Despite the name, however, Vampire Squids are not really squids. They are more closely evolutionarily allied with octopods, but they aren’t really octopods either. Vampire Squids are evolutionary all alone residing in thier own long branch of the tree of life.

If we look at this phylogeny from Lindgreen and coauthors from 2012 based on multiple genes.

And zoom in at the upper part of the tree

Let’s zoom in a little more

You can clearly see that Vampyroteuthis infernalis resides on alone on its own evolutionary branch. It shares its last common ancestor with the octopods but this a distant relative at best. Many think the Vampire Squid may be”phylogenetic relict” the last surviving member of order cephalopods long ago extinct.

One truly is the loneliest number. While you reflect on this evolutionary and ecological isolation of the Vampire Squid enjoy these videos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

The post The Lonely Existence of Vampire Squids first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, three quarters of a mile deep, lies the peak of an underwater mountain.  Rising 1.4 miles off the abyssal plains, Davidson Seamount, nearly 26 miles long and 8 miles wide, is one of the largest known seamounts in U.S. waters. Davidson contains an abundance of life including massive groves of large bubblegum corals and reefs of glass sponges.  Life is so abundant at the seamount, we proposed nearly a decade ago that Davidson Seamount with its dense aggregations of invertebrates may serve as source of many species to nearby canyons and rocky outcrops off the California coast.  Davidson may be a perfect habitat for many species allowing their populations to explode.  This Davidson Seamount cradle then may serve as source of migrating individuals into other less perfect habitats nearby.  This idea of Davidson as a biodiversity source was instrumental in getting Davidson added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) in 2009.

A recent expedition by NOAA, MBNMS, and Nautilus, returned to Davidson Seamount.  And is typical of Davidson delivered with a spectacular display of life.   Over 1,000 individuals of the small sized octopus Muusoctopus robustus were caught on video hugging the rocks in a brooding position.  It is unclear why these octopuses are using the seamount as a nursery.  Higher currents around seamounts may bring more oxygenated waters.  The dense aggregations of other animals may provide abundant prey.  The crevasse, cracks, and rocky rubble of this old volcano may provide shelter from predators.

The post An Octopus Nursery Discovered on a Deep Underwater Mountain first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Superheroes?  Who gives a heck.  I was too busy reading marine biology text books than to waste my time with the imaginary – and usually blatantly contradictory – special powers of comic book superheroes.  In the real world, becoming invisible is an easy task for an octopus:
Maybe you are caught unaware.  No problem, just blend into whatever looks good, like a strand of red algae:
Maybe your cloak of invisibility is not enough to hide from a predator, what to do?  Get really angry, very large, and look tough enough to scare them off. Bluffing is 9/10 of survival (something I learned in that Turkish prison):
Becoming invisible (or looking really pissed off) requires three simple things: (1) you will need an excellent sense of vision to relay your local environment to your brain to modify your (2) layers of stacked pigment cells called melanocytes to expand or contract, varying the color & shading of your body to re-create the color of your surroundings, and (3) relaying the physical aspect of your environment to tiny muscle fibers that instantly change to texture of your skin to mimic your substrate. Boom, gone (but still in plain sight).
 One layer of specialized cells, iridiophores, glam up the octopus with iridescent blues & greens.  These aren’t pigments, but cells that contain specialized components which take in ambient light and refract only the blue spectrum.  What lame-ass superhero can even bend light like that?  None. Moreover, this little Blue-Ringed Octopus has some nasty venom, so the pulsing blue rings warn a potential predators, but may also be irresistable to little kids poking around in tide pools.  Oops.

Having the superpower to flash colors & textures and immediately change shape aren’t just for fighting super-villains, but in this fast-paced world of evolution, cephalopods have come up with some excellent ways of just staying alive by a quick color change and expansion of muscles. Our friend the Mimic Octopus uses what’s called a ‘startle behavior’ in an attempt to scare off a potential predator (in this case, the underwater cinematographer):
The Mimic Octopus brings up its game by using the ability to quickly change into other sea animals. Here it looks like the feathery striped fronds of the vemomous Lionfish’s fins, and the black & white banding pattern of a highly-venomous sea snake, the Banded Sea Krait:

Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish all share highly muscularized tentacles, basically specially modified divisions of their boneless foot.  Octopus have suckers with an impressive ability to grip, and an amazing level of fine dexterity to solve problems like this:
Squid tentacles may have a combination of suckers alone, or suckers with piercing hooks or sharp saw-toothed edges to grip and maim their prey, as seen in these Humboldt squid: Octopus move with jets of water squirted through their siphon, and the intensity and direction of the blasts accelerates and steers the animal as smoothly as a hoverboard.
Squid aren’t that different from a personal spacecraft in those sci-fi comics, and these have a certain similarity to George Jetson‘s space car (but without George). With their siphon blasting jets of water and the fins along the side of the head undulating in waves that steer them, they can hover in place and instantaneously dart in any direction, and use their tentacles for streamlining, signaling, or attacking:
Now take this these concepts of color change, tentacles, and a personal hover-suit, and turn your little cephalopod body into some crazy disco predator. Using a neural network that coordinates the melanocytes and iridiophores into pulsating waves of light visually confuse – or possible mesmerize – prey enough to give you a split second to shoot your incredibly elastic predatory tentacles right in their face and pull them into your sharp killer beak. This is why the marine world is better than any comic book.
Ok, so maybe you want to be seen.  You’re a hot, sexy, ripe squid with gametes a-plenty and it’s the season for love.  But in the deep, dark ocean it’s hard to find the right mate. No problem, some squid have specialized bioluminescent cells in your skin where a tiny internal chemical reaction emits light energy in little glowing spots.  Your species may have a special pattern that identifies the right mates for you.  Not interested in love?  Those same light spots may attract prey that you can feast on until the moment is right for that special copulatory embrace:

So it’s been a while since the squid love-fest, and now your life is taken up with caring for the kids.  Sure, most squid just mate then dump a fertilized egg capsule on the ocean bottom and let those li’l squidlets hatch on their own, but not with Gontaus.  She may not be the world’s best mom, but unlike other squid, she carries her egg mass around to protect her little brood until the time they hatch.  When they do, she pulsates the eggs gently kicking them out into the big dark world below, like shaking sand off a beach blanket.  Once they are out, they are on their own and she has nothing more to do with them: Again, not the greatest mom, but better than most:

Next up, cephalopods have the highest cute factor of any invertebrate, more than flatworms, more than gastropods, and even more than those fancy-pants Peacock Spiders. I enter into evidence this contest between two little squid tucking themselves in for the night.  Looking like they were designed by a Japanese toymaker, the Pyjama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) and the Tropical Bobtail Squid (Sepiadarium kochi) will burow into your hearts:
Don’t need any fancy bed because the sea floor is soft enough? Well then dig right in with a few blasts of water.  No turn-down service required:

Most of all cephalopods just want to be left alone.  When color changing, jetting away, burrowing into the sand, or impersonating more dangerous sea creature doesn’t work, there’s always just losing your shit and kicking ass:

The post Cephalopods: Masters of W.T.F? – Enough GIFs to Kill a Kraken first appeared on Deep Sea News.

1) Cockles got feet, and they know how to use ’em. This isn’t a tongue, or some other fleshy pink appendage, but rather a foot, and a long, distensible, and flexible one at that. When in the sand, this foot extends deep into the sediment, and as it contracts, it pulls the shell down into the sand beyond the eyes of its predators. When you dine on cockles, this is what you eat.

2) Trippy aquatic castanets? Ghost shell from a Japanese horror movie? Nope, this is a scallop doing what scallops do for much of their life – trying to get the heck away from a predator. Unlike cockles that hide beneath the sand, the muscular adductor that snaps the shell shut creates a jet of water that moves them in short, jerky blasts through the water. While their escape plan isn’t all that great, it may just be good enough to get out of the path of slow-moving starfish, their most feared predators.

3) You can almost hear the thumping oonce oonce oonce rave beats where the disco clam lives. It’s not really a clam at all, but a very flamboyant bivalve called the Electric Flame Scallop. Their light show pulsates within the fleshy mantle, making small mesmerizing blasts of light. Unlike most respectable sea creatures, they don’t generate bioluminescence, instead they reflect ambient light through a thin layer of silica microspherules embedded in their flesh, making the light appear as electrical currents in that outer layer of skin. The hot-pink feather boa of tentacles may give them additional glam-rock cred, but they also contain distasteful sulfur compounds, so the blinking lights may give potential predators a fair warning for the subsequent mouthful of regret.

