Baby octopus!

Told you so.

Via Oceangal.

Denizens of the deep cont.

Not an octopus this time. This is the underwater giant woodlouse, or roly-poly or pillbug. It looks too big to roll or pill like the little ones. Generally I don't mind crustaceans - it's insects I don't like, but this is quite a disconcerting one. Luckily it lives at the bottom of very deep water, so our paths are unlikely to cross.



Apparently they eat dead whales and squid. (The ones in my garden eat my compost heap.) They're isopods (their legs are all similar), and they have a lung structure that means they can live on land (as long as they can keep themselves damp) or underwater. The underwater ones are called Bathynomus giganteus and there's a photo of an even bigger one here.

A relative is the disgusting Cymothoa exigua, an underwater louse that eats the tongue of fish, and then, in a sort of fair-dos exchange, lives in its mouth and performs the actions of the missing tongue (and grabbing the occasional tidbit). When I first saw this, it made me wonder about other possible organ-replacing parasites as a science fiction plot idea. If you could persuade something with good pumping power to replace a failing human heart in exchange for the free sugar and nutrients in the blood, for instance. What type of society would those parasites build? (Parasites are often solitary and sometimes hermaphrodite, not even needing others of the same species to reproduce. But that wouldn't be as good in a story as something that needed to find others of its kind to mate with.)

Picture here at Animal Planet.

Sinuous siphonophore

CreatureCast - Footage From The Deep from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

This is a video of a jellyfish - siphonophore - that is too fragile to be caught in nets, and can only be seen when swimming. Beautiful creature. Thanks to Oceangirl for finding for me.

Barry the Sea Worm

Workers found a giant sea worm at a Newquay aquarium in the UK. Something was slicing the coral in two and attacking the fish. They set traps, but the creature ate the traps. Eventually, they took the coral reef apart to find a four-foot long poisonous worm, which, of course, they called Barry. Barry now has his own aquarium. They didn't say what they feed him. Probably unruly children.

Picture from the Daily Mail

Story in the Daily Mail.

Giant Squid Cake

It's too cold, I've been diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency (apparently vast tracts of humanity are deficient - more on this later) and I have a terrible cold. Apart from that, everything's fine. At least I'm not trapped in an ice-world like one of my friends.

Another friend sent me this Boing Boing piece on a Giant Squid Cake. Two of my favorite things in one cakey package!

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (DVD)

As a bit of a change from yesterday's film Cold Mountain, a masterclass in wrenching a screenplay out of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, I'm watching "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (1961) featuring Barbara Eden and Peter Lorre amongst others, walking around a giant, spacious nuclear submarine with massive forward viewing windows. This is the famous planarian-shaped Seaview.

The plot is simple and nobody in the crew is called Walker or Hiro or Turner or Inman or any other Deep Names. The Van Allen belts are on fire, and the world has heated up so much that everyone not on a submarine is dead. Admiral Thingy has to go to the marianas trench to fire a missile to douse the Van Allen belts. All kinds of obstacles present themselves, such as minefields in the middle of nowhere (as if someone knew during WWII to tether mines in case a big nuclear submarine wanted to get through in a hurry 15 years later).

We had a bet which Denizen of the Deep the divers laying phone lines would face. I uncharacteristically let STB lay claim to the giant inert rubber squid trying to Swallow Our Seamen and claimed for myself the old "getting your flipper caught in a giant clam horror". STB, of course, was right.

A giant octopus turned up later - go cephalopods! - but nothing daunted the Seaview and the world (slightly scorched and presumably barren, so I hope Barbara Eden's up to having a lot of babies) is saved once again.

This is an Irwin Allen production, of course. The set was so expensive The Master of Disaster kept it and persuaded ABC to make VTTBOTS into a series. I remember watching it as a kid and one of my very early science fictional efforts was based on the TV series. I think I was seven. I should look it out.

The Life Aquatic

Oceangal forwarded this video on the jellyfish of Palau.



These jellyfish live in saltwater in the center of the island, trapped away from the sea. In their new little homes (there's more than one lake) they seem to have thriven. The jellies are farmers, or perhaps farms, depending on your level of anthropomorphism. They keep algae inside their bodies and live off the by-products of the plants' photosynthesis. In return, they ferry the algae from sunny area to sunny area during the day, and at night take them down to the low-oxygen level of the lake where some of the weirder bacteria live. They pick up nutrients from them for their plants and then go back up to catch rays the next morning. The jellies also catch the occasional copepod and eat it.

Although jellyfish look as though they're going somewhere, they aren't really swimming like a frog or an otter; their bell contracts and relaxes in the same way a heart does, with as much conscious thought as a heart puts into its beat.

Apparently these can barely sting, so snorkelling around in a cloud of them is a nice experience.

Undersea Boris Johnson found

Possibly the cutest sea monster ever, the avocado-sized piglet squid.

Found at Zooillogix by the indefatiguable Oceangal. Picture courtesy of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.


The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was overjoyed to learn of the existence of his watery cousin: