Star-Gazy Pie

CEPHALOPOD AWARENESS DAYS 2011

2012-01-12T22:17:00.000-05:00

It is my great pleasure to announce that we ~~recently~~ experienced the glory that was THE CEPHALOPOD AWARENESS DAYS!! (in October of last year oh no) They are as follows:

Possibly the most amazing illustration of Vampyroteuthis infernalis I have ever seen. Also, I think the common name should be "vampire hell squid", not "vampire squid from Hell". It's more mellifluous. Mellifluouser.

October 8 – Octopus Day

October 9 – Nautilus Night

October 10 – Squid Day/Cuttlefish Day

October 11 – Kraken Day, for the fictional cephalopods of myth, movies, literature and legend. I think you know where this is gonna go... ~~cyclopean horrors~~

October 12 – Fossil Day (to coincide with National Fossil Day), for all the cephalopods who have gone before.

In honor of these most joyful of days, it was my plan to post something appropriately themed daily. However, due to Blogger being profoundly unhelpful and my newish job apparently subsisting on time, this post is simultaneously:

a) comically late

b) briefer than I'd like

c) out of order

However, it is reportedly the thought that counts so I WILL POST YET.

October 10th, honors Squid and Cuttlefish. Why are they combined? I theorize it's due to a lack of days, but also because squid and cuttlefish both have ten appendages. Cuttlefish also have the honor of being my favorite cephalopod and my favorite creature since I was a semi-wee five year old. I spent the better part of 2nd grade (when I first learned of cuttlefish) drawing them on most pieces of paper I came in contact with.

Some of you have seen this image, but I thought now would be a good time to share. This is a vintage ornament that I produced in 2nd grade that graces my family's Christmas tree every year without fail:

For some reason in 2nd grade I typically drew cuttlefish with their arms tucked up under them. I have no idea why, I must've seen them depicted this way in a book or something. I find it strange that I drew this one with cartoon eyes, given I usually took care to draw them with their distinctive pupils in the 8,000 other drawings I produced from this time period.

This is not a small ornament. I am tempted to design some new ones, perhaps ornaments of questionable reverence featuring other cephalopods playing roles in winter holidays that preceded Christmas (Nautilus = Mithra? Y/N?). I'm sure someone on Etsy has beaten me to to it.

Photo by Hans Hillewaert

Nautilus Night made me think of creativity. First of all, I will present you with a musical number from the animation series Revolutionary Girl Utena. The song is entitled "肉体の中の古生代", which can be translated as "Paleozoic Within the Flesh". If you are interested, a translation is available here. However, I present this because I think of it as "the ammonite song".

The song features all sorts of interesting Japanese vocabulary about old things (stromalites? YES PLEASE) but ammonites ARE THERE and get hollered about at the end. So uh, enjoy a Japanese battle rock opera and duels fought by junior high students on upside down floating castles? This is basically Utena's level of normal, by the way. Sadly the show features more cows than cephalopods.

A quick search on Google or Etsy reveals that squid hats are not an unknown quantity by any stretch of the imagination. In honor of Nautilus Night (yesterday), I propose A NAUTILUS HAT.

Think about it: the hat is stripy like a chambered nautilus' shell and the dangly bits can be arms! GENIUS! Someone who is good at fabric crafts could even figure out some way to integrate the hood (the leathery bit that sits on top of their arms and the shell). WHO SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGE?

You can see the siphon on lefty here.

Photo © Ingrid Taylar

As for Kraken Day, I will suggest literature for you:

Kraken, by China Miéville I have talked about this book before here, but I love Miéville and it so much that it belongs here.

Everyone's gonna bring up Lovecraft (given he is kind of the patron saint of Kraken/Unmentional Horror-lit), but I'd like to bring up this:

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird It's anthology and features Neil Gaiman, Miéville again, as well as others. I have not yet read this book, but it is currently en route to my home as a gift. Of course there are the original stories by Lovecraft featuring Cthulhu ("The Call of Cthulhu" & "The Whisperer in Darkness") if you're not familiar with it yet somehow.

Cthulhurotica Yes, there is an anthology of erotica that involves the Cthulhu Mythos. No, I have not read it, but I would be negligent if I didn't make my readers aware of its existence. Cthulhurotica 2 is currently in production, for the record.

Boston!

2011-09-13T11:42:00.000-04:00

Your tireless/negligent writer has been quite busy and as it pleased to announce that in zir endless quest for employment, employment has been acquired (huzzah!) and I've relocated from Houston, Texas, to the Boston, Massachusetts area as part of the deal.

I've traded being about an hour from the Gulf of Mexico to having rocky New England beaches within five minutes' walk; the sandy ones are slightly further. I need to a camera that is not attached to a phone to document my adventures and interactions with local tide pool denizens and waterfowl.

So far I have only met cod inside tanks awaiting their doom.

For those of you who are familiar with this area of the U.S., feel free to provide recommendations for food, drink, cultural events, etc, to a Southerner who's in stage 1 of culture shock. I wish I could just wander around here and look at stuff full-time.

In the meantime, here's STUFF:

YOU SHOULD READ THIS!

maintainer of the glorious Trilobites.info

Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, by Richard Fortey

You will never see another person as excited or enamored by trilobites as Dr. Fortey. This book made me so happy because you could practically hear him flailing with trilohappiness through every page, including inspired poetic descriptions of them. There are few things more wonderful than to listen to an expert who truly loves their subject talk about it; you will know it when you encounter it, it is unmistakable.

I recently finished reading Fortey's Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and every time he mentions trilobites a bit of that unbridled love shines through. This man's work is a joy to read and he makes me laugh while educating me about stuff ("stuff" is my favorite noun right now).

I love Cambrian sea images and dioramas so, so much.

Along similar lines, go read Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the History of Life, which Fortey often refers to. I'm aware of the controversy and issues surrounding Gould and punctuated equilibrium, but that's not what I read the book for, nor is it an issue I'm qualified or interested in arguing about: I'm there for Burgess Shale beasties and the drama of their discovery!

Do you want to read about my power animal Anomalocaris? Of course you do! It's a bit dated (1990), but the history of the discovery of the Burgess Shale organisms and the publishing of monographs on them still stands true. I found this book wildly compelling and it was one of the best I read last year.

COMING SOON!

KUBODERA & MORI! KUBODERA & MORI!

TONMOCON IV - October 7-9th, 2011, Washington D.C., USA. Admission is $15. Regular readers and fellow ocean dorks will know that TONMO refers to The Octopus News Magazine Online, one of the Internet's premier resources and gatherings of cephalopod enthusiasts. This convention is right up my alley and I sorely wish I could attend to hang out with/terrify fellow cephnerds. Alas, cruel geography prevents me. I encourage all to attend and spread the signal to interested parties.

Speaking of Kubodera & Mori (the zoologists responsible for that image of a living giant squid up there), I strongly recommend all cephalopod dorks who haven't read China Miéville's Kraken do so in short order. You do not have to be a cephalopod dork to like it, but it really does help. It is fiction but sometimes you have to read fiction or your brain will melt under the sheer weight of science.

BATOIDS: Curiously Strong Fish

2011-04-12T01:12:00.002-04:00

An undulate ray (Raja undulata)

©Alain-Pierre Sittler

Données d'Observations pour la Reconnaissance et l’Identification de la faune et de la flore Subaquatiques

1) What's a batoid? For that matter, what's an elasmobranch?

A batoid is a ray (e.g. manta ray) or a skate. Batoids are members of superorder Batoidea, which is under subclass Elasmobranchii. Elasmobranchii in turn is one of two subclasses under class Chondrichthyes, which contains cartilaginous fish, as opposed to bony fish (for the record, most fish are bony). The other member of this class is Holocephali, the chimaera, aka the rabbitfish, ghost shark, ratfish, etc. While chimaera are awesome, even fewer people care about them/know they exist than batoids and they will definitely merit their own entry in the future.

A chimaera. Told you they were cute.
http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/palaeofiles/fossilgroups/chondrichthyes/modernforms/modernforms.html

Elasmobranchii contains the sharks and the batoids, thus making an elasmobranch any member of subclass Elasmobranchii. Yes, this will be on the test.

2) So...what exactly are skates and rays, then?

To be exceptionally crude about it, they're flat-bodied sharks. TIME FOR VISUAL AIDS!

Smooth skate

http://www.elasmodiver.com/SmoothSkate.htm

A cownose ray, my most beloved of batoids!

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

http://research.myfwc.com/gallery/image_details.asp?id=26194

As for the $1,000,000 question, "What's the difference between skates and rays?", let's break it down bulleted list style:

-Rays bear live young. Live birth by a manta in captivity (Japan in 2007) revealed that young manta rays come out rolled up like batoid burritos, with their wings folded. Unfortunately, this one appeared to fall victim to an abusive father after five days.

Hello little skatelet! An egg case full of skate.

http://people.whitman.edu/~yancey/

-Skates lay eggs. These eggs (egg cases, really) are awesome and are colloquially known as mermaid's purses. If you live near a coastline you may have been lucky enough to have found one on a beach. Some species of shark (such as dogfish) also produce this type of egg case. Here is a handy egg case ID chart for UK readers wondering what they've found on the beach.

-Rays have thin, whiplike tails; the tails of skates tend to be fleshier.

-Rays tend to be much larger than skates. You don't see stuff like manta rays or the stingrays that get hauled out of the Mekong River in the skate family.

Freshwater giant stingray, caught in Thailand in 2009.

-Skates don't have the infamous tail barbs that some species of ray use for defense. Instead, skates rely on thorns on the surface of their bodies. Check out the image of the "smooth" skate again. I can personally vouch that petting cownose rays is fun but I would not like to try it with a skate.

-Additionally, there are differences in dentition: rays do the "crushing" plate form of dentition, skates have horrid little teeth.

As is so often the case, the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research has written up a nicer, cleaner and infinitely more professional explanation than I just provided. I will also take this opportunity just to promote their site in general, given I end up on quite regularly: elasmo-research.org, my poppets!

3) Just skates and rays? So what's a sawfish?

...okay, I wasn't being completely honest with you. In addition to skates and rays, by far the most numerous members of the group, there are sawfish and guitarfish. There are further subdivisions of guitarfish into "guitarfish" and "wedgefish" but a) these terms don't seem to be used consistently and b) frankly I don't care to delve into it, given fish names are tricky business on a good day. Suffice to say that both guitarfish and wedgefish are funky batoids that look like permutations on the theme of "shark-ray".

Sawfish are probably the most well-known due to their fabulous rostrums, aka "saws":

PISCINE ALGEBRA: SAWFISH = SAW + FISH

SAWFISH FACTS TO BLOW YOUR MINDS:

The spikes on the rostrum are not teeth but denticles. Denticles are a type of modified tooth, which while close to teeth, are not teeth. Bear in mind that the famous skin of sharks and sawfish are also covered in dermal denticles. If a sawfish loses a denticle, it does not grow back. However, that doesn't make them not-pokey.
The rostrum houses electroreceptors which allow the sawfish to detect the movement and even heartbeats of buried prey.
In turn, rostrums (rostra?) are good tools for digging up said buried prey. Think of them as nature's electroreceptive denticle-lined shovels. In a pinch, the sawfish can use them for slashing, too!
Like many large elasmobranchs, sawfish are endangered. Wait, it's cool, lives in the ocean and is endangered? THERE'S A SHOCKER

Unfortunately, like so many creatures with interesting organs, humans have been hacking them off and selling them as elixirs, charms, markers of prestige, curios, medicine, etc. forever. In my quest for information on sawfish, I found an image of a sawfish that had had its rostrum cut off, been released and the wound had healed, effectively leaving the sawfish to live without one of its sensory organs. I'm pretty sure you can fill in the blanks on the implications of that. Their large oil-filled livers, bile, fins and skin that are of commercial interest. Wonderful.

It goes without saying that this is cruel and somewhat akin to shark finning, another practice that fills me with joy and mirth. Clearly I needed more evidence today to strengthen my general tendency towards misanthropy.

Child with a pile o' sawfish rostrums in Key West. Not sure where the rest of the sawfish are.

http://www.boldwater.com/article_sawfish_ebay.shtml

Guitarfish are more famous than they probably have any right to be, thanks to the program Ace of Cakes. Specifically, the crew was asked to make a cake for the third birthday of Sweet Pea, a shark ray (aka bowmouth guitarfish aka mud skate [?!]) who resides at the Newport Aquarium in Kentucky, in the shape of Sweet Pea herself. Here is the original:

That's a lie, this is Scooter, Sweet Pea's "roommate". Yeah, I know what you're up to buddy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16951419/ns/technology_and_science-science/

...and here's Sweet Pea's birthday cake!

http://www.charmcitycakes.com

For the curious, I believe the specific Ace of Cakes episode featuring Sweet Pea is called "Swimming With the Sharks". I vaguely remember it because I was squealing like a 4-year-old because BATOIDS ON THE TV!!!!

Cakes aside, I'm uh, not sure how much I can say about shark rays given there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information out there about them. I have learned that like everything else in the universe they get stuck in nets and make fisherfolk mad, they're pretty much impossible to mistake for any other creature and the "bowmouthed" part of their name is derived from the silhouette of their head resembling a longbow.

As for "shark ray", well, they kind of look like someone smashed and shark and ray together and they're the result. No idea about "mud skate" though, that's a stupid name for them and really non-descriptive given their unique appearance.

How about non-bowmouth guitarfish?

