Indie Squid Kid

While I was wrapped up with Plush Week, the rest of the ceph-blogging community was talking about Paul, the so-called psychic octopus that has been accurately “predicting” the outcome of Germany’s matches in the World Cup. Now, I have to admit that I have paid very little attention to the most popular sporting event in the world. This is not because of some snooty American prejudice against football, I just don’t really care for sports.

Anyway, I have two thoughts on the matter:

1. I’m a skeptic, but if anything was going to have psychic powers, it would totally be an octopus.

2. Paul is a weird-ass name for a German octopus.

Today is the opening day of a new special exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Glow: Living Lights

Don’t miss the first-ever museum exhibition to explore the phenomenon of bioluminescence — an organism’s ability to produce its own light.

Visitors to Glow: Living Lights start their journey by investigating the chemical process that produces “cool” light. They then explore the world of light-producing terrestrial organisms like fireflies, glow worms and foxfire fungus before traveling on to the mid-ocean, where an estimated 90 percent of the animals produce light. Here visitors encounter alien-looking creatures like viper fish, which dangle a light lure to attract their next meal, and cookie cutter sharks, which earned their name from the cookie-size chunks of flesh they take out of unsuspecting prey in the dark. Visitors continue on to demonstrations of the interesting techniques and equipment used by scientists to study bioluminescence, and then explore the many benefits of this research — from helping to speed the study of cancer-fighting drugs to the detection of anthrax spores in public places.

The exhibit is open from 10 am–5 pm Monday–Saturday and noon–5 pm Sunday, with the last entry at 4 pm every day.

Tickets prices are: $7 Adults; $5 Seniors/Students; $4 Children (5–11); free to Members.

Although cephalopods aren’t specifically mentioned in the above description, they use an image of a biolumenescent squid on their site and their print ads for the exhibit, so I’m confident our glowy, tentacled friends will be included!

If you’ve never been to the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, I highly recommend it. Their permenent exhibits include a nearly complete mounted skelton of Cretaceous Theropod Acrocanthosaurus atokensis (aka, Acro, Terror of the South!), a specimen of the Cretaceous Ornithopod Thescelosaurus which was found with a fossilized heart (aka, Willo), and an impressive collection of mounted whale skeletons.

The museum is located at 11 West Jones St, Raleigh, NC. It’s open seven days a week and admisson is Free (except for special exhibits).

(via BoingBoing, via The Aquaman Shrine)

There’s nary a cephalopod to be seen on this remixed cover of Aquaman #45 (June, 1969), but when I saw this online yesterday, I figured it was high time to break my silence on the Gulf Oil Spill. Not that I have much to add to the public discourse on the worst environmental disaster in American history..the magnitude of this catastrophe (58 days and counting) is almost too much for words. Of course there are some…words like, mind-boggling, brain-numbing, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking…

What can one unemployed nerd thousands of miles away do but watch in horror day after day as the environment and wildlife of the Gulf Coast (not to mention the livelihoods of everyone who depends on that environment for their very subsistence) slowly get consumed by a relentless, creeping tide of oil. All the while, the leaking riser 5,000 feet down continues to spew out clouds of black death with no end in sight. As Andrew at Southern Fried Science said, “American marine conservation will be divided into ‘before the spill’ and ‘after the spill’ for the next century.”

For the insight and analysis of real marine scientists, you should to go to Deep-Sea News. Dr. M and crew deliver the most comprehensive and thoughtful coverage of the spill you’re likely to find anywhere online. Southern Fried Science also has a page dedicated (and continuously updated) to reliable sources of information pertaining to the crisis.

I’m on the wrong coast to be able to attend, but if anyone is going to be in the Seattle area this weekend and needs something fun to do, you might want to check this out!

Start: Jun 13 2010 – 1:00pm
End: Jun 13 2010 – 3:00pm

Event Description: Artists, scientists, and enthusiasts of all ages come together to celebrate the intelligence and wonder of the cephalopods: octopus, cuttlefish, chambered nautilus, and squid. We’ll share some of our favorite scientific facts, enjoy cephalopod-inspired music, poetry, art, film, fashion, and more - then sit back to watch a cephalopod nature documentary to see these amazing creatures in action. All ages, $5 suggested donation, free stickers!

For more information, contact songsforsquid@gmail.com

Location:
Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave (between Pike & Pine on Capitol Hill)
Seattle, WA

(Via Artist Trust)

Bringing things back to our own temporal stomping grounds, the Holocene (aka, Now), here are two news stories that serve as nice addenda to a couple of recent posts.

First, we have some new research about the metabolism of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, Sensational Squid #2;

National Geographic: “Colossal Squid a Soft, Sluggish Drifter”

Summary: A study published in the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom finds that M. hamiltoni is not a ferocious hunter as often imagined, but rather a slow, passive ambush predator. The researchers measured the metabolic rates of smaller cold water squid species and scaled up the results to account for the size of the Colossal Squid. Their analysis indicates that the Colossal Squid has a very low metabolic rate, low energy requirements, and moves very slowly. The study team estimates that a single 11 pound fish can sustain a 1,100 pound squid for 200 days.

The next story is directly related to last week’s Argonaut video;

Wired Science: “Argonaut Octopus Mystery Solved”

Summary: In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, biologists Julian Finn and Mark Norman (both of Museum Victoria, Melbourne, Australia) have found that female Argonauts use air bubbles trapped in their shell-like egg cases to control their buoyancy. When wild Argonauts lost the air bubble, they were observed quickly swimming to the surface to take in more air. They positioned their bodies within their cases to create an air-tight seal and then descended to a depth where the water pressure compressed the trapped air enough to achieve neutral buoyancy.

