Ecology & Zoology
This week's "Smithsonian Snapshot" is a giant squid eye from their collection, not currently on display at the museum, i.e. ONLY AVAILABLE ONLINE:
But they TOTALLY should have put it in a smaller jar, 'cause, like, it just doesn't look that big.
Background cephalopod trivia time! Can you identify:
A) the brown&white striped object visible behind the eye through the jar?B) the objects in the jar at the far right of the photograph?C) the squid in the jar peeking out from behind the eye jar?
Fisherfolk can be tremendous founts of information about marine animals. They know where to find different species, what sort of baits they like best, what sizes to expect, and how all these things change with the seasons. Smart marine biologists spend a lot of time talking with fishers and learning from them.
That said, fishers can sometimes draw rather curious conclusions from what they observe. Here's an excerpt from a recent article by well-known angler and fishing writer Charley Soares:
During some of the recent seasons, I have received reports of jumbo squid, some up to 2 feet in length…
Newswire |
An Open Letter to UK Prime Minister David Cameron has been signed by a host of politicians, scientists, academics, wildlife experts and celebrities. The letter calls on the UK Government to dissociate itself from purchasing offspring of wild-caught primates for research and was published today in the Times and Guardian newspapers.
Support for the BUAV (the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection) campaign comes from primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, actress and wildlife campaigner Virginia McKenna, environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, conservationist Ian Redmond, TV wildlife…
There's a paper out in ProcSoc B about aggressive mimicary, a very devious way to hunt by pretending to be prey or a mate, and then gobbling the hapless critter that comes to investigate.
Here are some of my favourites!
Photuris fireflies
Female fireflies attract males with a precise courtship signal. I don't know whether to be impressed or sickened, but the guys rather deviously waggle their bum to look like females, luring males in, then scoff them. "Look, its Dave! Mind you, I am hungry..." (proceeds to waggle bum like girl).
Bolas spiders
These guys have got the weirdest way of hunting…
. . . don't exist.
But because it's finger squid season in Texas, I've been reading up on the closest approximation to a freshwater squid: the Atlantic brief squid, Lolliguncula brevis. It's a pretty great name for a pretty great squid. The latin name just rolls off the tongue: lolly-gunk-you-lah. And "brief"? Like these? Oh wait, those are squid briefs, not brief squids . . .
I think the brief squid was named for its diminutive size.
Who knew brevity could be measured in centimeters?
But seriously folks, the brief squid may be the most freshwater-tolerant of cephalopods. It lives all along…
Researchers have discovered a 525-million-year-old fossil which belongs to a group of tentacle-bearing creatures which lived inside hard tubes.
The creature belongs to a group called pterobranch hemichordates which are related to starfish and sea urchins but also show some characteristics that offer clues to the evolution of the earliest vertebrates. About 30 species of pterobranch are known to exist today although 380-490 million years ago a group of these animals called graptolites were common across the prehistoric oceans.
Pterobranches are creatures which secrete a substance that…
It's one of the most persistent problems in camouflage: how do you hide your eyes?
Skin is not that difficult to disguise. You can change its color, cover it up, match it to your environment. But eyes are tricky. You have to be able to see out of them. And unfortunately, predators are extremely good at looking for eyeballs.
I'm not a predator, but I am a marine biologist, which is kind of the same thing. I've done my time searching through plankton soup for squid larvae--and I can tell you the best way to search is to look for the eyes. They're just so recognizable!
The squid I was hunting…
Tree islands, patches of high, dry ground a meter high that dot the marshes of the Florida Everglades, are elevated enough to allow trees to grow and provide a nesting site for alligators and a refuge for birds, panthers, and other wildlife.
And those critters may have anthropogenic garbage left by early man to thank for it. Garbage mounds left by prehistoric humans might have driven the formation of many of those Everglades' tree islands, distinctive havens of exceptional ecological richness in the sprawling marsh that are today threatened by human development.
Scientists have…
I'll confess it. Even though they're the divas of the ocean, the quintessential charismatic megafauna, even though they overshadow all the other weird and wonderful marine life, I still like whales. And our oceans need them, just the way our land needs wolves and tigers and pandas and elephants.
So I designed a super-nerdy t-shirt:
I submitted it to a Threadless challenge for the Oceanic Preservation Society. If you like it, go vote it up!
(It's okay for me to post this here, because there's a big squid in the design. And an octopus. And my next entry is going to be a super-awesome research…
This is the best song I have heard all year. (Thanks to i'm a chordata! for the shout out.) I might even go so far as to say it's the best song I will hear all year. What could possibly be more awesome than this beautiful, bluesy explanation of why animals in the ocean undertake vertical migrations?
It is okay for me to post this here, because squid are vertical migrators, too. They're just another step up the food chain from the phytoplankton and zooplankton Hannah is singing about.
A quick linguistic postscript (which I can assure you will not be nearly as entertaining as that song was): I…