Guitarfish that lack the "bowmouth" adjective look similar to their bowmouthed relatives, but with pointier heads and a greater diversity of body shapes:

It is much harder to find good pictures of not dead/mutilated

guitarfish online than you'd think. BE NICE TO GUITARFISH

Speaking of guitarfish, the Tennessee Aquarium Blog has a couple of nice entries with lovely images showing Gibson, a giant guitarfish who lived at the aquarium for a bit when floods hit Nashville (where Gibson typically resides) in May of 2010. Entries how one goes about moving a giant guitarfish and what one feeds such creatures follow. There's even an online story for children about a guitarfish named Gilbert, although it's a slightly less biologically accurate representation (in all fairness, the author acknowledges this). You should probably read it, you'll thank me later.

However, the real awesomeness of guitarfish is what they look like underneath:

Atlantic guitarfish: dorsal and ventral views of head
© George Burgess

While it's tempting to call the lower image the guitarfish's "face", that's incorrect; its eyes are on the top (dorsal) side of its body while the holes located behind the eyes are the spiracles.

WHAT'S A SPIRACLE? I'm glad you asked that question! Aside from the simple answer ("Them holes in ray heads!"), lets have an illustration from our friend Lord Blue-Spotted Ray:

Bluespotted ribbontail ray (Taeniura lymma)

near Leyte, Philippines

Photo by Nicolai Johannesen

To be simple about it, spiracles are holes on the surfaces of some animals that are used for respiration. They're probably most well-known in an oceanic context from the example of batoids, but they have ample representation on land as well. For example, many caterpillars, some types of spiders, scorpions, and others. LET'S HAVE A VISUAL AID

See those holes sportily dotting the side of our very hungry caterpillar? Those are their spiracles, which they can open and close at will. Spiracles do occur in other animals, but for purposes of our discussion we'll focus on their presence in elasmobranchs (if you care you can look it up). Yes, elasmobranchs, not just batoids: sharks (though not all sharks, mind you) have spiracles too.

Grey carpet shark; the spiracle is located below the eye.

But anyway, back to the point at hand, which was ray "faces". So what're all the holes on the under (ventral) sides of their weird heads? The mouth is pretty self-evident, it's where they stick their food. What ISN'T self-evident is their dentition, which is one of the big differences between skates and rays. Rays certainly have teeth (a wide variety, in fact), but they're fused together into "crushing plates". This can be somewhat difficult to mentally visualize so here's an example of a spotted eagle ray jaw:

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/gallery/descript/seray/seray.html

This particular set of jaws is used for crushing shelled mollusks into lunch. As I said before though, there's diversity of ray teeth so here's an illustration of dentition from perhaps the most familiar and unfairly maligned of batoids, the stingray. This example has the benefit of showing how the jaw actually fits into the fish's head, too! EXCITEMENT FOR ALL

Dentition of yellow stingray, A. Opened mouth of female, B. Front upper teeth (above line) and rear upper teeth (below line) of female, C. Side view of upper tooth of female, D. Upper teeth of mature male, E. Side view of one tooth of same

(Fishes of the Western North Atlantic, 1948)

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Gallery/Descript/yellowstingray/yellowstingray.html

As is so often the case though, we have an exception to the rule of ray teeth: the Shamu of the batoid world, the manta ray. Yes, I know I've managed to go this entire entry without even mentioning their awesome remora-crusted forms, except when they're beating their tortillaform offspring to death in captivity in displays of paternal care. Mantas are filter feeders, preferring zooplankton to whelks, but they actually possess vestigial peg-shaped teeth on their lower jaw. Poky vestigial teeth that look like this:

Manta ray teeth!

Photographer: Mark McGrouther

These teeth are not used for eating, but unsurprisingly, for mating. Mantas get frisky, which is concerning when both members of congress can weigh up to 5,000 lb/2,268 kg. Regardless, there is your manta ray dentition. So what about skates? Unlike rays, skates have their nice and pointy teeth arrayed prettily on their funky jaws in non-crushing plate fashion:

http://courses.washington.edu/chordate/453photos/teeth_photos/specialized_teeth.htm

The big question is, will skates bite you with their pointy little teeth? I searched the Internet in vain because the word "skate" is an unfortunate homograph in English. Additionally, there's apparently some phenomenon related to hockey called "skate bite" that definitely does not involve batoid skates (although there is one that involves octopus).

...I was still talking about guitarfish faces, wasn't I? I suppose the important part isn't so much knowing what every part of a batoid "face" is (though I encourage it!), but the fact of the matter is that picking up on resemblance of the ventral side of batoids (particularly skates) to a vaguely human idea of a grimacing face is not new.

A few hucksters back in the day (back in the day = at least as far back as the 1500s) decided to capitalize on this and gave us the Jenny Haniver: a the body of a dried skate or ray (which preserved the "face") which was then cut and shaped to give to give it a vaguely anthropoid figure. Some were purported to be the corpses of mermaids, some of devils (the pectoral fins of batoids came in handy for infernal capes), alien creatures, etc.

Ms. Haniver in all her glory! This thing is incredibly cute (if you're into mutilated batoids).

http://www.zymoglyphic.org/acquisitions/haniver.html

Internet rumor purports that the celebrated bishop fish, one of my personal heroes and sources of inspiration in life, may have been a Jenny Haniver, but I find this difficult to swallow, given it would be very difficult for a Jenny Haniver to a) appeal to Catholic bishops and b) make the sign of the cross before swimming off into the Baltic Sea. We're going to ignore the fact that all of these things seem awfully impractical for any type of fish to do and just enjoy the illustration below:

Gesner, Conrad. (1587). Historiae animalium.

NOTE: If you haven't checked out the digital version of Conrad Gesner's Historiae Animalium you should probably run, not walk, there now. It was published in 1587 which pretty much guarantees that is amazing and an utter delight. This text has the distinction of featuring the angriest porcupines and beavers I have ever seen in my life.

Let's get back to confirmed living batoids. I should probably do obligatory sections on three subjects that I kept running across as I've done research for this post: stingrays, manta rays and electric rays.

Round 1: STINGRAYS

Stingrays have long had a reputation for being dangerous. This is probably because they have venom-coated barbs on their tails that they will stab you in the leg with if you stomp on them.

However, due to the tragic and unusual death of nature television show staple Steve Irwin at the tail of a stingray, reactions to them seem to have to turned to outright fear: while one should never give too much credence to YouTube comments or anything they read on Yahoo! Answers, I have seen far too many comments on batoid-centric videos that called every batoid a "stingray" and treated every "stingray" like it's a vicious predator out to get them. This is actually the same way many people tend to talk about sharks, which is also grossly inaccurate, misinformed and has led to negative repercussions for that much-put-upon fish.

FACTS:

When a stingray wounds a human, it is out of self-defense, not malice. I personally think that stabbing whatever creature that is exponentially larger and heavier than me and happens to be standing on my cartilaginous body is a perfectly valid reason for exercising a typically non-lethal defense mechanism. When you are playing at the beach, please remember that you are in their habitat, not vice versa. Also:

Humans are not a food source for stingrays, therefore they are not hunting you; stingrays physically can not eat you. I promise.

The Elasmodiver, a site that's been a great resource to me both while writing this entry and just in general for my daily elasmobranch needs, actually has a page set up with information specifically related to this disturbing issue about stingray barbs, how to treat stingray injuries and information about stingrays relevant to beachgoers. I strongly recommend that everyone visit this if no other link in this entry just to combat some of the rampant fear-based misinformation on stingrays that's floating around.

Like all wild animals (which it is, make no mistake), it is good to treat stingrays with respect: don't live in terror of them, do take precautions to not step on them (Stingray Shuffle!), don't molest them, etc.

ANOTHER BEEF: YouTube commenters and members of the media are guilty of calling pretty much every batoid a "stingray" all the time. This is inaccurate/straight-up stupid: taxonomically speaking, stingrays must be members of the Dasyatidae family. There are LOTS of batoids that are not "stingrays". In a timely fashion, there are actually inaccurate reports about a batoid in the media currently so let's have an object lesson!

Many of you may have seen news reports of a "giant stingray" leaping onto a woman in her boat. This "giant stingray" is clearly an eagle ray to any person with eyes and who knows anything about batoids, given eagle rays are both photogenic (thus well-known) and large. Please compare:

An eagle ray. Diamond-shaped body, notice

the head shape. Max weight is 230 kg/507 lb (so

the average weight is well up there); common

length is 180 cm/5'9". Thus the eagle ray that

leapt on the woman in the report (the ray's weight

seems to oscillate between 200-300 lbs.) is perfectly

average for its species. Eagle rays, unlike stingrays,

swim a lot and school. They don't engage in the

same burying behavior, though they will swim near/at

the seafloor. And yes, as observed, they

leap, sometimes into boats.

A Southern stingray. Traditional

disc-shaped body. Typically smaller

than an eagle ray. Found on sandy bottoms,

near reefs, in seagrass beds; not known

for leaping like eagle rays, mobulas or

mantas.

As you and anyone who has experience with rays can see, the two cannot be confused. Seriously, it would be really odd if a stingray, a creature that hangs out on the seafloor, randomly jumped into someone's boat, as opposed to a ray of a species that frequently swims along the surface and is known for jumping.
To be fair, I do not expect every person to be able to identify every batoid, but instead of calling an unknown batoid a "stingray" (which is not a generic label. Sorry, the word "stingray" narrows it down a very specific set of rays!) perhaps they could just call it a ray? That's not wrong, unless it's not a ray. Which is possible, people call all sorts of things all sorts of wrong stuff all the time.

I will also take this opportunity to talk about Stingray City, a snorkeling/scuba diving site at Grand Cayman Island known for its stingray population that's habituated to humans. I will suggest it if you are hellbent on physically interacting with stingrays, which I guess is better than being terrified of them. Many well-known photographs of Southern stingrays are from this site. However, there's also photography of people making utter jacklords of themselves with the rays.

Kfulgham84, the author of this image, demonstrates

the dangers and temptations of fraternizing with stingrays

at Grand Cayman Island. I'm sure that cloaca examination

was all in the interest of "science".

They are tolerating you, not trying to become your friend: please be respectful towards them. They are not pets, do not treat them like your cat (unless your cat is a stingray). Of course Star-Gazy Pie readers know better and would naturally behave appropriately around rays but apparently some fools who clearly didn't receive proper home-training DO NOT. Also, these fools take pictures of their foolish behavior and post it on the Internet.

In conclusion: If you swim with the rays, or happen to encounter them in an unscheduled manner, don't be That Guy.

However, I will talk more about stingrays than just complain about fools who do ill by them. Stingrays can get very large, as attested to in one of the photos up above.

The largest stingrays in the world are the freshwater stingrays that live in the rivers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. They are the guys that show up in e-mail forwards from your relatives and websites that feature many exciting animated pop-up ads.

Zeb Hogan (the Megafish Project dude) with H. chaophraya. Most photos of

giant stingrays aren't too exciting because they live in muddy rivers so it's

just people holding them and them being huge.

They are more formally known as freshwater whiprays and the binomial name is Himantura chaophraya. Yes, they are stingrays, meaning they have huge fricking barbs on their tails. National Geographic has covered them as part of their Megafishes Project, which I naturally encourage you to check out because large weird freshwater fish are great and knowledge is my drug of choice. Jeremy Wade of Animal Planet's River Monsters also did an episode on them if you prefer that sort of fare.

Round 2: MANTAS

The largest ray, mantas are the charismatic megafauna of the batoid world. Behold their majestic form:

A manta ray smile. Awkward.

The first thing you might notice about manta rays (aside from their size) is how weird they look compared to the standard batoid (omitting the guitarfish, sawfish, etc.) body shape:

The mouth is on the front of the head (not the bottom of the body)

The prominent cephalic lobes, aka the sticky-out things on the front of their heads. Mobula rays (which basically look like small manta rays) also have these structures. Speaking of mobulas (which I will not talk much about, beyond saying that the two members* of family Mobulidae are mantas and mobulas, to give you an idea of their relationship), Paul and Michael Albert have produced a research essay/narrative/photo gallery thing called The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of Cortez that is worth a look.

Here are mobulas doing their flying thing off Cabo Pulma:

Also, they school. A lot. They are somewhat photogenic.

Their eyes are on the sides of their heads. While this isn't as weird as the cephalic lobes or the the front-of-the-head mouth (this eye position is also present in eagle rays), stingrays' eyes are on top of their heads.

Like the largest of their non-flattened elasmobranch comrades, the whale shark, manta rays are also filter feeders. Unfortunately, the manta does not get to sport the natty grid + spots pattern that looks so cool on whale sharks. Now that I think about it, I'm surprised people don't kill them to wear their skin, they do it to every other species unfortunate enough to have skin that is aesthetically pleasing to humans.

While they are filter feeders, manta rays DO have teeth! However, they're for sexytime, not for dinnertime. I actually reviewed this earlier when talking about batoid dentition, so scroll up if you want to see their little poky teeth.

Manta at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, ©Tim Snell

http://www.testmeat.co.uk/photos/index.php?id=745

So how big are these guys? The maximum recorded size from FishBase claims a 910 cm/29.86 ft for length and 3,000 kg/6,613.9 lb. for weight. That's 3.3 tons of batoid, by the way. However, FishBase also tells us that mantas are commonly 450 cm/14.8 ft and the sources I could find says average weight is more around 1,360 kg/3,000 lb., a mere 1.5 ton of flattened cartilaginous fish.

1933, y'all. Also, mini-manta is precious, aside from being dead.

I hate having to say this, but evidence on the Internet compels me: just because you can ride a manta ray doesn't mean you should. In fact, you shouldn't, not just because it's like the oceanic equivalent of ghost-riding the whip. Why? Let's talk about MUCUS.

Any of you who've ever touched a fish before know that they're slimy (scroll down for slime, as interpreted by hagfish). Fish are slimy due to the protective coating of mucus on their bodies that protects them from infection, harmful organisms and other external badniks. Touching/handling/stressing fish removes some of this valuable mucus coating, which can injure them and/or make them more susceptible to infection. Thus, RIDING a manta would most likely be detrimental to their mucus coating and could possibly outright injure it.

