Heteroteuthis hawaiiensis
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
Whew, dodged a mistake — the movie is on RIGHT NOW! An alert reader caught me in time and let me know I live in the Central Time Zone. I haven’t even touched the hooch yet.
It starts with Deborah Gibson, Submarine Pilot, dodging angry whales, and…breaking a giant octopus out of a block of ice? And it then destroys an oil drilling platform? I’m confused. That means I have to take a sip. (No, not a drink. I plan to survive this event.
A shark just leapt up and ate a jetliner? What the hell? OK, big drink. Never mind survival.
I may not make it through this abomination. It’s not just the drinking and the bad movie, it’s the commercials every 5 minutes.
I don’t understand. Suddenly the navy is involved in giant shark hunting? Firing a battleship’s cannon at it? And it survives?
It just ate a battleship. I didn’t buy enough hootch for this thing.
A plan! Corral each monster in a bay: Tokyo Bay and San Francisco Bay. Yeah, I can tell this plan will work just great.
Why do the fake scientists in this movie keep peering into microscopes and pouring colored fluids back and forth? They’re studying something the size of a freight train!
Debbie and Asian scientist she just met get lusty over death talk, have sex, and get inspired to use pheromones to draw monsters into bays. Pheromones are made suddenly in lab, and are fluorescent green. Weird.
Asian scientist talks about it’s fate that he and Debbie will be together. Prediction: he’ll be eaten soon.
The octopus just ate a jet fighter. Tally so far:
Octopus: One oil platform, one small jet fighter.
Shark: One jetliner, one battleship.
PZ: One glass of wine.
For some reason, placing the tiny beaker of pheromone bait requires Debbie to drive a submersible to place it in just the right spot. It’s supposed to attract a monster across half the width of the Pacific Ocean!
The submersible claw gets jammed, of course. And here comes the shark. At 500 knots! Don’t worry, the submersible outruns it.
Shark just ate another battleship and the Golden Gate bridge.
The octopus is not getting enough screen time here. If I wanted all sharks all the time, I’d be watching the Discovery Channel.
Octopus was apparently wreaking havoc offscreen. Debbie Gibson’s lover reports that they shot it with artillery and just made it mad.
Since big guns did nothing, they’re obviously going to have to nuke it.
Until Debbie has a brilliant idea: have the two fight each other to the death. Saw that one coming from a mile away.
The only way to get the two monsters to fight is deliver another tiny container of pheromone from a submarine piloted by Debbie. Of course. This is insane.
Debbie is now lustfully hoping for a bloodbath. What happened to the earlier insistence on catching them alive?
Shark has eaten an oil tanker now, and is chasing Debbie Gibson’s sub. At 500 knots, probably. Debbie shoots it with torpedos that miss, until the entire US submarine fleet shows up to shoot at it, too.
And then the octopus shows up to eat 5 submarines! Yay octopus!
Shark and octopus finally meet: octopus is winning with nice strangle hold, until shark bites off one of his arms. Dirty fighter! They separate so SyFy can squeeze in another commercial.
The shark is trying to eat Debbie’s submarine. Just ate it in half, but Debbie is getting away in a submersible.
The octopus just destroyed the submarine containing Debbie’s sensitive Japanese lover. She’s going to rescue him, apparently.
SHARK/OCTOPUS FIGHT!
They wrestle around for a bit, then…both dead? Just like that/ How anticlimactic.
Final tally:
Shark: One jetliner, two battleships, an oil tanker, and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Octopus: An oil platform, one small jet fighter, and six submarines.
PZ: Two glasses of wine.
I think the octopus was robbed. Maybe if his diet had been as robust as the shark’s, he would have won at the end.
Several readers have alerted me to this artful cover from Play magazine.
Why must the videogames always be about the nasty wicked violence? Put away the weapon, young lady! The mysterious creature only wants to play.
But it does remind me…Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is on TV in about an hour and a half, and I need to get ready. What snacks are appropriate for such a movie? The traditional popcorn and soft drink? Or is this more of a large jug of cheap hootch sort of event? And should I start drinking now, or wait for the absurdities to start?
This picture has a little story behind it. Over 250 million years ago, our world experienced the most massive extinction event known, with over 99% of all individuals on the planet dying out abruptly, and diversity was greatly limited for a few million years after that. One possible explanation for the Permian extinction is a correlated series of massive volcanic eruptions that burned through thick coal deposits and drowned the earth in CO2 — global warming on a massive scale. Even cephalopods suffered. The ceratatid ammonoids had been in decline for a long time, but the extinction nearly wiped them out, reducing them to only a few struggling genera.
But then something interesting happened. After the great extinction, the ammonoids exploded in diversity, radiating rapidly. Something about them had made some of them capable of riding out the disaster, and then exploiting the changed world afterwards.
One speculative explanation for the secret of their success is the ability of some members of the cephalopod clade to survive in cold, nearly anoxic conditions, like Vampyroteuthis infernalis. They were able to rebound quickly because of their dismal metabolism and the general fecundity of cephalopods. They restored some ecological webs faster than previously thought and provided an environment for further growth of more severely crippled clades.
It just goes to show you that our current episode of global warming is a relatively minor event. Life will go on. Fast-living organisms with high metabolic demands like, say, humans, might suffer and die from the environmental consequences of a high CO2 atmosphere, but don’t worry — the cephalopods will live on. They might even get a happy surge in numbers from the changes.
Brayard A, Escarguel G, Bucher H, Monnet C, Brühwiler T, Goudemand N, Galfetti T, Guex J (2009) Good Genes and Good Luck: Ammonoid Diversity and the End-Permian Mass Extinction. Science 325(5944):1118-1121.
Marshall CR, Jacobs DK (2009) Flourishing After the End-Permian Mass Extinction. Science 325(5944):1079-1080.
If you’ve got cable, you’ll want to tune in to the “SyFy” (yeesh, could they have made it a little dorkier?) channel for…Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus!!!. Who ever said television was a great wasteland? That’s quality entertainment!
That’s this Saturday evening. We’re all nerds together here, I know you don’t have anything better to do.
Oh, who to root for?
(Sent to me by Martin Hingston)
Those Australians know how to sell a classy bottle of wine — it’s all in the label. There’s a good chance I’ll be traveling to Melbourne this Spring, and I might just have to bring an extra suitcase to haul back plenty of these:
But noooooo — they’re all sold out! Maybe I’ll have to change those travel plans and visit a more hospitable country.
In yesterday’s Friday Cephalopod, I asked, “Where are the tattoos?” I guess I was being too obscure — I was referring to the latin name of the animal, Octopus maorum, which just means Maori octopus. Anyway, sometimes being too oblique pays off, because Ryan and Sean replied by sending me photos of octopus tattoos.
I do have a Trophy Wife, but I think she’d slap me silly if I went out and got something like those.