4) Octopus are (literally) cold-blooded killers, and they’ve got a whole toolkit of ways to subdue different kinds of prey. With clams, they grasp the shell with their tentacles, and using a sharp tooth-studded tongue, drill a small hole through the shell and inject a paralytic venom. The drugged clam relaxes its grip and they octopus can easily pry the shell open. With the former tenant now lunch and just a fading memory, the octopus takes over the clam’s home and uses the thick shell for protection from its own predators, keeping one eye open for danger.

5) Squee Alert! Bears and clams rarely meet, but when they do the results can be sickeningly adorable. Grizzly bears along the Pacific Coast often forage for marine invertebrates at low tide, and have even been seen pawing through the sand for clams. This young grizzly is learning the art of clam digging, yet hasn’t perfected the technique, and now has a huge cockle clamped to one of its claws. You’re Welcome!

The post Five Mind-Blowing Bivalve GIFs That Will Blow Your Mind – Your Blown Mind Won’t Believe #6! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I now know what all the Deeplings are getting for Christmas….

This might be the best thing I have ever seen on Etsy.

The post The Hat You Didn’t Even Know You Needed. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Extra Crispy

Behold, the Crusty Nautilis (Allonautilus scrobiculatus), a name so great it could become your next secret agent moniker or CB handle. The tempura-like coating on its shell is a thick periostracum, the outer layer that protects the inner shell, that can get even more crusty with the addition of small marine organisms that sometimes grow on the periostracum. All modern-day nautiluses are related to another group of shelled cephalopods called the Ammonites, once an abundant, widespread, and morphologically & ecologically diverse group that numbered in the thousands of species but suddenly became extinct about 65 million years ago. But the Crusty Nautilus is a survivor, and is the most ancestral or “primitive” of the living nautiloids, having evolved more than 100 million years ago and squeaking through the mass extinction that wiped-out their Ammonite cousins.

Crusty Nautiluses live in deep-waters off eastern Indonesia, New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. Their shells, empty ones washed ashore after the decomposition of their dead owners, were known to early scientists since the 1700’s, but is wasn’t until 1984 that whole living Crusty Nautiluses were captured, allowing scientists to study their soft anatomy and leading to the understanding of their deep antiquity on the cephalopod family tree.

In Nautilus, you live inside shell, in Spirula, shell live inside YOU! [pronounced with your best Yakov Smirnoff impersonation]

While driving on New Zealand’s 90-Mile Beach I came across a drift of hundreds of these tiny curled shells, not more than a couple of centimeters wide, piled between two sand dunes. They are the inner shell of a squid so distinct that they constitute a single species in a single genus in a single family, in an entirely unique order of cephalopod, the Spirulidae. The Ram’s Horn Squid (Spirula spirula) is a small deep-sea predator with an internal shell divided into gas-filled chambers that act as an internal floatation device as they rise and fall each evening in the Deep Scattering Layer far offshore. Eaten by seabirds, dolphins, porpoises, fur seals, and fishes, the undigestible shell is defecated or regurgitated and rises to the surface of the water, floating atop the ocean until they wash ashore on a beach.

The function of the shell in the body of this 4 centimeter-long squid is a not a mystery – the shell float holds the squid upright in the water – but the large bioluminescent organ atop its head is quite a puzzle. Unlike light-emitting organs in other deep-sea squid, it doesn’t seem to attract prey (as it points light away from the mouth), it doesn’t illuminate the feeding tentacles, and it doesn’t seem to provide the invisible cloak of countershading that balances the downwelling light above with the darkness below. Few live Spirula have been caught and studied in captivity, and there are virtually no studies of them in the wild. There are still mysteries in the sea, and plenty of projects for future graduate students.