Behold, the Übermensch in its natural habitat! Unfortunately there was no

name because believe you me I'd be posting it. Mounts: They're for WoW,

not diving, you puddle of Ebola bleed-out.

Oh, and possibly your silly self too, but at that point you have it coming so you'll get no pity or love from this fish blog, though you'll likely receive a heaping tablespoon of derision and contempt, tied with a ribbon made of French cave-aged scorn.

Round 3: TORPEDO RAYS, aka ELECTRIC RAYS

What? A fish with many names? You don't say! First, let's get our etymology on via the Online Etymology Dictionary: the "torpedo" comes from the Latin torpere, meaning to "be numb". Coincidentally, these guys are also known as "numbfish" or "crampfish" in some quarters. This is as deep as I'll go. The Etymology Dictionary actually provides Proto Indo-European stems so you should be grateful that that isn't within the purview of this entry, although I actually have an idea for an entry that involves good ol' Proto Indo-European and fish (NOTE: It's actually an aborted term paper!) so none of you are truly ever safe.

Bullseye electric ray photographed by Andy Murch

http://www.elasmodiver.com/bulls-eye_electric_ray.htm

Electric rays (that's what I'm going to call them IN GENERAL) look a little weird compared to the rest of the rays we've covered. I tend to overgeneralize their body shape as "unfortunate pancakes taped together". This diagram provides a better idea of the diversity in electric ray body shapes:

Still look like weird pancakes.

(Madl & Yip, 2000)

In addition to being pancakeoid, you'll notice their tails (or more properly, "caudal fins") more closely resemble those of fish than of stingrays or certainly mantas with their spindly tails. What are they used for? LOCOMOTION! Somehow this makes them look even sillier, the guy below vaguely looks like a living metal detector who just happens to be an awesome electric batoid. I doubt he is sympathetic to your gouty toe.

Torpedo Ray at Casino Point (Catalina Island, California), Photo by Nick Ambrose

http://californiadiver.com/torpedo-ray/

Electroreception (the biological ability to perceive electrical impulses) is not something unusual to elasmobranchs or to many fish in general; geez, the platypus can do it, why can't you? However the electric rays are unique among batoids in that they can both detect and emit electric impulses.

Let's break it down taxonomically. Technically, there's no such "thing" as an electric ray, given that would imply that there is a single species called "the electric ray". That is a blatant falsehood because there are actually about 60 species of rays that emit electricity.

Let me show you, because if you're going to learn one thing while you're here it's ridiculous fish taxonomy. Let's do this thing, you know most of it already due to my blathering:

Class: Chondrichthyes (Contains Elasmobranchii and Holocephali [chimaerae])
Subclass: Elasmobranchii (It's a shark or a batoid!)

Superoder: Batoidea (It's a batoid!)

Order: Torpediniformes (Rays that do the electric thing)

Under the order Torpediniformes we get four families of electric ray with four evocative (to the point of being amusing) names: Narcinidae, Narkidae, Torpedinidae and Hypnidae. There may be a suggestion of a naming motif hidden here. Indeed, electricity-producing rays have been known to humans for a very long time and apparently used to be subject to medical employment.

This 2,300 year old garum (fish sauce) plate from Christies boasts two

cephalopods and two batoids. The batoids are two types

of electric ray and the cephalopods are an octopus and a squid.

Scribonius Largus, Emperor Claudius of Rome's court physician, used electric rays as treatment for headaches and gout. We know this because he recorded it in his text Compositiones medicae, where he specifically mentions treating people by having them stand in buckets with "live black torpedo fish" circa 50 C.E. Apparently the physician Galen also thought electric rays were pretty good for this kind of thing, even though it strikes me as rather rude.

The skin is peeled back to reveal the electricity-producing organs.
Engravings from John Hunter's paper to the Royal Society
©Royal College of Surgeons of England
1. The under surface of a female torpedo
2. The upper surface of a female
3. The under surface of a male

I've found allusions to the ancient Greeks using electric rays as a form of anesthesia during childbirth (?!) but no reliable references because the Internet is full of lies. I have, however, found a letter from a guy doing experiments on electric rays writing to Benjamin Franklin about them in 1772 to tell him that he figured out that OH GOD THEY'RE FULL OF ELECTRICITY, JUST LIKE THAT LEYDEN JAR.

Anyway, yeah, people have known about them for a while and used them for their busted toes and all kinds of weird stuff, with nary a thought for the ray's welfare in mind.

BONUS: What do electric eels (which are actually really big knifefish, not eels at all) get for Christmas in Japan? Forced labor, depending on how liberal your definition of "labor" is.

So how strong is the shock of the electric ray, anyway? It kind of depends on which electric ray you're talking about. As is so often the case with fish records, they vary and FishBase ain't talking. The max seems to be about 200-220 volts and that seems to be pretty outstanding; the species cited as producing this was Torpedo nobiliana, the Atlantic torpedo. I look askance at records of things like 700 volts, which I have seen cited as an upper range figure.

Please, manta riders, approach, harass and attempt to ride this ray.

There is a reason for the pancakeosity of the of the electric ray: if you observed engraving by John Hunter, electric rays' kidney-shaped electricity-producing organs are located in the sides of their discs. If you'd like to see these organs in the flesh, the Brine Queen dissected an electric ray and documented the process.

An electric ray will specifically use its Thor-like powers to ambush its prey, wrap its flexible body around it to deliver powerful shocks, and then devour it using its distensible jaws. I'm not sure if the diver in this video got shocked, but the put out ray's posture seems to suggest it at the very least entertained the notion:

I think this covers your introduction to batoids. There's always more to say because there are a LOT of batoids: The ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research says that 55% of total extent elasmobranch species (sharks + batoids) are batoids, with around different 555-573 species of batoids. I've mentioned fewer than 10 species in this entry, to put it in perspective.

To conclude my entry, I give attention to neglected skate. Skates are always neglected and I'll fully admit I neglected them here. I blame the world for not having more information on skates and skates for not being manta rays or having much of a reputation beyond "how is it not a ray?". While no, they don't get as big as river stingrays or mantas, they certainly can get big. I also applaud the angler, Damian Greenwood, for releasing it. There are definitely more sustainable fish to eat. Read the full write-up here.

192 lb/87 kg skate caught off the west coast of Scotland.

*=yes, I'm oversimplifying and excluding subspecies. DEAL

Madl, P & Yip, M. (2000). Essay about the electric organ discharge (eod) . Proceedings of the Cartilagenous fish Colloquial Meeting of Chondrichthyes , http://www.sbg.ac.at/ipk/avstudio/pierofun/ray/eod.htm

International Cephalopod Awareness Days 2010

2010-10-09T20:34:00.000-04:00

LO AND WOE, for I have been negligent! We are in the midst of a holiday, perhaps the most important of holidays. No, not that Columbus' Day foolishness, but the INTERNATIONAL CEPHALOPOD AWARENESS DAYS. The Cephalopodiatrist, TONMO, The Cephalopodcast and others are repping proudly and head-footly, I am doing my best to boost their signal.

I'll be here. Waiting.

Photo by Mike Bartick.

So what are the International Cephalopod Awareness Days? Directly citing the Cephalopodiatrist (brilliant name, btw), they are:

Thursday, October 8 - Octopus Day, for all the eight-armed species
Friday, October 9 - Nautilus Night, a time for all the lesser-known extant and extinct cephalopods
Saturday, October 10 - Squid Day/Cuttlefish Day, or Squidurday, covering the tentacular species

According this list, my specialties would then be today and tomorrow, owing to my infinite love of the cuttlefish and fascination for all things weird, obscure and cephalopodic. I've even written a past entry on ammonites that I can submit as a humble offering for today. Or I guess I could use the one on argonauts, surely they count as semi-obscure cephalopods?

Now I must decide the method in which I should celebrate these most grand of creatures. I thinking possibly commemorative baked goods. If I was crafty in a material direction, I would consider making a head-mounted squid. This is completely unrelated but amazing.

Even Chun-Li has a squid hat.

Perhaps I should write about the ghosts of Cephalopods Past, those Paleozoic wonders whose remaining impressions of hard bits we can only gawk at in simultaneous sadness that they are no longer with us/happiness that we are not their prey.

Perhaps I should do a tribute to the cephalopod in fiction. Why does the image of dread Cthulhu stick with us so stubbornly, far more than any other of Lovecraft's creations?

DECISIONS AND PRODUCTS TO COME LATER. IN THE MEANTIME, MEDITATE ON ALL CEPHALOPODS, GREAT AND SMALL. ALSO, FEEL FREE TO THROW MONEY IN THE GENERAL DIRECTION OF OCEAN BLOGGERS UNITED FOR EDUCATION

GET OUT YOUR POCKETBOOKS

2010-10-03T19:50:00.000-04:00

It's that time of year again on a couple counts!

A) You'll soon be getting a new post only three months after the last one entitled "B is for BATOIDS". I know you are literally oozing with excitement so you should probably go get a mop and take care of that, it'll stain the carpet.

A spotted eagle ray, who is indeed a batoid.

B) It's time for the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2010! www.donorschoose.org is one of my favorite educational charities, especially since I used to work in an elementary school and:

i) they are poor, educational funding the U.S. is a trainwreck

ii) I made it one of my duties to "transmit the joy of science to students" in addition to being a literacy tutor.

I was more successful than I expected, possibly because I have zero shame and behave like an eight-year-old when it comes to things that I am excited about. I probably made a bunch of adults uncomfortable too but maybe they should learn to not be joyless husks every once in a while.

Anyway, not a lot of noise has been made yet and I am currently waiting to throw my lot in with the ocean science people. PZ Myers and his lot already have their widget up, I'm just biding my time.

I'm also feeling the drive to do some sort of ocean-related top ten list. One would suggest that it would be natural for me to do one on cephalopods, but that's so been done. Of course, since it is the month of Halloween, I could do another "You call these horrors of the deep? Here are REAL horrors of the deep and btw the nature is amoral therefore this is not an excuse to kill sharks in the style of the Mexican Navy." Because you KNOW all people are going to do this month is post pictures of anglerfish despite that the average anglerfish is about as terrifying/provides as much physical resistance as a bowl of pudding.

Arch-nemeses.

Behold the Power of Tuna: RECOGNIZE

2010-06-29T19:47:00.002-04:00

Wow, I am terrible at updating lately. Things are probably going to continue to be not-so-great for a while because I'm in the preliminary stages of relocating from Michigan to Texas; after Texas I'll possibly be relocating internationally for work, but let's not worry about that right now. Instead, let's worry about other stuff like:

Carnival of the Blue 37, hosted at blogfish. Lots of neat contributions, I hope someday to be able to contribute myself.

Also relevant is that June 11th was World Ocean Day and the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Jacques Cousteau. Like so many other folks who blog about the sea, Cousteau definitely impacted my love/interest in the ocean.

My mother was and has always been excellent about bringing my brother and I to the local library. When I was 4-5 or so I discovered a series of books by Cousteau on the shelf and proceeded to check them out obsessively, a habit I totally never repeated later in life (bless you, Madeleine L'Engle). It was a cycle, we'd check some of them out and then I'd recheck them out as long as they'd let me. I couldn't even read at the time, but it didn't matter, I'd make my mother or father read them to me.

A nudibranch! I used to pronounce the "-branch" as in the things that

grow out of trees, not with a final -k. I am reasonably sure that this will be held

against me at some point.

In this way, my childhood was filled with nudibranchs, eels, basking sharks, barracudas, tuna, squid, giant clams, etc...and this is completely ignoring marine mammals in the equation, which I think may be as universally appealing to children as dinosaurs. I wish I could pinpoint which books they were, they were definitely not aimed at children. They must've been older as this was around 1989-1990 and they weren't terribly new back then.

But yes: Jacques Cousteau, we salute and will continue salute you for having such an impact on so many people who love the ocean now, due in part to your efforts to spur our imaginations oceanward. Maybe astronomers have similar feelings about the venerable Carl Sagan?

OTHER NEWS RELATED TO WORLD OCEAN DAY:

Japan is being a pain in assorted body parts about whaling. Again.

Actually, I've decided that this post will be devoted to something near and dear to the hearts of Japan and the United States, though in completely different formats: TUNA.

I'd wager that most folks in the U.S. take tuna, the nationally most-consumed fish, for granted because this is what tuna looks like in the national consciousness:

I honestly wonder how many U.S. folk who don't have reason to spend much time around fish know what a tuna looks like. For the record, the fish that the meat in the can came from looked something like this:

I don't know if you can tell from this distance, but the first thing that caught my eye about the fish (a skipjack tuna) were the rows of little knobs running near the tail. These knobs are called "finlets" (and "tails" in fish are actually called "caudal fins", but we can have fish anatomy lessons another day) and mark the tuna as a member of the Scombridae family, which is where mackerels and wahoo are also categorized. Note that finlets are not exclusive to this family, but they're still distinctive.

My oceanographer professor (when he wasn't talking about catching sea bass in Baja) occasionally referred to tuna as "horses of the sea" because they are built for speed and gratuitous face-rocking.

Yellowfin tuna are faster than you.

Unless you happen to be a cheetah.

AWESOME TUNA FACT: They're...not exactly cold-blooded. They're not exactly warm-blooded either, but they're certainly more warm-blooded than most fish. The term "cold-blooded" means that an animal is unable to regulate its body temperature; its body temperature is the same as the temperature of its surroundings. The LSU AgCenter says it more succinctly than I can:

Tunas (and a few sharks) have developed the ability to control their body temperature through a network of veins and arteries called a "rete mirabile" that traps (and dumps) body heat. Even smaller tunas can maintain temperatures 50ºF higher than surrounding water temperatures...for most cold-blooded fish, the colder the water and therefore their body is, the slower and more sluggish they are. Tunas' warmer body temperatures speed up the chemical reactions in their body that produce energy and allows their muscles to contract more quickly. This provides faster swimming speeds and increases their endurance...

