I told you not to read that book, but a bunch of you did, and now look what’s emerging from the depths.
As we all know, from the teleological impulse, all lineages are destined to converge on the truest, most godlike form, therefore someday your descendants will all look like that, because you just had to read the damned book.
Unfortunately, the article is 5 years old, so I haven’t found out yet if they’ve completed their conquest. It’s going to be an improvement, though…and once the spiders complete their terrestrial take-over, this will be the planet of the 8-limbed overlords.
Granddaughter visited the Seattle Aquarium. Guess who she met there?
How about a glass octopus?
Yes, I’m bringing back the Friday Cephalopod. I have been diverted by my fascination with spiders, but I realized I can encompass multitudes, and my love for marine squishies never went away. I just can’t do much personally with cephalopods here in the middle of the Minnesota prairie — but I can still love them from afar.
They’re beautiful, but so are arachnids. Does that make me polyamorous?
It’s a travel day for me! I have to drive to Wisconsin to fetch my wife back and to say hello to a cute little ragamuffin for a bit, and then tomorrow I come back. I’m thinking once classes start and I have to deal every day with a swarm of potential plague carriers I’m going to have to throttle back time spent with unvaccinated grandchildren.
While I’m on the road, though, at least I can leave you a pretty diamond squid to look at, and you can always converse among yourselves on The Infinite Thread.
They’re kind of like wet spiders, aren’t they?
No. It’s always “underwater killing machine” this and “largest creature of its age” that. Consider the accomplishment of growing to become one of the largest animals on the planet during the Ordovician, instead.
Look at you! Scarcely out of the Cambrian, and already 2.5m long, with a sophisticated sensory system, clever system for maintaining equilibrium in the ocean, and beautifully adept tentacles. Be proud, great brave mollusc! You were more than just a murder monster.
I agree so much with John Oliver here, with one qualifier.
Octopuses are awesome, but they have a flaw: they don’t live in the Midwest. In fact, the entire centers of every continent are an octopus-free zone, which means I can either spend my life pining for an unrequited love, or I could open my eyes and realize that instead, the continents are crawling with an equally weird and even more diverse population of mysterious creatures who don’t get no love. Not that they care, but part of the appeal of octopuses and spiders is that they don’t give a good god damn about people — they’re independent and free and living their best life without you.
Every few years, stories of Organism 46-B rise up again, and of course, I’m starting to see it again in 2020. Organism 46-B is a mythical creature of extreme inaccessibility — it lives in Lake Vostok, the freshwater lake buried 2 miles beneath Antarctic ice. You’d think that would hamper the spreading of the tall tale, since you’re not going to have drunk tourists stumbling around the edge of the lake snapping blurry photos of phenomena they call the Lake Vostok Monster, but it also prevents skeptics from dissecting the claims. They think. Except this story has Russian scientists building an elevator and sending scuba divers down to visit. Not true and not possible! A couple of holes have been bored down to the surface, but no one is going for a swim.
The scary story claims that the Russians found a giant monster down there.
Organism 46b is a species of giant octopus, but with 14 arms rather than eight.
It also spits poison and can mimic human form. I think I see a bad B movie developing here.
I’m disappointed. It’s so implausible on every level, yet I think 2020 really needs a tentacled man-eating sea monster.
By the way, one truly cool story: the existence of deep Antarctic lakes was predicted by the great Peter Kropotkin.
I still dream about cephalopods, even if the arachnids are snaring most of my attention.
Via special request by @SarahMackAttack, reposting this spectacular brief encounter w/ Taningia danae (also known as Taning's Octopus squid) ROV SuBastian was descending on a pervious #NingalooCanyon expedition dive! More info in thread that follows: pic.twitter.com/GNHedtvSqg
— Schmidt Ocean (@SchmidtOcean) March 27, 2020
I have a few fossil molluscs from the Devonian — they’re fairly common orthocerids, these cone-shaped shells that once housed mighty ancient cephalopods. Mine are small, but some of these shells get to be 5 or more meters long. We have to imagine big eyes and swarms of arms writhing out of the broad end of the cone, because those squishy bits don’t fossilize well. Well, not just imagine, because we do have data that lets us reasonably infer what the animal looked like. Here’s an excellent post that describes how this kind of reconstruction of Endoceras was done.
That’s not guesswork. Using trace fossils and phylogenetic bracketing and assembling bits of evidence from multiple specimens, you can make an informed estimation of the main features of the animal.
And it is awesome. Bring ’em back.
