I’ve been informed by Greta Christina that I’ve been beaten to the punch: the best title ever is already taken.
Happiness Is a Squishy Cephalopod(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
It’s so true, and I’m going to have to pick up a copy of that one.
Wonderpus is a spectacular cephalopod that has appeared a few times on the Friday Cephalopod. How can you forget an octopus with this kind of psychedelic color?
Now a reader has sent me a link to the formal taxonomic description of Wunderpus photogenicus, and we can get more details on this beautiful animal.
Figure from The Deep(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Claire Nouvian.
from Kim Reisenbichler © MBARI 1995
OK, nice reference to both Darwin and cephalopods, but doesn’t it bother anyone that the viscosity of the medium would make baseball impossible to play, and that wooden bats would cause a serious buoyancy problem for the animals?
(Via Zeno, who has frightened the creationists out of his state)
I’ve got to get back to my meeting, but Cosma just had to distract me with these classic video clips on dissecting the squid giant axon, including movies of one of my personal heroes, JZ Young (pronounced, as everyone knows, as jay-zed), in action. It’s beautiful stuff.
People are always arguing about whether primitive apes could have evolved into men, but that one seems obvious to me: of course they did! The resemblances are simply too close, so that questioning it always seems silly. One interesting and more difficult question is how oysters could be related to squid; one’s a flat, sessile blob with a hard shell, and the other is a jet-propelled active predator with eyes and tentacles. Any family resemblance is almost completely lost in their long and divergent evolutionary history (although I do notice some unity of flavor among the various molluscs, which makes me wonder if gustatory sampling hasn’t received its proper due as a biochemical assay in evaluating phylogeny.)
One way to puzzle out anatomical relationships and make phylogenetic inferences is to study the embryology of the animals. Early development is often fairly well conserved, and the various parts and organization are simpler; I would argue that what’s important in the evolution of complex organisms anyway is the process of multicellular assembly, and it’s the rules of construction that we have to determine to identify pathways of change. Now a recent paper by Shigeno et al. traces the development of Nautilus and works out how the body plan is established, and the evolutionary pattern becomes apparent.
This is a still from a movie by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (31MB Quicktime). I’ve also edited down a slightly more bandwidth-friendly 4.6MB version that shows just the action at the time of the strike.