Compared to other less active fish, tunas have hearts that are ten times larger for their body weight, pump three times more blood, and have blood pressure three times higher. They also have a much higher proportion of red muscle in their bodies than the average fish, which allows them to cruise at higher speeds more efficiently.

http://www.seagrantfish.lsu.edu/biological/mackerels/yellowfintuna.htm; text bolded by me

If you are thoroughly entranced by the particulars of scombroid physiology, the University of California has a treat for you! Very thorough examination of several scombroids, both inside and out. Don't worry, they're polite and don't rudely shove fish viscera (fishera?) under your nose, you have to click links if you want to see guts.

But yeah, have you ever wondered why tuna steaks look like this (top) and say, catfish fillets (bottom) look like this?

DING DING DING: Tuna have more red muscle than other fish in order to fuel their eternal swim, not unlike some shark species that must utilize ram ventilation to respirate. To burn the oxygen required by these hefty piscine muscles, tuna have myoglobin, a type of protein, in their muscles. Myoglobin actually forms the pigments that gives raw "red" meat its color, and is also responsible for making red meat that has been frozen turn brown.

Because consumers enjoy their red meat really red ("bright red"="fresh" in the human brain), this has led some dealers of both tuna and red meat to treat their products with processes that prolong this red color; one way to do this is to expose the meat to carbon monoxide before it's frozen. As the venerable Alton Brown says, this isn't a bad thing in theory, but it can be unscrupulously used by the powers of darkness.

Of course, not all tuna are bright red, across both individuals, species and parts of the body. The sushi/sashimi eaters in the crowd will know that otoro, meat from the fattiest part of the bluefin tuna, is actually quite pale because well, it's fat:

Not the pieces that look like watermelon.

So how do they use all these thick muscles that I keep going on about? In conjunction with their highly streamlined bodies. As I research, the word that keeps coming up to describe the body of the tuna is "missile". They have:

grooves along the sides of their bodies to tuck their pectoral fins into place
eyes that are flush with their bodies, tunas don't have time for protruding eyes slowing them down
a stiff body and skull to increase speed
forked crescent-shaped (lunate) tails optimized for rapid oscillation i.e. going really fast

Speaking of sushi, since Japan's consumption of tuna is highly relevant to this conversation, we should probably talk about it a bit. First, the Sushi FAQ will give us a brief education about the particular cuts of tuna used in sushi. We also have this beautiful image if you prefer a graphical approach. Available in both Traditional Chinese characters and Romanized Japanese!

While there nine species of true tuna (fish who belong to the genus Thunnus), there are 9-10 others that belong to the greater tuna family and happen to have the word "tuna" in their names. The skipjack tuna, the fish in your can (unless you buy "white meat" tuna, which is albacore) is actually a member of this latter category; don't worry though, it's still a scombroid. The most well-known members of the tuna family include the albacore, yellowfin (ahi), blackfin, bigeye and several species of bluefin tuna.

While they're all of interest, we're going to focus on the bluefin here because that is what you're eating when you order maguro at your local sushi establishment. Bluefin are by far the biggest tuna around: the most ridiculous on record was an Atlantic bluefin caught off of Nova Scotia in 1979 that weighed 1,496 lb/678.57 kg. The same site provides a photo gallery of more absurdly large bluefin tuna.

However, the AVERAGE weight of the Atlantic bluefin tuna (no, I'm not giving you averages for every subspecies of bluefin tuna, live with it) is around 550 lb/250 kg, with a length of 6.5 ft/2 m. Regardless, even a small mature bluefin is still a Large Fish.

Rows of frozen tuna torpedoes at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo.

More hydrodynamic than when actually alive!

Bluefin tuna are also Not in a Good Way. In addition to them being good eats pretty much everywhere, Japan has a special fondness for the bluefin. In addition to eating them with enthusiasm, there is a great deal of money to be had in supplying them. As of January 2010, the record price for a single bluefin tuna at Tokyo's premier Tsukiji fish market (which I really need to post about too) sat at a cool 16.28 million yen, slightly over $175,000 US (depending on the day), for a 511 lb/232 kg individual. They are very serious about their tuna. So serious that the estimates I've seen suggest that Japan consumes 70-80% of the world's Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna catch.

As is so often the case, demand is exceeding supply: this level of consumption is simply not sustainable. We are seeing the bluefin tuna go the way of Atlantic cod and salmon; it's more disturbing yet because while there is no commercial fishing of wild Atlantic salmon and cod (check the point of origin of your salmon; if it's Atlantic salmon, I can almost guarantee that it was farmed off the coast of western South America), bluefin is still being commercially overfished.

Zoom! TUNA ALERT

There have been some attempts at farming bluefin tuna (or "ranching", both terms sound silly), but farming a large voracious fish that literally has to keep moving or it will die? Um, good luck with that. For the interested, Wired also posted an article about 11 months ago about the myriad joys of tuna ranching.

I don't know what the fate of the bluefin tuna will be. Like pretty much everything that lives in the water, it was sacrificed to the almighty dollar at CITES in Doha this year. While the possibility of a ban was presented and voted down, Japan pretty much said that bluefin tuna aren't that endangered, despite a wealth of evidence from a wealth of sources that says that Japan is apparently pulling its numbers directly from its anus, probably still a little poopy.

Just in time for me to post this entry, there's a 9-page article on the New York Times that covers much of what I'm talking about: Tuna's End. I suggest reading if you have the time/interest. If you REALLY want to read more, marine conservationist and artist Richard Ellis has just the book for you (and me!): Tuna: A Love Story.

You're going to have to earn that albacore, son.

So uh, what to do? I strongly suggest not eating bluefin, yellowfin or bigeye tuna, for one. The Environmental Defense Fund provides both a recommended seafood list and a Sushi Selector for those of you having trouble with this blast to the sushiverse that others are dealing with by burying their heads in the sand as quickly as they can. The Monterey Bay Aquarium also has seafood watch resources.

Ocean and environmental conservation organizations will often provide action alerts to you to contact legislators and politicians regarding tuna regulations; Oceana comes to mind, but there are many others out there. I know that Greenpeace has been doing some work regarding tuna seining (referenced the NY Times article) and putting pressure on retailers who market unsustainable species of fish; if you agree with their tactics, it may be another venue for you.

EDIT 07/01/10: A commenter at BoingBoing drew my attention to the inaccurate comment I made implying that all sharks must continually swim to respirate. This error has been corrected. I appreciate having my attention drawn to this so that I don't make an off-handed factual error and provide inaccurate information, which is the opposite of my intent.

MINI-UPDATE UNTIL I POST SOMETHING REAL

2010-05-24T23:31:00.000-04:00

Given it's been well over a month since I last updated, I think we need to review the news in the fish blogosphere (<- I hate that word). Remember, if I link something I found it interesting/entertaining enough to read!

I DID NOT COME HERE FOR THIS

The colossal squid (not the same as the giant squid; some of the classy folks at TONMO have even prepared a fact sheet specifically about this topic) lost some street cred with the release of a study recently, claiming that even though it has nightmare-inducing swiveling hooks on its arms, it's actually kind of lazy. However, Mara Grunbaum at Arch-Anemone has written in brave defense of these lazy/terrifying/totally k-rad creature.

Remember argonauts? It turns out their shell/egg case is also an adjustable ballast tank. This is COOL BEANS.

Fish with hands that they use to walk! Adorable fish with hands! LOOK AT THEM

The always-fabulous Echinoblog (the source for all your echinoderm news and media) has a great post on pearlfishes and their natural habitat, sea cucumber cloacas. It is a thing of beauty. Oh, there are also anal teeth. I love nature.

There's a good post up at Hectocotyli about zoophilia; "bestiality" has such a stigma. No, seriously, it's an interesting post on human sexuality as it relates to animals. It's probably NWS due to obligatory octopus shunga, but you might be able to get away with the "But it's ART!" excuse if you have a prudish boss/coworkers.

Apparently a six-gill shark was caught 30 km up a river in Tasmania. Six-gill sharks (most sharks have five gill slits), like so many creatures I love, are old-school. I will write more on them later, but suffice to say that six-gilled sharks are generally found in the opposite of rivers, that is in deep sea waters, so this is kind of weird. Maybe it is bad at directions.

Don't do this. Just...don't.

This is not a new story, but apparently a betta was removed from a 14-year-old Indian boy's penis. He claims he was holding the fish while urinating but somehow it escaped and swam up his urine stream clear into his unit.

....

...well, I know I hold my fish in my hands when I'm cleaning the aquarium, it's by far the best place to put them. At least we have this boy's experience for us, the fish-holders, warning us of the dangers of holding fish near one's urine stream while voiding one's bladder.

And of course, I would be remiss in ignoring the biggest story: the oil well currently ejecting valuable filth into the Gulf of Mexico, thus causing problems for many, many organisms. It is also causing problems for Louisiana, which is a Problem because I myself am from coastal Louisiana; I do not take kindly to this sort of business causing problems from my frequently beleaguered home state.

Unfortunately, me flailing and yelling horrible things at the well/oil industry/global economy/various governments isn't going to stop anything. I'm sure me spilling more virtual ink on the situation will do much. If you're interested (which you should be), I would suggest keeping up with the situation at Deep Sea News, they seem to have a steady and constant finger on the pulse of the situation.

NOT-SO-FUN OIL SPILL FACT: What do they clean the poster children of oil spills (water fowl) with? Diluted Dawn dish soap!

BONUS: Pelican before and after being scrubbed up!

ISOPOCALYPSE 2010

2010-04-07T01:20:00.001-04:00

If you go on the Internet, you may or may not have seen this image that is making the rounds through mainstream online media:

Apparently this got posted to Reddit in which people commenced with their "OMG WHAT IS THIS KILL IT WITH FIREing" that you may or may not be familiar with. You, gentle reader, almost certainly thought, "Pish posh, anyone can clearly see that is a giant sea isopod they've strung up so rudely on boat...stuff." If you didn't, that's okay, you still have my eternal gratitude for reading this.

Continuing on, the good folks at Deep Sea News came to the rescue and educated people hard; you can read the chronicle here, in which they staunchly defend our brave isopod from the slander of the Internet. However, rampant misinformation of the occasionally-amusing type is still being spread so your friendly Uncle A. (<--me) is here to learn you even HARDER.

-Despite what you may have heard on AOL giant sea isopods are not roaches. The lowest taxonomic level to which they both belong is the phylum Arthopoda.

To put that in perspective, humans and dogs are closer together on the taxonomic tree (we both belong to the Mammalia class) than giant isopods (Bathynomus) and cockroaches (Blattaria) are. Organisms closer to isopods include the usual restaurant suspects (crabs, lobster, shrimp) krill and the like.

Taco has nothing on Lord Isopod.

TAXONOMY BREAK*!

If you want to make my veiny heart swell with pride, go read this introduction to the taxonomic hierarchy as it is used in biology. For the rest of you, here's a crash course that involves me borrowing images from the aforementioned site.

HERE IS A DIAGRAM AND FLASHBACK TO 7TH GRADE SCIENCE CLASS. Organisms are divided into six large categories, called kingdoms or regna:

1) Animalia (mammals, insects, primates)

2) Plantae (flowers, trees)

3) Fungi (mushrooms, mold)

4) Protista (amoeba, the awesomeness of slime molds, algae, diatoms)

5) Archaea (most famous for extremophiles, i.e. the blue/green stuff that lives in hot springs in Yellowstone, the things that live your in guts RIGHT NOW!!!1)

6) Bacteria (most famous as pathogens; the LIVE ACTIVE CULTURES advertised on yogurt). Yes, six; I'm from the U.S. so we'll be dealing with the U.S. system.

Organisms are classified by a number of different characteristics as being more or less similar to one another in terms of evolutionary biology. The further down you go on the taxonomic staircase, the more specific you are. For example, the taxonomy of a yellow-bellied marmot, a creature near and dear to my heart (SPOKANE MARMOT POPULATION HOLLA), would look something like this:

Spokane's greatest natural resource, upping ~~property~~ AWESOME values by

merely existing. HATERS GONNA HATE

Image: Rajah Bose of The Spokesman-Review

KINGDOM: Animalia (it's an animal)

PHYLUM: Chordata (it has a spine)

CLASS: Mammalia (it is a mammal; it gives birth to live young and

breastfeeds them)
ORDER: Rodentia (it is a rodent, which are characterized by

having by two sets of continuously growing incisors

which must be kept short by gnawing on stuff).

Notice that humans diverged from marmots below

the CLASS level; until then we're together.
FAMILY: Sciuridae (it is a squirrel)

SUBFAMILY: Xerinae (it is a ground squirrel)

GENUS: Marmota (it is a marmot)

SUBGENUS: Petromarmota (it is a marmot that lives in

rocky areas)

SPECIES: Marmot flaviventris

If there are subspecies, they go there at the bottom. But yes, if you want to know what a given organism is most closely related to, CONSULT YOUR TAXONOMY! For fish we have the venerable FishBase as a resource for this.

Taxonomy lets you do things like find out that the langostino lobster in Long John Silver's "Lobster Bites" are not actually lobster, but a "squat lobster". Which look are related to porcelain crabs and hermit crabs, which are also not actually true crabs. ... ...awkward. Does it make them any less tasty? No, but they're still not lobsters.

Same with the obligatory market labeling of certain types of catfish as "tra" or "basa" courtesy the shining paragon of science and rationality that is Senator Trent Lott; I am embarrassed to have his state border my own, but it's not like Louisianan politicians aren't embarrassing me/themselves/the entire state on their own. This was done in an effort to appease U.S. catfish farmers who felt that they were being undercut.

