chordates.
OK, now talk about whatever you want…if you can.
(Current totals: 10,157 entries with 983,758 comments.)
If only it were TrueType or Postscript, I’d be using this octopus alphabet all the time.
Over on the TONMO forums, an aquarist has been documenting the life of his octopus, “Legs”. Legs was wild caught when only the size of a fingernail, and raised to healthy, thriving adulthood — with lots and lots of photos.
Legs just recently died, unfortunately, which is the sad reality of getting to know most cephalopods — they tend to be very short-lived creatures, many living for only a year. “The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Legs.”
Archy is speculating about Gould’s idea that if you rewound the tape of life and replayed it, you might get some very different results…and he suggests that in a different world, molluscs could have replaced vertebrates as the dominant large metazoan. This is perfectly reasonable, but he chose to illustrate the concept, and my SIWOTI syndrome kicked in.
Noooo! He’s got an arrow for a “large brain” pointing to an enlarged fleshy flap above the eyes. That’s not where the cephalopod brain is located! They have a ventral nerve cord — the central brain would be deep, between the eyes and behind the beak, wrapped around the esophagus.
In this alternate universe, the intelligent cephalopods would be speculating about how those primitive, stupid vertebrates could have evolved into something as clever as they are, and they’d draw something frog-like and point to a puffy throat-sac and say, “look at its big brain!”
But OK, the ray gun is cool.
Years ago, when my kids were little and easily impressed, we had a tradition of making pancakes on Sunday morning (better than church!). I’d sometimes go wild and make a mickey mouse pancake, or sometimes we’d have chocolate chip pancakes, but I never played around quite as much as Jim, who makes weird pancakes all the time. I like this one, for some reason.
I showed you that video of an octopus stealing a camera, now here’s one of an octopus trying to snatch a crescent wrench. Unfortunately, he is punished horribly.
Man, cuttlefish are brutal.
(embed code is buggy — here’s a link if it doesn’t load)