 

The Tentacle That Rocks the Cradle

The Brown Paper Nautilus (Argonauta hians) is actually a small sea-going octopus, and like all octopus (octopi, octopuses, octopods, octogenarians, whatever) it has neither an internal nor an external shell. Yet, the female produces this beautiful shell-like structure that is essentially a maritime baby buggy. Her care-free childless year ends after mating with a male that only breeds once before dying, then this merry widow secretes a thin, light, boat-like spiral shell that she fills with a cargo of her eggs. She hops in and pilots this stroller as it floats from the ocean’s surface to hundreds of feet down into the sea, adding and expelling air as a buoyancy mechanism, scooting backwards with jets of water from her siphon.

Mother Paper Nautilus wields a strange pair of tentacles that look like fleshy tennis rackets made by Salvador Dali. These organs secrete the minerals that increase the size of the shell, and she can actually expand these elastic organs to encompass the entire shell, and quickly withdraw them back into the shell of she senses danger. With mom taking up so much space in the crib, most of the young that hatch find the shell too crowded and leave to begin their pelagic larval existence, but a few may hang around for several days, and by then, the female sheds this vessel and begins another year as a free-swimming octopus. During this time she will feed on small invertebrates and baby fish, look for a new mate, and avoid the tuna, dolphins, albatross, and other ocean predators that feed on her kind. In the meantime, the discarded shell floats atop the ocean and may be cast ashore, like the one in the photo, and found by a lucky beachcomber.

Polly Wanna Kraken?

The age-old connection between cuttlefish and parrots may seem strange, but through a long convoluted history of humans, birds, and mollusks, it’s perfectly normal for parrots to chew the living heck out of the dead endoskeleton of a cuttlefish.Cuttlefish, not a fish at all but a family of cephalopods (Sepiidae) more closely related to squid than to anything else, contain what is functionally an internal life jacket. The cuttlebone is a hard oblong structure that spans the length of the body cavity of the cuttlefish, and made of a calcium carbonate structure microscopically infused with tiny air cells. This personal flotation device counter-balances the weight of their dense flesh and tentacles and makes them neutrally buoyant in the water. Lessened of the tethers of gravity, cuttlefish can do what they do best: levitate around seagrass beds or reefs like psychedelic, pulsating zeppelins, zapping small prey with lightning-fast elastic tentacles and living a complex social life with other cuttlefish worthy of a Mexican telenovella.

While that makes perfect sense, here’s where parrots come in. Humans have held parrots captive since Egyptian, and later, Grecian and Roman times, likely traded up along the Nile from eastern Africa or even from western Asia. Caged birds have needs that domesticity can’t deliver like their wild habitats and diets used to. But cuttlefish, an esteemed seafood by their human captors for centuries, brought cuttlebones for entirely different uses. The crunchy mineral nature of the cuttlebone acts like an abrasive emery board for parrots to file down their ever-growing beak. It also provides a much-needed calcium supplement for regrowth of new plumage and for formation of eggs in breeding females, and the satisfying feeling by a frustrated parrot driving its beak deep into the cuttlebone is the avian equivalent of us popping sheets of bubble-wrap. Cuttlebones are a multi-million dollar global industry, with cuttlebones shipped from the Mediterranean, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India to pet shops around the world for those jailed parrots that need that little hunk of a dead cuttlefish to keep them healthy.

The post Malacology Monthly: Cephalopod Compendium first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If we landlubbers want to make a turn, we nearly always need to turn our 2 clumsy feet in the direction we want to go by rotating our entire body (unless we are determined to an an awkward crab side-scuttle). Not so for the octopus. Using the beautiful radial symmetry of their 8 armed body, they can crawl along just as gracefully in any direction without having to turn their bodies. In other words, the direction their arms propel them in is completely independent of the orientation of their head and body. Check out the crawling action below, the blue arrow is the direction of motion while the green arrow is the orientation of the octopus body. KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE GROUND OCTOPUS.

Octopus crawling is actually pretty simple, they just shorten and lengthen their arms to move forward, getting grip with those awesome suckers. This is similar to the how some mollusks move, octopi just have way more arms to coordinate. And unlike most animals, their gait isn’t a well-coordinated affair with a distinct rhythm like human walking or horse trotting, it’s just kind of random. Although they do preferentially use their back 4 tentacles to move and have favorite tentacle pairs they use together. Grade school must be a nightmare when trying to figure out what tentacle to put that pencil in. #3 right-tentacled? Ambi-tentacled?

Even though we know that octopus locomotion is amazeballs, we still don’t completely understand how they coordinate all 8 of those arms  and don’t end up in tangly knot (Immediately upon posting this I got a schooling via text from fellow deepling Alex Warneke: Octopi uses chemical signals so they don’t get tied up in knots. Their suckers recognize the “scent” of their own skin and will not stick to it :)”). And while they can crawl independent of their body position, octopi often don’t. Instead they face at a 45 degree angle to their motion. Why? So their eye faces forward! Because an octopus walking into a wall would look pretty stupid.

SOURCE:

Guy Levy, Tamar Flash, Binyamin Hochner, Arm Coordination in Octopus Crawling Involves Unique Motor Control Strategies, Current Biology, Available online 16 April 2015, ISSN 0960-9822, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.064

The post Which way does an octopus crawl? Anyway it wants. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Inspired by the Coral Triangle and California’s Kelp forest, Okeanos was developed in collaboration with world-renowned marine biologists and oceanographers. This dance/cirque performance incorporates choreography, apparatus, and set design by Capacitor Artistic Director Jodi Lomask and the voices of Dr. Sylvia Earle and Dr. Tierney Thys. Okeanos includes video art by RJ Muna and Toshi Hoo, underwater cinematography by David Hannan, sound composition by EO, Kaya Project, Beats Antique, edIT, and Tipper, vocalizations by Anka Draugelates, violin by Julia Ogrydziak, and costumes by Kimie Sako & Becky Karthage. Okeanos is performed by Mayuko Hosoai, Elliott Gittelsohn, Naomi Hummel, NancyKate Seifkar, Maggie Powers, and Micah Walters.

The main highlight reel (with voiceover by Sylvia Earle!):

And of course, the Octopus dance:

You can find more information about Okeanos and more videos on the Capacitor dance troupe website.

The post TGIF: “Okeanos” – Marine Life & Modern Dance first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Take a look at the images below – it took me a good 10 minutes to figure out this is actually a 2D image printed on the side of a building. It looks so real in the pictures, that I was convinced that Bristol Aquarium has engineered huge 3D tentacles and a fake water tank to scare the hell out of people walking past… More pictures available at Justin’s website.

The post Giant Octopus Building Art! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Nearly every group of animals has a transparent brethren that lives in the well-lit open ocean.  In darker deeper water, a majority of denizens are red or black.  In both cases, this coloration or lack of serve to cloak the animal.  But what’s an animal to do if they are in between these zones, not a sharp boundary but a grey area full of scoundrels  or needs to migrate between the two.  A red or black creature in ligher shallower waters easily contrasts against the light coming from above.  A transparent animal, finding itself in the deep, would be easily distinguishable from the direct light cast from another organism’s bioluminescence.  If only like a Bird of Prey an organism could shift between cloaking and no cloaking.

Two such creatures the octopus Japetella heathi (right) and the squid Onychoteuthis banksii (left) can do exactly this.  When you shine a direct light on the normally transparent Japetella heathi or Onychoteuthis banksii, mimicking a bioluminescent beam, its chromatophores are triggered turning the animal opaque. But the octopus, like a crafty Klingon,  is strategic in triggering the chromatophore response.  Objects or shadows near the octopus did not trigger a response.  Yet tactile, i.e. poking it with a probe, a big stick, or whatever is nearby, or blue light did activate the cloaking device.

Both animals consistently reflected 2x as much light when in the transparent mode compared with the pigmented mode. Indeed in the cloaked state, the octopus was able to achieve the same reflectance of the red and black fishes and invertebrates of the deep.

These cephalopods seem to understand the ancient Klingon proverb tugh qoH nachDaj je chevlu’ta’ or A fool and his head are soon parted.  Best be no fool and cloak often***.

Sarah Zylinski, Sönke Johnsen (2011) Mesopelagic Cephalopods Switch between Transparency and Pigmentation to Optimize Camouflage in the Deep. Current Biology Vol. 21, Issue 22, pp. 1937-1941)

*I would also note that early Klingon Bird of Preys also had sweet submarine style periscopes

**I’m not referring to young emo vampires either although maybe cloaking is useful agains them as well

***not really related to this post but I feel compelled to say KKKKKKKHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!

The post Cloaking Klingon Cephalopods first appeared on Deep Sea News.