I have personally seen websites and store displays describe basa and tra as "similar to catfish". This is dead wrong, because BASA AND TRA ARE CATFISH. Yes, they belong to the Pangasiidae family of catfish, whereas the catfish native to North America are from the Ictaluridae family. This does not make them "not catfish", however; ALL fish that belong to order Siluriformes.

Chum (aka keta or dog) salmon with some dude. You may see these guys marketed under the name "silverbrite" because nothing says "tasty fish" like something that sounds like it's silverware cleaning product. Especially since the fish is very clearly silver.

I will stop now, because I could go on for days about my anger regarding the "market" names of fish and nobody wants that (yet).

Actually, this brings up something else that I'm sure all of you know, but I'm going to throw it out there. Whenever there are pictures circulating on the Internet (possibly forwards from your great-aunt) of various creatures, don't necessarily believe the caption. Examples include deep-sea creatures allegedly washed up by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 (HINT: Tsunami do not work that way) and well, plenty of others.

One my mother asked me about described an animal in a picture as a "giant catfish" when it was actually a juvenile whale shark (READ: catfish do not look like whale sharks and whale sharks are very distinctive).

E-mail forwards are not necessarily known for their standards to accuracy so I would suggest applying a healthy degree of skepticism and seeking further information from reliable sources whenever one receives such things.

*=Yes, I am aware that the biological taxonomy hierarchy is changing/the one I've provided may not be 100% correct at this moment in time. However, I figure that this breakdown would be the most useful while avoiding splitting hairs about microbiology/clades/etc.

BRAVO

2010-03-28T04:05:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to rage about the results of the recent CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) meeting for a few days now. CITES is an international conservation agreement between (as of 2009) 175 nations that meets once every three years to discuss various protections for flora and fauna.

The results of the most recent meeting would probably be best conveyed by the participants writing "SCREW THE OCEAN" in a snowbank with urine. Christie Wilcox at Observations of a Nerd writes about it in a much more dignified manner than I would, but here at the main points:

-Protection/regulations for eight species of shark did not pass. The majority of sharks being commercially caught are being taken for their dorsal fins.

I'm pretty sure these look better on sharks.

-Trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna failed. Bluefin (the shining stars of sushi and sashimi) are being eaten out of existence; this is only about Atlantic stocks, Pacific stocks are in a bad way as well. You can largely thank Japan for this one; for having such a thing for tuna, you'd think it'd be concerned about their conservation. APPARENTLY NOT

-Trade ban on polar bear products (they count as marine mammals, hush) failed.

-Trade ban on 31 species of coral failed. The need for coral jewelry apparently trumps corals being integral to many marine ecosystems.

I've heard that tigers made out pretty well (given some people think parts of them are good for the old E.D.), but that's small consolation. There are a good number of resources out there that discuss all this in more detail if you're interested, but the heart of the matter is that short-term gains from trade apparently trump conservation and sustainability for many members of CITES.

One would hope that with everybody and their grandmother howling about "sustainability" and "green" everything people would've picked up on what happens when demand exceeds supply, but this seems to be one of those things that can be conveniently compartmentalized away when the situation (PROFIT) calls for it.

Here are some groups responding to this:

The Pew Environment Group

Oceana

Ocean Conservancy

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Overfishing.org

I could go into more detail (and probably will later) but it upsets me greatly that so many posts are about how this or that organism is endangered, nearly extinct (goodbye dear baiji; kind of surprising given people usually crap themselves over marine mammals. Maybe just not weird-looking river dolphins?), has a threatened habitat, etc.

In closing, I strongly encourage all (any?) readers to do what you can in terms of supporting oceanic (and frankly all types of environmental) conservation. If you read this thing regularly you've noticed that this blog is a way for me to share my lifelong love, fascination and enthusiasm for marine life; think of it as an exceptionally dorky love letter to the sea* that I insist on reading to everyone I meet. It is my goal to infect others with this enthusiasm; this will become much more difficult the more damage these valuable ecosystems sustain.

*=though we're not married. Yet.

HONK HONK CHIMAERA ALERT

2010-03-25T04:44:00.000-04:00

Enjoy this lovely video of chimaeras, fantastic little cartilaginous shark-esque fish also known as ratfish, rabbitfish and ghost sharks. Don't worry, they'll get their own entry; I can never ignore something with grinding plates for teeth.

Via Deep Sea News, footage by Neptune Canada.

Detachable penises and the argonauts who love them.

2010-02-28T21:01:00.001-05:00

The male Argonaut is an insignificant shell-less creature, fond of retirement, solitary and rarely seen. When the tender passion seizes him, as he rocks on some sunny wavelet, far from female society, he does not go in search of a wife, but with Spartan courage, detaches one of his eight hands (or arms) and consigns it to the deep, in the hope that some tender hearted individual of the other sex will fall in with it and take it under her protection.

Dall, W.H. (1869). Notes on the argonaut. The American Naturalist, 3(5), 236-239.

Diagram of the male argonaut; a is the octopus, b is the hectocotylus.

Nicholson, H.A. (1880). Manual of zoology. St Andrews, Scotland, UK: William Blackwood And Sons.

One subject that is always of interest to me is the sheer diversity and gory details of the many reproductive practices found in nature*. That (and winter recess) is what brings this entry to this evening: the semi-autonomous phallus of the argonaut.

"Hectocotylus", for our purposes, means "octopus wiener".

Photo: Julian Finn, The Malacologist

However, after briefly consulting a few sources, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce my readership to the argonaut itself, as opposed to merely its PHABULOUS PHALLUS. When we think of cephalopods (which I hope you do several times per day), most people think of octopus and squid, possibly cuttlefish too if they had the misfortune to spend time with me around age six or so. And while the argonaut is certainly an octopus (it belongs to Order Octopoda) it's a weird octopus and not usually what people envision when they hear the word. An image will explain what I'm talking about:

As you can see, she's riding around in one of the many things that makes argonauts so distinctive, as well as being the source of their nickname, the "paper nautilus": the thin calcium carbonate eggcase of the female.

ACHTUNG

They are not nautiluses, nautiluses belong to an entirely different order (Nautilida, to the shock of nobody) and their shells are quite different than those of the argonaut. The government of Australia has even prepared a handy and user-friendly argonaut vs. nautilus comparison chart so that you'll have the resources you need when push comes to shove in those high-stakes cephalopod knowledge duels.

ALSO NOTE: In looking for information for this post I've seen many posts that say that they are "closely related to octopuses". This is not actually true, given they ARE IN FACT octopuses. Octopoda is a very diverse order that I intend to post more about in the future because I am mildly obsessed with cephalopods in case you missed the note; argonauts are not the strangest of the order. Wait until we get to some of the more obscure orders under Cephalopoda, like Sepiolida, or even hang out with more extinct cephalopods!

The shell/eggcase of the argonaut is created from secretions produced by two of their dorsal arms, which are webbed and feature chromatophores, aka the things that lets cephalopods change colors real good. Let's have some VISUAL AIDS:

S. G. Goodrich Animal Kingdom Illustrated Vol 2 (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859)2:495

Big ol' webbed arms. Arms != tentacles, by the way. And sans shell!

The shiny pink part of the shell are the webbed arms, all splayed out.

These modified arms are particular to the females; the males have their own...modified arm, but that'll come later. For now, more SCIENCE FACTS ABOUT ARGONAUTS:

-Females can leave and re-enter their shell because they cling to it with their suckers. This is not the case for nautiluses, who are physically attached to their shells.

-Argonauts do not in fact use their webbed arms as sails by sticking them above the water, although this was apparently a widely-accepted belief back in the day. You can thank Aristotle for that one, by the way. While I can't confirm it through experience, supposedly they also exhibit this ability in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

-Oddly, argonaut shells are not an example of a remnant cephalopod shell, evolutionarily speaking (the vestiges of this shell can be seen in the cuttlebone and the gladius/pen of the squid). The jury is still out on how the argonaut acquired this ability in terms of evolutionary biology, but what we do know is that the true mollusk shell is formed through an internal shell sac; the argonaut's shell is formed through an entirely different external mechanism, indicating that despite some visual similarities, their magnificent eggcase chariots are evolutionary innovations.

-Continuing on about the shell, most true cephalopod shells are composed of aragonite; the shell of the argonaut is composed of calcite.

-This is probably assumed at this point, but argonauts lay their eggs in their eggcase; most octopuses lay their eggs in strings inside of caves.

-BIG difference between most octopus and argonauts: octopus are benthic, argonauts are pelagic. Basically, most octopus hang around on the sea floor at varying depths. Sure, they swim around some, but by and large they live on the floor. Argonauts, on the other hand, live in the open ocean, relatively near to the surface.

This also means that they are much more difficult to study because of the sheer lack of availability. Contrast this with this octopus wandering between tide pools like it ain't no thang. There will occasionally be mass strandings, which shell collectors often enjoy. Like many other cephalopods they keep poorly in captivity, which doesn't really help the situation.

-The word for argonaut in Japanese is "蛸船" (takobune）, which literally means "octopus boat". This is an absurdly cute name.

Now let's talk about ARGONAUT SEX. Argonauts exhibit significant sexual dimorphism, i.e. females are WAY bigger than the males; males' full growth is about 10% of that of the female of the species. Males also have the star of this entry, the detachable female-mantle-cavity-seeking hectocotylus. Unfortunately for male argonauts, they only get to mate once. I could write all this out, but I'd rather quote (bolded emphasis added by me):

The male argonaut has a modified third left arm that carries and stores sperm. This arm develops in a pouch under the male’s eye until needed for fertilization, at which point it explodes out of its sheath and leaves the body (Nesis, 1977; Iliffe, 1982). The arm attaches to the outside of the female’s mantle via suckers, then autonomously wiggles into the mantle cavity (Nesis, 1977). Originally, this arm was thought to be a parasitic worm and was given the scientific name Hectocotylus, and the modified arm is still called a hectocotylis in octopuses and squids. The detached arm is free-swimming and very active, but it probably cannot seek out females since it lacks a sense of direction (Iliffe, 1982). Upon expulsion of the hectocotylus, the male dies, and the arm, with its threadlike organ to carry and store spermatophores, remains in the female’s mantle cavity until such time as she chooses to fertilize it (Iliffe, 1982; Norman, 2003).

Female argonauts can have a few hectocotyluses within their mantle cavities simultaneously and often lay eggs after attaining spermatophores (Norman, 2003).

Orenstein, M., & Wood, J.B. (2007). Argonauta argo, argonaut. Retrieved from http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/MarineInvertebrateZoology/Argonautaargo.html

Crudely summarized, the male argonaut's terrifying micro-penis EXPLODES out from under his eye, he dies, penis-arm swims to the female and plops itself into her mantle cavity minus the male who is now just another tiny seven-armed carcass drifting in the sea. Note that females can:

a) carry a number of sperm packets simultaneously

b) tote the sperm packets around until they decide to fertilize their eggs.

I don't know if argonauts have this ability, but I know some organisms who do the sperm packet thing (cuttlefish, if I'm not mistaken) can decide which sperm packets they want to use.

As mentioned earlier, people most frequently encounter argonauts in as either washed up and dead or just the eggcase alone. However, occasionally live ones will be encountered on the beach, as demonstrated in this video:

Note how she's jetting water pretty much the whole time and expels ink at 2:26. At about the same time she wraps her webbed arms around the eggcase, whereas she had them tucked in before. Hopefully she made it back safely.

REGARDING EGGCASES

The Argonaut shell is formed, curiously enough, by the females only; as among more highly organized beings sometimes, the gentler sex outshine their brothers in the splendor of their apparel, and the extent it occupies. Unlike many, however, the Argonaut toils not, neither does she spin. Folding her arms about her, in her earliest infancy, she is speedily arrayed in all her glory, and has not shown any discontent at the old fashions since the time of Aristotle.

(Hall, 1869)

I desperately wish that this was how scholarly papers were still written, full of whimsy and random opinions regarding cephalopod aesthetics. This is why I am quoting resources about argonauts from the 1860s. /TANGENT

I've spent most of this entry talking about the organism itself; however, most people are more interested in the delicate eggcases of the argonaut than the octopus that travels in it. Argonaut species can differentiated by the types of eggcases they produce. A gallery of eggcases for sale can be seen here; Wikipedia has a handy comparative chart as well:

Of course, I'm more interested in the octopus than the shells really, so here's one without her shell. You can see her webbed arm trailing out behind her:

I will leave you with a video of an argonaut in captivity that shows off the chromatophores (color-changing cells) beautifully. Like most cephalopods in captivity, it is not doing anything particularly exciting, but it's still lovely to observe:

*=BONUS! Here's am oddly beautiful video of leopard slugs mating. It gets hot and heavy at around 1:30.

BONUS BONUS! Here's the opposite of the above video, a banana slug chewing off its partner's penis! You should read the whole page, it's fascinating. Apparently the researcher observed a banana slug suffering from priapism (i.e. penis won't go down) and it decided to take matters into its own metaphorical hands by chewing its own penis off of its head (that's apparently where they keep their junk). TOO HOT FOR TV XXX MEGA-HUNG SLUG PENIS PIX AT 3:00

GONADS (not custardy this time)

2010-02-13T19:20:00.000-05:00

Here is a fabulous tweet today from Miriam Goldstein formerly of The Oysters' Garter and now at the venerable Deep Sea News:

My interns found a polychaete epitoke! Everyone loves when their gonads break off and have sex without them. http://bit.ly/cqLayS

بهموت

2010-02-05T20:58:00.001-05:00

As y'all can probably tell, this semester (ending in mid-April) isn't shaping up to be chock-full of updates, much to my infinite sadness. Instead, my days are filled with Arabic, Indo-European linguistics and TESOL business. HOWEVER, THERE ARE FISH TO BE FOUND IN THIS MADNESS!

I remember reading this a while back (by which I mean probably upwards of ten years ago now), but brainwashing by Squaresoft caused me to forget: the mythological Bahamut is not in fact a dragon, but a fish. A very very large fish, a fish that holds the earth on its back.

A fish that is so big that in the 1,001 Nights, Jesus (Isa) literally passes out when he beholds the Bahamut (who also hangs out with Kujata, natch) and Allah has to tell him what's up (which continues to blow his mind. Allah does stuff like that). The Bahamut is days long. The full story can be found in Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, a fine text that currently holds a place of honor in my bathroom and that I encourage all to read. It has vegetable lambs which are both awesome and gross. Other features include Kafka's bizarre/surreal descriptions of his imaginary beasts that must be read to be understood.

This Bahamut can kill Hedgehog Pies, but cannot make Jesus pass out.

How did Bahamut turn from a cosmic Middle Eastern world-bearing fish into a metal space dragon with lasers? The answer lies, as it does with so many things, with Dungeons & Dragons. Apparently the Dragon King was first given the name Bahamut in the first edition Monster Manual, released in 1977, after Ye Olde World-Fish, given the habits of fantasy authors to shamelessly crib from various mythological and religious traditions (not hating, btw). Square employees, like all proper nerds, were playing D&D at that time and Bahamut was among one of the large number of enemy designs (particularly in early games) that were directly ripped from D&D. Bahamut the Dragon King makes his first appearance a Final Fantasy game in the original Final Fantasy (I), released in the U.S. in 1987 in Japan and 1990 in North America. The rest is history.

Dragon Bahamut, straight from the source. NEEDS MORE LASERS

Unfortunately, due to not being featured in a prominent console RPG series, Bahamut-the-World-Fish appears to have considerably fewer depictions online, and much less recent. It gets messier, too, for the word "bahamut" in Arabic turns into the more well-known Hebrew "behemoth". However, the behemoth mentioned in the Christian Bible's Book of Job (where most non-nerds encounter the word) is usually depicted in medieval art as a terrestrial quadruped of some sort; his buddy Leviathan is interpreted as an aquatic beast. Both of them, shockingly, show up in Final Fantasy games.

So I guess the moral of this post is that MYTHOLOGICALLY-SPEAKING, BAHAMUT IS A FISH, NOT A DRAGON OR A FLYING FORTRESS.

Other topics coming up soon related to this are FISH, PALEO-LINGUISTICS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE INDO-EUROPEAN HOMELAND PROBLEM! I know you are all quivering with excitement, given the importance of the Indo-European Homeland Problem in our daily lives. I'm seriously doing a paper on this for class, so I may as well spread some knowledge; think of it as manure for the fertile fields of your brain.

P.S.:

...not fish-related, but at the same time since I'm on the subject: SHIVA IS NOT AN ICE SPIRIT. SHIVA IS A VERY IMPORTANT HINDU GOD WHO IS NOT ELEMENTALLY ALIGNED BECAUSE HE'S WAY BEYOND ELEMENTS. HOWEVER, I WILL CONCEDE THAT HE IS SOMETIMES BLUE.

HONK HONK! FISH NEWS

2010-02-05T14:57:00.000-05:00

Time for a Star-Gazy Pie FISH NEWS* ROUND-UP!

From Conservation Maven: Adverse effects: when stream restoration improves habitat for invasive fish

Adorable news from Science Daily: 'Squeaker' Catfish Communicate Across Generations

Science Daily informs us that this is a catfish. Actually, it's about venomous (cat)fish.

The 47th Circus of the Spineless is up at Beetles in the Bush, an entomology blog. This time around features sea slugs that look Final Fantasy X enemies, the Heike crab, beetles, green bottle flies (useful in determining time of death in human corpses!) and more! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA

Do you remember basket stars? If not, they were featured in the entry in which I totally called out Oceana on their idea of "freaky fish". The Echinoblog has all sorts of cool stuff up about basket stars AND MORE.

Indie Squid Kid, who is living the dream of the cephalopod enthusiast, is doing a list of Ten Sensational Squid. You know what you must do.

Dead sunfish (Mola mola) look more like they eat souls for breakfast than sad. I blame the cavernous empty eye sockets and munchy teeth.

The ice-cool cats down at Deep Sea News explain that just because a squid is big doesn't make it Giant.

* = news is probably kind of current. Maybe. Guaranteed to be interesting, at least!

Mom & Dad, if you're reading this, yes, this can be taken as proof that I enjoy talking about genitalia and poop.

2010-01-12T01:15:00.001-05:00

Those of you who know me know exactly why I am posting this. For those of you who don't (and possibly those who do), it's time for your first glimpse of walrus autofellatio:

Link from the fine gentlemen at Deep Sea News.

Herman the Manatee

2010-01-08T17:48:00.001-05:00

My significant other brought my attention to the existence of the webcomic Herman the Manatee yesterday. It stars a sirenian, which should already give it some clout, right?

I have returned triumphant!

2010-01-05T22:19:00.000-05:00

FIRST THINGS FIRST: Big ups to the gentlemen of rare caliber over at Zooillogix for ~~shilling for me in exchange for an aquarium shot glass~~ showing their appreciation for my contribution to their ambitious Zoo/Aquarium Shot Glass Collection by linking to Star-Gazy Pie! Also, welcome to any/all visitors arriving here from that fine institution!

I have returned from the wilds of a) finals and b) spending winter vacation in Texas. Activities in Texas were not as fish-centric as I had hoped, except a lovely visit to the Houston Aquarium where I shamed my ancestors with my enthusiasm; details are forthcoming, but suffice to say that I am enamored of cobia and could spend all day playing with social rays.

Aquacultured cobia, being raised for America's kitchens. I'm sure they will not be marketed using an idiotic/completely-misleading name like "oil rig bass" or something else similarly inspiring.

NOAA (2008, January 8). Aquaculture information center - DOC/NOAA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.noaa.gov/retiredsites/docaqua/nmai2006.html

There was also a brief visit to the Houston Natural Science Museum, where I acquired this fine gentleman: the very first Dunkleosteus figure I've ever seen. Dinosaur plastic figures are a dime a dozen, but I've never seen a single Devonian fish figure before. I was immediately smitten and my mother was probably embarrassed by the sight of her 25-year-old child beaming while carrying around a piece of painted plastic in the shape of a fish as if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread. I also acquired a slice of an ammonite fossil because ammonites are great; the only thing that would make them greater is if the living cephalopod were inside.

Also, FYI, Safari Ltd. also provides for all your minotaur figure needs.

Unfortunately, this visit did NOT include a trip to the National Resource Center for Cephalopods in Galveston. I searched their website thoroughly and it didn't appear offer individual ceph-dork tours. However, this trip report from TONMO (The Octopus News Magazine Online, natch) shows that it is possible for cephalopod enthusiasts to visit. To be fair, this was published back in 2002, so who knows? I'll actually try calling next time I'm in the area and see what I can arrange.

Unfortunately, classes are starting again tomorrow, but I'll see what I can do. Lots of ideas, lack of time/occasionally computing power to bring them to fruition!

Fresh Manatees

2009-12-02T04:17:00.000-05:00

Fitting in as a fine addition to the previous post, the fine gentlemen at Zooborns have provided us with footage from the Singapore Zoo of a recently-born manatee. Enjoy!

HARK! A SIRENIAN

2009-11-28T20:31:00.003-05:00

I have been requested to do a post on sirenians by my friend Nicole. Out of all the marine mammals, sirenians (manatees and dugongs) seem to get the least media time:

West Indian manatee gesturing for emphasis.

-whales show up because they're charismatic megafauna and people still hunt them, contravening the moratorium on whaling

-pinnipeds (seals, walrus & co.) get airtime for the same reason, see "clubbing baby harp seals" for details.

-dolphins (which are a subset of whales) have recently gotten attention due to The Cove and the movement for dolphin-safe tuna that I remember being a semi-big deal as a child during the early 90s. As an addendum to this, I suggest reading this post at Southern Fried Science. Dolphins have been popular in the public consciousness as long as I've been alive, possibly thanks to Flipper (the first movie came out in 1963) and Sea World.

-some types of otters are also considered marine mammals, though I think they don't seem so in most people's minds because they don't live in the open ocean.

-Wikipedia (always the most scholarly source) claims that polar bears can be considered marine mammals because they live on sea ice; WE REPORT YOU DECIDE

Just a dugong munching.

Sozzani, R. (Photographer). (2005). The Dugong, or sea cow [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.greenpeace.org/international/photosvideos/photos/the-dugong-or-sea-cow-2

But yeah, pretty much the only attention sirenians get in the media is when they're getting hit by boats and personal watercraft in Florida. However, there is more to these creatures! To conclude that manatees only exist as obstacles to watercraft is equivalent to dismissing my local raccoon population as simply obstacles to automobiles, which is what you would probably conclude if you lived here (we saw 10-11 dead raccoons on the road on an 11-12 mile stretch recently).

Do sirenians only consist of manatees and dugongs?

Yes. There are three species of manatee (West Indian manatees, Amazonian manatees and African manatees) and a single species of dugong. Up until 1768, there was a third type of sirenian, the massive Steller's sea cow, which was hunted to extinction within 27 years of its discovery, though other factors were involved in its demise.

Steller's sea cow?

Steller's sea cow was discovered on the Commander Islands east of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea in 1741. Manatees (~4 m) and dugongs (~2.7 m) are much smaller than Steller's sea cow was; these animals clocked in at around 8 m (26 ft).

Self-Sullivan, C. (2009, August 1). Call of the siren - manatee & dugong research, education and conservation.

Retrieved from http://www.sirenian.org/caryn.html

It's suggested that the population at the Commander Islands was a remnant group, having been hunted to extinction elsewhere. It's not terribly surprising, given that they are large, slow, defenseless herbivores (they ate kelp) who lived near to the shore. As a result, they were hunted for their meat (according to anecdotes in Callum's An Unnatural History of the Sea, sailors claimed it was delicious), skin and blubber, which could be refined into an oil that burned smokelessly, which is incidentally a property of whale oil. Reports by Steller (the naturalist on the Bering expedition that found them) indicated an initial population of 1,500-2,000 animals. Clearly this did not last long after information about the population

It's been suggested by some (Anderson, 1995) that hunting was entirely directly responsible for their extinction; Anderson argues that reduction of the sea otter population (which lives on both the Commander Islands and Kamchatka) resulted in an explosion in the growth of sea urchins. Sea urchins eat kelp, which was incidentally the main (only?) food consumed by the sea cows. Thus, Anderson claims that part of this extinction event can be attributed to Steller's sea cows losing their source of food.

And that's pretty much it for Steller's sea cows. It's a small consolation, but as a result of being hunted, there are skeletons on display in museums, such as this one at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, in Paris.

Alright, so let's talk about manatees and dugongs. How are they different?

Size: Manatees are overall larger animals than dugongs.

Tails: Manatees have very wonderful paddle-shaped tails; dugongs' are split and fluked like a dolphin's.

Flippers: Manatees have vestigial nails on their flippers (scroll down); dugongs do not.

Heads: Manatees and dugongs differ in their dentition: how their teeth grow, what kind of teeth they have, etc. Manatees also tend to have a shorter snout than dugongs. It's more complicated than that, but this is one of those cases where if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of comparative sirenian cranial anatomy, you'll have to look elsewhere.

HERE HAVE A HELPFUL CHART:

sirenian. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/546552/sirenian

These things are weird looking. What're their phylogenic relationships with other species?

As you may have noticed from the image of the manatee's toenails and references to snouts, modern sirenians somewhat resemble fusiform aquatic elephants; elephants are their closest living relatives (as far as common ancestors go), along with hyraxes. Yes, these little fat snuffly things:

Shang, N., and Carrick, G. (2006, July). Africa.

Retrieved from http://www.hennessea.com/Africa.htm

I like Wikipedia's description of the hyrax: "From a distance, a hyrax could be mistaken for a very well-fed rabbit or guinea pig."

However, a more accurate description of hyraxes are that they are the remaining examples of a group of animals that look like rodents (but aren't) that used to be much more widespread. They belong to the Afrotheria clade, which along with sirenians and elephants includes elephant shrews (which are not actually shrews but that's okay because they are still precious), tenrecs, aardvarks and others.

Hmmm, that doesn't actually help much, does it. Perhaps the most interesting features of hyraxes are that they display a number of early mammalian features, including:

-they have poorly developed internal temperature regulation (which they deal with by huddling together for warmth, and by basking in the sun like reptiles).

-Unlike other browsing and grazing animals, they do not use the incisors at the front of the jaw for slicing off leaves and grass. Instead, they use molar teeth at the side of the jaw.

-Unlike the even-toed ungulates (deer, antelope, pigs, giraffes, etc.) and some of the macropods (kangaroos, wallabies, etc.), hyraxes do not chew cud to help extract nutrients from coarse, low-grade leaves and grasses.

They do, however, have complex, multi-chambered stomachs that allow symbiotic bacteria to break down tough plant materials, and their overall ability to digest fiber is similar to that of the ungulates. (Thanks Wikipedia!)

Hyrax tower!

Duke, D. (2008, January 1). The Chaircat's blog.

Retrieved from http://animalorphanagekenya.org/blog/page/2/

Hyraxes inhabit the Middle East and various parts of Africa. They have been doing this for a very long time, on the order of 40 million years. 40 mya places hyrax development in the Eocene epoch (55.8 ± 0.2 to 33.9 ± 0.1), known as the time in which modern mammals emerged (go here for more details about the Eocene).

Due to living the Middle East, there are a number of biblical references to hyraxes; however, they were generally translated as "rabbit" or "hare" because the European translators had no idea what hyrax was. This is disappointing because hyraxes are cooler than lagomorphs. Here is Rocky the Hyrax producing lovely vocalizations:

Moving away from hyraxes in particular though, the Eocene marks the appearance of the earliest sirenians, including such august figures as Prorastomus and Protosiren. Check this illustration of Prorastomus, plus some collectible figures.

Honestly though, to explain sirenian evolutionary relationships, I think this chart does it most succinctly. For reference, Trichechus refers to manatees, Hydrodamalis is Steller's sea cow and Dugong is self-referential. This chart even has a handy-dandy geologic time scale built in for your convenience!

That was a long tangent.

Yeah, pretty much.

So what do sirenians do?

Well...they eat a lot of sea grass? According to Gerstein (1994), manatees are capable of understanding discrimination tasks; Dierauf & Gulland (2001) state that their abilities in discrimination and task-learning behaviors are similar to that of dolphins and seals in acoustic and visual studies.

They're basically very chill animals, eating their delicious sea grass and swimming around in warm shallow water (about 3-7 ft./1-2m deep). However, manatees have problems, many due to humans. The main causes of manatee mortality include: watercraft collisions (40% for West Indian manatees), cold stress, hurricanes, red tide (harmful algal blooms), entanglement/swallowing fishing equipment, getting crushed in water control mechanisms, etc. If you'd like to read more, Stith, Slone and Reid (2006) have written a review and synthesis of manatee data in Everglades National Park detailing much about manatee mortality.

Photo by J. Marino at Crystal River Manatee Tours

Those of you who were around in the 80s will remember the media attention given to manatee casualties and gruesome injuries due to watercraft collisions. As a response to this, the U.S. Geological Survey has launched the Sirenia Project, which monitors the West Indian manatee and supporting their recovery.

In a more popular measure, in 1981, musician Jimmy Buffett and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham formed the renowned Save the Manatee Club, where you can adopt a Florida manatee.

While hunted in the past for their meat, skin and bones, by and large manatee and dugong populations are protected by laws in most countries. However, poaching does occur, specifically mentioned in the West Indian and African manatee populations. Dugongs are legally hunted by aboriginals in Australia for subsistence purposes; they are poached elsewhere due to a demand for dugong products. For more information on this, please consult Sirenian International.

Well, that was depressing.

Here's some information that's a bit more light-hearted:

Have you ever wanted to hear an angry manatee? Frightened? Normal manatee burbling? You've got it!

This video shows yawning manatees and provides a closer look at their mouth anatomy, which is kind of weird.

Munching dugong!

-The oldest manatee in captivity is Snooty, who was born in captivity and resides at the South Florida Museum. Snooty was born in 1948, making him 61 years old on his last birthday.

-There are locations in the United States where it is legal to swim with manatees. However, if you're going to do so, don't be this guy. Manatees are easily stressed, they do not need people harassing them.

References

Anderson, P.K. (1995). Competition, predation, and the evolution and extinction of steller's sea cow, hydrodamalis gigas. Marine Mammal Science, 11(3), 391 - 394.

Myers, P. 2002. "Dugongidae" (On-line), Animal Diversity Web. Accessed

November 21, 2009 at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Dugongidae.html.

Antarctic Echinoderms

2009-11-28T05:19:00.000-05:00

Sweet time-lapse video of starfish, urchins and worms crawling around the Antarctic sea floor. Now with seal corpse dissolving action!

Thanks to Vera for the link! Buy her comics!

Lil' living fossils

2009-11-17T04:03:00.002-05:00

Behold the first footage of a juvenile coelacanth:

Big ups to Charlette for this one.

UPDATE 11/19/09 00:42 - Here's a news release, courtesy Casey.

Echinoderms!

2009-11-15T21:37:00.001-05:00

I love "how to tell these things apart"/"what are the differences" posts and Chrism of the Echinoblog has a fine post on how to tell asteroids and ophiuroids apart.

Choriaster granulatus, an example of my favorite type of starfish (CHUNKY)

Messersmith, J. (2009, March 31). Underwater variety pack [Web log message].

Retrieved from http://www.messersmith.name/wordpress/2009/03/31/underwater-variety-pack/

BRIEF EXPLANATION: Both asteroids and ophiuroids are echinoderms, the group that includes sea stars (starfish), sea urchins, sea cucumbers, sand dollars, crinoids and all those cool invertebrate cats. HOWEVER, not all starfish are equal! What the general public calls "starfish" can be categorized as asteroids ("sea stars") or ophiuroids ("brittle stars"). I will let Chrism tell you the rest. Enjoy and consider this an appetizer to a series I'm planning on doing about invertebrates, because people absolutely do not care enough about invertebrates.

Because people do not care enough, here is a link to Circus of the Spineless, a blog carnival starring some of the folks I regularly follow that is devoted to invertebrates both terrestrial and other.

A victory for lungfish, turtles and Queenslanders!

2009-11-13T00:08:00.002-05:00

Seen here is the largest specimen of Murray (Mary River) Cod.

Tibbetts, T.A. (2003, January 6). Pictures from the snowy mountains.

Retrieved from http://www.uisgebeatha.org/snowymountainspictures_dec2002jan2003.html

Remember when I was hating on folks for the idea of damming the Mary River, home of Australian lungfish, the Mary River Turtle and Mary River cod? Almost certainly not, but as a result of that entry I joined the SAVE THE MARY RIVER!!!! group, whose e-mails have kept me abreast of the situation. As of yesterday, I am pleased to announce that it looks like the Mary River is safe from damming! Australian conservationists are a-twitter (probably literally); I need to check Australian news sources for more info. Look at these guys:

DPI researcher with a lungfish caught in Splitters Creek. (ABC: Jodie van de Wetering)

van de Wetering, J. (2009, February 10). Learn about lungfish.

Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/02/10/2487576.htm

Mary River Turtle, sporting awesome headgear.

Perhaps the second-largest specimen of Mary River cod?

Scott, B. (2007, July 20). A Snail's eye view. Retrieved from http://snailseyeview.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

Good job, everyone!

Aquarium Gets Hits by a Car

2009-11-11T00:29:00.000-05:00

Apparently a woman in Florida who was driving with a 6-year-old in her lap drove her vehicle into an aquarium exhibit at the Tampa Airport, killing nearly all of the fish; survivors (for the moment) were gathered in a bucket.

Species mentioned in the article were saltwater tropical fish, including such crowd-friendly species as "clownfish, angelfish and blue tang"; there were around 30-40 fish in the tank. No mention was made about how the invertebrates in the tank fared, though one article mentioned people searching for hermit crabs, but I can't imagine well. I would imagine there were also plants and whatnot.

This wigs me out because I repeatedly have dreams about aquariums being damaged and fish spilling out that can't be saved, so I have to stand there in horror and helplessly watch them suffocate. This sounds like a nightmarish scene.

Not surprised.

2009-11-03T00:38:00.001-05:00

Oceana's blog announced the winner of the 2009 Freaky Fish contest; unsurprisingly, the winner was the anglerfish. I personally think that anglerfish should be retired from these kinds of contests or just get honorable mention because they're going to win every time by virtue of being, well, anglerfish. More on freaky fish at a later date, though.

I found a review for Callum Roberts' The Unnatural History of the Sea over at Conservation Maven and recently acquired a copy from the library. If I end up having anything worth saying after I read it, I'll post it.

The thought that came to mind when I read the synopsis was a comment from I read in one of my social studies textbooks that said something to the effect that European explorers in the 15th century described the abundance of sea life at the Grand Banks as so great that you could scoop up cod in a basket. For some reason, that image has captured my imagination, even more so given the dire state of the long-famed New England fisheries.

Photo by Dieter Craasmann, taken from Blue Ocean Notes

The Atlantic cod, long a backbone of the New England fishing industry. Its tastiness has led to it becoming a case study in the wages of overfishing and an unsustainable industry.

Things in the pipeline: Freaky fish update, a special post by request about sirenians and possibly the letter "B" in my Alphabet of Fish.

Freaky fish? That is not a freaky fish, THIS is a freaky fish!

2009-10-31T22:07:00.002-04:00

Oceana (a PAC concerned with oceanic affairs) apparently has an annual "freakiest fish" contest on their blog, the Beacon. I viewed this year's candidates and am by and large unimpressed; the only fish that I think legitimately belong on that list are the wolf-fish, hairy angler, hagfish and maybe the crown-of-thorns starfish.

Why are coelacanths on there? Yeah, they're not conventionally attractive, but they're hardly freaky; if anything, their behavior is kind of dull. And leafy seadragons? All they do is look pretty!

Past winners of the Freaky Fish voting include:

2008 - Fanfin seadevil. This is not surprising, as anglerfish ALWAYS excel in this kind of contest. Seriously, look at that thing.

ANGLERFISH PROTIP: As terrifying as they look, they tend to be pretty small, less than a foot (~30 cm) long; and that's the big females, males tend to be very small and essentially are free-swimming gonads before becoming just plain gonads. I'll elaborate on this later.

2006 - Blobfish, fangtooth, monkfish. Blobfish are Internet famous due to an e-mail meme claiming that they're an example of deep sea creatures washed up during a tsunami. Fangtooth? Well, they can live in the abyssopelagic zone, which pretty much implies that they're going to be freaky looking.

ABYSSOWHAT?

Abyssopelagic! TIME TO TALK ABOUT LAYERS (or ZONES) OF THE OCEAN

"Abysso-" - the abyss. I'm reasonably sure that everyone reading this knows what "abyss" means/implies. For our purposes, let's say that it means "stupid deep". The average person will have no interaction with the abyssopelagic zone due to the pressure/temperature/general conditions down there; for a general idea, here's a demonstration of what happens to styrofoam cups. The current record for human free-diving is around 530 feet (161.5 m); so, as you can see, without a submersible, even the most enthusiastic human diver will never plunge below the euphotic/epipelagic zone.

"-pelagic" - if a fish is described as "pelagic", it means it lives in open water, not near/on the bottom of a body of water (those organisms are called "demersal") or in reefs. There are further subdivisions within these categories, but this definition of "pelagic" will suffice for the time being.

It kind of reminds me of the internal structure of the earth:

Earth's polar diameter is 7,899.80 miles (12,713.5 km); the average thickness of the continental crust is 21-43.5 miles (35-70 km), while oceanic crust is only 3-6 miles (5-10 km) thick; bear in mind that humans have never even dug to the mantle. We interact with very little of earth's interior, similarly to how little of the ocean most of us personally access.

Brief tangents into geology aside, the ocean is typically divided into about five layers; only the two uppermost layers receive any light from the sun. Generally speaking, we're most familiar/comfortable with forms of life that ultimately depend on sunlight to survive, either directly or by consuming organisms that directly use sunlight for life (i.e. plants). Note I certainly do recognize that abyssopelagic scavengers depend on the sun indirectly, by eating things like dead whales that sink to the ocean floor. Things that live in places with no sunlight (such as the aphotic zone and deep caves) tend to seem a little freaky to us.

Continuing on though, we have monkfish. I first encountered monkfish in this context, familiar to readers from the Pacific Northwest:

That is at Seattle's famous Pike Place Fish Market, where fish are tossed daily for your pleasure! Every time I've visited, they've also had at least one monkfish amid the salmon, with his happy monkfish sign. If you look closely at them, you'll figure out why they're ugly - monkfish are anglerfish!

Though I've never had them myself, they've been called "the poor man's lobster" and are evidently tasty enough to have led to an overfishing problem. They're also known as "headfish" or "goosefish"; monkfish liver used in sushi is called "ankimo". Research also reveals that their flesh is known to be marketed as a substitute for scallop, so if you're trying to make ethical seafood choices, please read your labels carefully to avoid consuming monkfish.

Okay, I'll admit - the illustration of the John Dory doesn't do this fish justice. In its blurb, they also neglected to mention that it has protusible jaws, which ups the freak factor considerably.

Additionally, my research on John Dories allows me to provide you a source for frozen John Dory halves and monkfish!, straight from the marine processors of China! If that's not enough, how about these tasteful John Dory plates, yours for the princely sum of £29.95 (~$49 US)?

OTHER NOMINEES I OBJECT TO:

The upside-down jellyfish. Jellyfish have a pretty high base level of "weird"; this one is by and large pretty normal looking, aside from the upside down business, but does that actually surprise anyone? I personally nominate the granrojo jellyfish (Tiburonia granrojo), Nature's very own Metroid:

They're about 2-3 feet wide (60-90 cm), have gross fleshy arms and live 650 to 1500 meters (2000 to 4800 feet) down. They're not much to say about them, because we don't know much about them. However, one interesting feature is that their number of arms of variable between individuals. George Matsumoto, an MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) biologist who was lead author on the paper in which granrojo was first described, has this to say about it:

The feature that researchers find most intriguing is a collection of short stumps protruding from Big Red's surface—so- called "oral arms" that might be used for feeding. What mystifies Matsumoto is why some of these jellies have four arms, whereas others have six or seven.

"It is like finding one human with four arms, another with three, and another with two," says Matsumoto.

(2003, May 5). Mbari news - big red jelly surprises scientists. Retrieved from http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2003/nr03-matsumoto.html

They're huge, freaky and AWESOME. The MBARI press release also has links to more images of granrojo, which I strongly recommend you look at.

My final objection is the crown-of-thorns starfish. Yes, I changed my mind from earlier. While yes, their appearance is can be kind of concerning, starfish (more appropriately called "sea stars" because they are echinoderms, not fish, but I call cuttlefish "cuttlefish" so I clearly don't care all that much) are by and large a pretty freaky group.

