Ecology & Zoology
Speaking of cephalopods which have surprised by not being too heavy to fly after all, I was reminded of one little cuttlefish who is actually too heavy to swim: Metasepia pfefferi, or Pfeffer's Flamboyant Cuttlefish. With the scientist's charming penchant for repurposing ordinary adjectives, biologists describe the body of this little fellow as "robust," which means that it is chubby in all dimensions. It may sound insulting to keep calling it heavy and chubby, but actually these features make for a very cool trick.
The Flamboyant doesn't swim and hover midwater like other cuttlefish. Instead…
Okay, even though nobody commented on my post about the Ocean Bloggers Challenge (funding marine science for classrooms in need), enough donations have accrued to completely fund one of the projects: Invertebrates in my Tank! So, as a thank-you to all these people, here is another squid cartoon.
Apparently this comic was the result of a New Yorker captioning contest. This interview with the contest winner is almost as funny as the cartoon itself.
The one regret I have about winning the cartoon-caption contest is thatit unmasks me as the sort of person who enters cartoon-caption contests.…
A fine question! As is so often the case in science, the answer is both yes and no, depending on what kind of squid you are.
Squid come in two metaphorical flavors: Myopsida and Oegopsida. They are usually characterized by lifestyle differences as neritic and pelagic squid, so you might wonder why the taxonomic labels aren't simply Neritica and Pelagica. It turns out they are named instead for the most prominent anatomical difference between them: the presence (in myopsids) or the absence (in oegopsids) of a cornea.
(Linguistic detour: Myopsida obviously comes from the same root as myopia,…
Hey, my boss is in the news! Kinda sorta, if you count tiny local papers you've never heard of. And why not--especially when they run articles about people you know?
Together with the Noyo Harbor Commission, Dr. Gilly and Supervisor Kendall Smith will be discussing, in depth, the Humboldt squid, nicknamed "red devil" for its red color and fierce nature to attack everything in sight from fish to scuba divers, and their migration towards Northern California from their natural South American habitat.
Okay, I'm not going to get on my "red devil" hobbyhorse; I'm just going to point out that they…
It's hard to answer definitively without specifying: healthy for whom? Healthy for people, seems to be yes. Healthy for the oceans, seems to be kinda maybe. It's absolutely a better choice than orange roughy or shark! Here, in the third and final part, I consider the question: Healthy for the squid?
Well, duh. Definitely not. They're getting eaten.
I've been a vegetarian my whole life. I was raised that way, and as I got older, I continued to choose not to eat animals out of a combination of concern for the environment and love for the animals. But I'm no evangelical vegetarian. Many of my…
Having considered Humboldt squid consumption from the public (human) health perspective, let's try judging it for environmental health.
If Humboldts are truly an invasive species, then it should be good for the environment to eat them. They seem to like eating a lot of the same fish that humans do, so their invasion provides unwelcome competition. Some folks are thinking it might not be a bad idea to open a commerical fishery for Humboldts, just to reduce their ecological (and economical) impact!
Maybe so--from California northwards. But in Mexico, Central and South America, Humboldts are not…
Ah, to be a lizard - lay around in the sun, star in Japanese movies and, if your tail is pulled off, you grow it right back.
Humans are not so lucky about the regeneration part but Tel Aviv University research says we may come close.
Prof. Meital Zilberman of TAU's Department of Biomedical Engineering has developed a new biologically active "scaffold" made from soluble fibers, which may help humans replace lost or missing bone. With more research, she says, it could also serve as the basic technology for regenerating other types of human tissues, including muscle, arteries…
Now that we're all convinced the Humboldt squid isn't going to eat you, let's turn the question around: can you eat the Humboldt squid?
First, from the public health angle: Does it have mercury, everyone wants to know about any seafood, quickly followed by, I don't want nasty parasites.
Mercury, like many other toxins, bioaccumulates. Animals don't break it down or digest it, so it gets concentrated up the food chain. Suppose a single sardine has a small amount of mercury. A squid that eats a hundred sardines will accumulate a hundred sardines' worth of mercury. A tuna that eats a hundred…
I guess it doesn't show up on my blog automatically, but I decree that my contest entry counts as today's Squid-A-Day. So there!
40,000 or so spiders have been described, all of which have been thought to be strict predators that feed on insects or other animals, trapping their prey in elaborate webs or hunting them down directly. But researchers have now found one exception to this rule, a neotropical jumping spider known as Bagheera kiplingi and the first instance known to science of a spider that dines primarily on vegetarian fare, according to a report published in Current Biology.
The spiders' veggie option of choice is so-called Beltian bodies, specialized leaf-tip structures produced by acacia shrubs. The…