Ecology & Zoology

And they're on exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Splash Zone! Seriously, if you are within 100 miles of Monterey, you should go see them now. If you're not, well . . . sorry! Take my word for it, they're really cute! You'll have to take my word for it, because yeah, I forgot my camera. Oops.

That link up there to the aquarium's site will take you to some lovely video footage, though.

MBA is particulary good at showcasing local animals, stuff that you could see (but most people never do) if you went diving right out in the bay. The cuttlefish are some of the few exotics they have on display--Sepia pharaonis, all the way from the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean.

First the bad news: our octopus died. Climbed out over the astroturf, was found on the floor the next day. Very, very sad.

But, the consolation: on the same day, a dozen or so live market squid appeared in our lab, fresh from the spawning grounds, ready to lay eggs for research. They are beautiful!

The good news: a diver was pulling up some instruments and an octopus stowed away. Knowing my lab's love of all things cephalopod, this diver brought us the octopus, who is now adorably and safely ensconced in a very secure tank, and shortly to be stuffed to the gills with crabs and shrimp.

Some discussion over the identity of Nemo's little octopus friend Pearl has led me into a deep investigation of Grimpoteuthis (dumbo octopuses) and Opisthoteuthis (flapjack octopuses). Both are shortened on the antero-posteral axis (which, yes, takes some head-scratching to figure out--octopuses are even more difficult than squid when it comes to axes of symmetry) but this shortening is carried to the greatest extreme in flapjacks. Hence the name. From the Tree of Life web project:

Possibly I have found it:

Species of Opisthoteuthis are the most compressed, in the anterior-posterior axis, of any cephalopod.

Mmmm! Syrup, anyone?

Ever wonder why the slow moving sloth has a slightly greenish hue? Ever consider the sloth at all? Well, perhaps not. Location, location, location, is the mantra for many of us in our macro world, but it is also true for the small world of algae.

I'm at a conference. It's keeping me busy. Today my friend and fellow conspirator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H grad student Julie gave an awesome talk about Humboldt squid in the California Current.

Also, there were three talks about octopuses! One of my favorite things about this conference is that every year the Alaskan Octopus Contingent shows up with new findings about the behavior and ecology of the Giant Pacific Octopus--the very species I blame for instigating a childhood cephalopod obsession that made me the grad student I am today.

The Monterey Herald hit close to home today with Turning the tables on giant, predatory squid:

These fascinatingly grotesque
creatures can reach 7 feet in length and weigh in excess of 100 pounds,
are known cannibals and can tear off a fisherman's hand with its
razor-sharp beak, dousing its prey with prodigious amounts of black ink.

It doesn't get much better than strung-out spiders and a white dude using ghetto slang. And Canada.

Two caveats: one, you may want to watch this out of hearing from impressionable young children. It's not terrible but the occasional joke may be branded in their brain as scientifically valid and therefore not a bad decision. Two, I am mortally terrified of spiders, but I sucked it up for this video because it was funny. I will just be scratching at imaginary spiders crawling all over me for the rest of the day.

There are a lot of myths out there about the marine world, but by far the one that bothers me the most is the notion that sharks don't get cancer. This simply untrue statement has led to the slaughter of millions of sharks via the industry for shark cartilage pills, which are sold to desperate cancer patients under the false pretense that they can help reduce or cure their illness.

One of my favorite zoologist habits is to gesture on one's own body when describing an animal's anatomy. The weirder the animal, the funnier the implicit analogy.

"These worms have a ventral nerve cord," I explain, drawing a line from my collarbone to my navel. "This mollusc has gills on its dorsal surface," reaching over one shoulder to pat my back.

Easy to do in front of a class, harder on the printed page. There we rely on diagrams to indicate dorsal (top), ventral (bottom), anterior (front), and posterior (back). For example, here's a squid: