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 took Iliana on a little survey trip around her house, and was mildly disappointed. She lives in this housing development of too-big houses that have some kind of disturbing style of permitted paint jobs — absolutely everything is in muted earth tones. Dull browns, grays, an occasional dark brick color, but nothing bright at all. The wildlife around here is the same. We spotted a prairie dog colony that yip-yip-yipped at us.
Brown everywhere. Then I found a fly on Iliana’s house, and was amazed: this is the color template for all the houses around here! The developers must have seen these little flies buzzing around and decided to paint everything to match.
There were no spiders in sight. Finding spider food gives me hope, though.
I get complaints all the time about my spider photos. No matter how gorgeous they are, there are always a bunch of people who dislike seeing them. They’re not cats, you know? Everyone wants cats. Nothing but cats. Adorable little kittens frolicking about.
Well, PZ don’t do that. I’m willing to compromise, though, so here…a non-spider. It’s kind of the antithesis of a spider, which makes it more like a kitty cat. Enjoy your penis worms.
Here’s a big bucket full of penis worms.
And a beach covered with penis worms.
You like that, huh? You want more? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!? Are you going to continue criticizing my spiders?
A baby Octopus octopus found by NOAA in American Samoa.
I’ve seen these midge larvae in our local ponds, and wondered how that folded fang-like appendage worked. Now I know.
I’ve been saying for a long time that if you want to design a movie alien or monster, you just need to look at Earthly invertebrates. There’s huge amounts of nightmare fuel there.
Here they come, the legions of cephalopods. Massive aggregations of brooding octopuses were found near Monterey Bay.
That’s not all. The University of Georgia had a single octopus in their aquarium, Octavius, presumed male, until they discovered a surprise one morning.
“I noticed this cloud of moving dots and I realised, ‘Oh my God, she had babies. There are babies. There are babies everywhere.’ And a sort of panic ensued,” aquarium curator Devin Dumont told Mary Landers at Savannah Now.
“I immediately started scooping them out and putting them in buckets and there were just buckets and buckets and buckets full of tiny octopi.”
Finding a tank full of baby octopuses (or octopodes for language pedants) would certainly be enough to shock anybody into mixing up their Greek and Latin word roots.
I, for one, welcome our breeding swarms of transgender octopuses, and will greet them as saviors when they emerge to release humanity from its misery.
My favorite spider died last night. I’m just broken-hearted now. So I put her corpse on the microscope and made a video of her face.
Spiders have so much more to love.
Mondays are usually awful, but now at least I have one thing to look forward to: it’s feeding day down on the spider ranch. The adults get a nice chewy cricket each, while I go through the spiderlings’ chambers and toss them a fruit fly each. Since Vera was so avidly hungry today, I recorded her trapping her prey and then picking at it for an extended period of time.
This one is only for spider obsessives who can enjoy staring at close-ups of arachnids doing strange things with their jaws for 15 minutes or more. Are you one? Let me know, and we can start a club.