Today it was announced in the journal Nature that the mystery of Nectocaris pteryx, a problematic fossil species from the famous Burgess Shale deposits, has finally been solved. This tiny Invertebrate that lived in the Cambrian oceans 500 million years ago is, in fact, the oldest known cephalopod.

[UPDATE: The image I originally used in this post seems to have been removed from Wikipedia Commons. Follow this link to see before and after reconstructions.]

The original Nectocaris specimen was discovered 100 years ago, but it wasn’t formally described until 1976. However, the phylogenetic identity of the two inch long creature remained uncertain. It seemed to have similarities to both arthropods and chordates, but didn’t clearly fit into any known group. In this new report, researchers Martin Smith and Jean-Bernard Caron examined 91 additional specimens and came to the conclusion that N. pteryx is a mollusk, specifically a primitive, non-mineralized (i.e. shell-less) cephalopod. This revelation pushes the origins of cephalopods back at least 30 million years.

As we can see from the above reconstruction, Nectocaris resembled a modern cuttlefish. It had a flat “kite-shaped” body with large lateral fins, but only a single pair of long, grasping tentacles. It had a pair of non-faceted eyes on short stalks and a large anterior funnel, suggesting that cephalopod jet-propulsion evolved very early on. The lack of a shell disproves a long held assumption that shell-lessness is a relatively recent adaptation. It now seems that cephalopods didn’t evolve shells until much later, most likely “in response to increased levels of competition and predation in the Late Cambrian.”

Nature 465: 469-472 “Primitive soft-bodied cephalopds from the Cambrian”

The newest resident of the National Zoo in Washington D.C. is a juvenile Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). Event though the charismatic cephalopod arrived at the zoo in February of this year, he (or she?) still needs a name. And you can help!

Polls are currently open until noon on Wednesday, April 7 to vote on one of four names: Vancouver, Olympus, Ceph, Octavius.

Personally, I can’t decide between “Ceph” and “Octavius” (too bad Mister Splashy Pants is already taken), but I will definitely put in my vote before the deadline.

Vote Now!

The winning name will be announced via the the octopus cam at 2 p.m. and on Facebook, and Twitter shortly thereafter.

UPDATE: The people have spoken, and the octopus’ name is “Octavius.”

photo by Natalie Metzger

We interrupt Halloween Week to bring you this exciting news bulletin:

Sperm Whales have finally been photographed feeding on Giant Squids!

It has long been known that the Giant Squid was on the menu of Physeter macrocephalus, the Sperm Whale, but the legendary encounter has never been captured on film. Before the first specimens of Architeuthis were described by science, whalers would find their remains among the stomach contents of harvested Sperm Whales, and those whales would sometimes bear enormous sucker scars. There were even reports from sailors who claim to have witnessed the two leviathans locked in mortal combat, and the image of squid vs. whale has become iconic.

Underwater photographer Tony Wu photographed a pod of six whales—five adults and a calf—in the waters off Japan’s Ogasawara Islands (the same area where scientists filmed a living Giant Squid for the first time back in 2005). Dr Mark Norman speculates that the adults were in the process of teaching the young whale how to dive and hunt for food. Recovered nearby was one of the squid’s 3.5 meter long tentacles.

See these amazing photos at The Daily Mail Online.

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival promotes the works of H.P. Lovecraft, literary horror, and weird tales through the cinematic adaptations by professional and amateur filmmakers. The festival was founded in 1995 by Andrew Migliore in the hope that H.P. Lovecraft would be rightly recognized as a master of gothic horror and his work more faithfully adapted to film and television.

If you live anywhere near Portland, OR (Natalie, I’m looking in your direction) and are a fan of things that go Bloop in the night, this is the event for you!

www.HPLFilmFestival.com

October 8th, 2009 marks the 3rd annual International Cephalopod Awareness Day. Of course, every day is cephalopod awareness day here at Indie Squid Kid, but I can’t pass up an opportunity to help in my own small way to make everyone even more aware of the coolest animals in the planet. This year, ICAD is a three day event:

Thursday, Oct 8 is Octopus Day

Friday, Oct 9 is Nautilus Night

Saturday, Oct 10 is Squid Day

So what does this mean exactly? The editors at CephalopodCast.com invite anyone in the blogosphere to participate in the three day celebration. Bloggers, artists, poets and musicians are encouraged to create one or more works to mark the occasion and submit them for aggregation on a special Cephalopod Awareness Days commemorative page. Topics can be scientific, cultural or fictional. As long as they somehow include cephalopod awareness, they will be considered. If you don’t have a blog, but still want to contribute, contact the editors for ways your creation can be hosted on the site.

Additionally, free promotional space is available to artists that contribute to the ICAD campaign. Any artist that creates a Cephalopod Awareness Day badge can have it featured prominently on the site, along with a link to their Web site, Etsy shop or portal. See example above. Badges should not be more than 200×200 pixels in jpg or png format. Badges submitted after October 8 will be irrelevant. See the guidelines on the Cephalopod Awareness Days official commemorative page for more details.

For my part, I plan to use these three days to focus on the biology and natural history of the different cephalopod groups. I’ve been wanting to ratchet up the science around here, and can’t think of a better excuse than International Cephalopod Awareness Day!