Starfish are popular with children because of their familiar shape. However, their familiar shape is kind of inherently freaky because they exhibit radial symmetry. Humans and most animals exhibit bilateral symmetry; that is, we have a left and right side that would more or less match up if we were folded in half along a vertical axis. Organisms with radial symmetry only have a top or bottom, no right or left. Think about that for a second and recognize how utterly alien that would be to the human experience, to have no right or left. The evolutionary biology of starfish

Other organisms that exhibit radial symmetry include jellyfish, some types of sea anemones, sea urchins (bearers of custardy gonads, considered a delicacy in many cultures), sea lilies and many plants.

Then there's the way that starfish eat. To put it bluntly, they have two stomach, one which they evert (basically, push out of their bodies) to engulf/digest food, one to further digest food. Some are able to force their everted stomachs inside the protective shells of soft-bodied mollusks (e.g. clams) to devour them within their own homes.

But as far as plain freaky visual appearance goes, the crown-of-thorns starfish is a non-entity compared to say, the basket star:

Tanenbaum, J. (2006, June 15). Jacob tanenbaum: teacher at sea: 06/01/2006-07/01/2006. Retrieved from http://jacobtanenbaum.com/~tasblog/2006_06_01_archive.html

I know I am not the only one getting a Lovecraftian vibe from this thing. Look at the arms! The mouth! The everything! Also, they're pretty large, with the central disk growing up to 5.5 inches (15 cm) across. JUST THE DISK. Did I mention they don't have blood? And look like dendritic structures inside the brain, except they're mobile, huge and have regenerative limbs?

Here's a video to help drive home how...special...they are:

In case you didn't find that unsettling, let's also meet their cousins, the brittle stars!

And a final video, in honor of Halloween. One of the defense/stress mechanisms of sea cucumbers (another echinoderm; while many cultures eat them, they are NOT sea vegetables, they are mobile organisms) is to violently expel parts of its respiratory organ out of its anus. It is things like this that make me happy to be a human, for while I may cope with stress poorly, my reactions do not include violently crapping out my lungs.

When they do this (called "evisceration" for obvious reasons), they may expel a nasty chemical soup that will hopefully take care of the predator...however, if you're keeping sea cucumbers in a tank, it may also kill all the other inhabitants in a charming process called "cuke nuke". GAME OVER, PLEASE INSERT COIN AND TRY AGAIN. They do grow these organs back, but depending on the violence of the evisceration, the cucumber may be injured in the process.

So, for your pleasure, here are some divers molesting a sea cucumber to get it to demonstrate this marvelous ability. While I personally think molesting sea cucumbers is rather rude, evisceration evidently pretty normal for them.

Hope you enjoyed, have a Happy Halloween!

A is for ammonite

2009-10-10T03:57:00.004-04:00

I may have mentioned to some of you that the other day I woke up with a single sentence on my lips: "A is for Anomalocaris", my Cambrian super-predator BFF. This thought launched a brilliant/horrible idea: A blog series/potential children's book on aquatic creatures from A-Z! Fabulous! So, starting today, I present you with A, which is not in fact for anomalocaris, but AMMONITE.

A IS FOR AMMONITE
What's an ammonite?

Ammonites are extinct cephalopods, related to celebrated extant creatures such as octopus, squid, cuttlefish and the relative who they most superficially resemble, the nautilus. Sadly for us, the ammonite has been extinct for quite a while; they got iced along with the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, which happens to be the most recent mass extinction event in the history of Earth. And when I say "most recent", I am implying that there have been more, because, well, there have been more.

Anyway, despite becoming extinct, ammonites had a pretty sweet run of it. Let's consult our handy-dandy Chart of Geologic Time:

I have colored the right vertical section of the chart in tasteful hot pink to show the 435 million year run of the ammonites. As you can see, dinosaurs of any real sort were only around for roughly half of that.

Also, if you've ever wondered what period of geologic time we're currently in, we're in the Cenozoic Era, Quaternary Period, Holocene Epoch; it's that very thin sliver of time topping the rest of the history. Cephalopods have owned the earth for far longer than any of us hairless primates have been trundling around, and it's likely that they will continue to do so after we're gone.

Cryptic quasi-apocalyptic suppositions aside, ammonites, like their descendants, were numerous. Currently, the worldwide biomass of squid exceeds the worldwide biomass of humans; that is, there is more living squid matter than living human matter. Bear in mind this is just for squid, this isn't even counting all the other cephalopods.

Ammonite fossils are distributed worldwide and make very useful index fossils, special fossils that can be used to date different strata of rock because they are specific to a particular time period. Given the long reign of the ammonite, in this case specific species of ammonite are used as the rock-clocks.

So what's great about them?

#1) They are named after the Egyptian god Amun/Ammon, who was often depicted with ram's horns. People thought that ammonite fossils resembled coiled ram's horns, thus they are called ammonites.

#2) They were ridiculously diverse in terms of shape and size. Along with the traditional nautilus-shell-looking ammonites, there were crazy variations. This gallery depicts a large variety, and this thread from good ol' TONMO (The Octopus News Magazine Online; if you have more than a passing interest in cephalopods, you need to join this site NOW) has a number of images of the nipponites, the squiggliest of ammonites.

Illustration based on nipponite fossils
#3) They are the source of ammolite, a rare and lovely gemstone.

Gem-quality ammolite is found in some ammonite fossils deposited in a region once covered in a shallow inland sea that stretched from "...Alberta to Saskatchewan in Canada and south to Montana in the USA.", according to Wikipedia other ammolite resources. It is iridescent like an opal and is the official gemstone of the Canadian province of Alberta.

Personally, ammolite (and opals, natch) is one of my favorite gemstones and there is no shortage of websites out there with examples of their ammolite jewelry. I think it looks better in fossil format, personally; patterns and colors can be viewed here at the Gem Society's page on ammolite, which provides much more comprehensive mineralogical information than I am providing here.

BONUS LINK: Here's a Russian site with all sorts of colorful ammonite fossils, including some with pyrite (fool's gold).

#4) They are a natural example of the spira mirabilis.

The spira mirabilis, the "miraculous spiral", is known by approximately 8 billion different names. These names include "logarithmic spiral", "equiangular spiral", "growth spiral" and others. For the specific mathematic properties of this curve, I suggest consulting Wolfram MathWorld's page on the topic. This site is messier, but has interesting examples of the curve in nature.

#5) They range widely in size!

Ammonites can be tiny...

....or very large.

And numerous!

I leave you with a few ammonite links:

-Site about large chalk ammonite fossils viewable at Peacehaven, in the UK. There are other interesting fossilized creatures there, too.

-Beautiful gallery that shows the diversity of ammonite shapes and shells from all over the world/time. At the bottom, there's a gorgeous iridescent blue shell that's not to be missed.

-This website can direct you if you're interested in purchasing ammonite fossils, or samples of ammolite. They are not cheap. More are available here.

-FAQ on Fossil Cephalopods from the venerable Cephalopod Page, presented by Dr. James B. Wood

-Article on nautiloids by Phil Eyden from TONMO.

It's that time of year again~!

2009-10-03T20:31:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year again: The Social Media Challenge results in Seed Media Group, the maintainers of the ScienceBlogs blogging network (home to such luminaries as Zooillogix and other fine blogs), running a DonorsChoose.org donation drive.

DonorsChoose.org allows you to contribute funds to a teacher/school in need; you select the project. This year I am supporting the GeoBloggers' projects, which are listed here. The project I chose to support involves teaching meteorology to ESL students at a Title I school . The only way this project could be more up my alley is if it involved cats, weather, Gnosticism and Sumerian.

Any number/types of blogs are participating, a list can be found here, though I am biased towards supporting ScienceBlogs and encourage you to do so as well. I know some gamers are reading this; looks like Gawker Media (maintainers of Kotaku) is also participating. Basically, there's something for everyone here. If you have the means, I strongly encourage you to donate.

SOON TO COME: A SECRET PROJECT THAT I CONCEIVED OF THIS MORNING

RIP, little dudes.

2009-09-30T23:45:00.002-04:00

So not okay.

I Love Ancient Fish EPISODE I: Bowfin

2009-08-27T00:28:00.010-04:00

Image by Solomon David, curator of the fabulous PrimitiveFishes.com. Also, possessor of the most Torah-iffic name I've ever heard.

This week I visited my hometown of Sulphur, Louisiana, and couldn't help but notice the word "choupique". Choupique Bayou, some kind of Cajun sausage hut involving the word "choupique"...the word seemed familiar but wouldn't quite come to me, so I looked it up when I got home. "Choupique" is the name used for the bowfin, Amia calva, in South Louisiana.
Like so many other fish, the choupique goes by a wide variety of confusing names, such as "mudfish", "speckled cat" (probably because they have barbels; they are NOT catfish), "grindle", "cypress trout" (they are not trout), "lawyer" and "dogfish". Personally, I think "dogfish" is the worst of these because "dogfish" conjures images of small sharks, not these guys. I suppose it could be worse, there's the good ol' mahi-mahi/dolphin name issue that alarmed me as a very young fish dork.

In addition to the fish, "Choupique" is also the name of a Louisiana band depicted here in what appears to be gay Klan attire, bless their hearts (no seriously, that's just a joke guys, no allegations of racism here)
.
The bowfin, like its excellent brethren the gar, bichir, coelacanth and others, is considered a living fossil. Bowfin flourished during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of the Mesozoic, making them contemporaries of superstar dinosaurs Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus. This is not a recent fish. Like several other types of "living fossil" (e.g. Nautilidae, the nautiluses, who are spiffy and deserve their own entry), the bowfin is the only remaining member of its family (Amiidae).

PRO-TIP: Here's a handy tour of events through geologic time, courtesy the San Diego Natural History Museum. The good folks at the Geological Society of America have even made up a colorful PDF chart of geologic time that you can print up and tape to your wall/give to your loved ones so you never have to look too far to see when the PLIENSBACHIAN AGE was.

*~BOWFIN Q&A HOUR~*

So why are they called bowfin?
Bowfin are distinguished by their very long dorsal fin.

QUICK EXTERNAL FISH ANATOMY PRIMER WITH OUR FRIEND THE LARGEMOUTH BASS! THIS WILL BE USEFUL IN THE FUTURE, TRUST ME.

Courtesy KentuckyLake.com

The dorsal fin is the fin(s) running along the length of the fish's back. Most fish have fairly short dorsal fin(s); the bowfin is not most fish.
What kind of sweet prehistoric features do they have?
Bowfin have a couple: in particular, the gular plate and their kind-of lung. The gular plate is a large bony plate located in their mouths. Gular plates are not unique to bowfins, they're also found in Elopidae (ladyfishes, skip-jacks), Megalopidae (tarpon) and Albulidae (bonefishes); other types of gular plate are found in living fossil-mates the coelacanth and the bichir. For photographic details, here's a drawing from The Dictionary of Ichthyology. Other owners of gular plates include the bowfin's evil twin, the snakehead. Notice that snakeheads have long anal and dorsal fins.
I hate to give any species bad press, so I need to say that snakeheads are not evil in their appropriate context. However, as an invasive species they can wreak havoc on ecosystems.
Regarding their lung, while bowfin do not have lungs in the same manner as lungfish, their swim bladder can function as a primitive lung and they may take oxygen by breathing air. This behavior is also exhibited by those perennial aquarium darlings, the betta and the gourami, though they possess a different type of lung-like organ (called the labyrinth organ; will be visited later). Being able to obtain oxygen through a method other than gills is very helpful when you live in low-oxygen environments, which are incidentally the habitats in which both bowfins and bettas are found.
Also, here is a picture of a bowfin skull:

Image by Udo M. Savalli

As you can see, they feature the armored head that I love so dearly in old-school fish.
Do I want to a catch a bowfin?
Maybe. Bowfin are renowned for their enthusiastic fighting and penchant for biting, much like my cat. With these fish, the fight continues after they've been removed from the water, so come prepared with leather gloves. To quote The Bowfin Anglers' Group, possibly the people on the Internet who are most excited by bowfin, "Bowfin fight like cat[fish]s or carp on speed" and "The bowfin has sharp teeth that will make hamburger of a careless thumb".
Do I want to eat a bowfin?
Depends who you ask. The good folks down at the Bowfin Anglers' Group seem to think so and provide recipes for your perusal. Folks at other message boards give opinions ranging from "tastes like fish jello", "the cats wouldn't eat it" to "if you cook it quickly after it's killed it's okay". In my neck of the woods people definitely eat bowfin, but my people are also from the swamp and eat pretty much anything, so take that with a pinch of file.
Can I keep one in an aquarium?
Not with other fish if you're not using them as feeders. Bowfin pretty much eat anything, including each other. If you're feeling saucy, I hear they're fans of crawfish.
Anything else I should know?
Male bowfin are very protective of their young, to the point that they will display aggressive behavior (i.e. take a chunk out of you) if you happen to be wandering around their habitat and they feel you have come too close their fry.
References/Recommended Reading:
Brent Courchene on bowfin
FishBase's entry on bowfin
The Bowfin Anglers' Group
Alan Richmond of the University of Massachusetts on bowfin

L-l-l-lungfish

2009-08-11T22:02:00.001-04:00

Some of y'all know that I am an enormous fan of primitive fish. They allow us a view of what the Age of Fishes was like to some extent, and everyone knows that the Devonian Period was by far the coolest part of the Paleozoic Era, which was filled with cool stuff. Anyway, I was playing around at Endangered Ugly Things yesterday and eventually came upon Ceratodus.com, an Australia-based breeder of Australian lungfish for the aquarist market. I don't want to post images from there without their permission, so just go look at their gallery - their lungfish are absolutely adorable, though all lungfish are terribly cute.
I first learned about lungfish as a child from a general "facts about animals" book my parents got me for Christmas one year. It had an illustration of a lungfish curled up in its muddy pocket and I was sold. Incidentally, this is the same book that taught me about jackdaws and Surinam toads.
Continuing with our story, it was through these links that I learned about Granddad, the oldest fish aquarium fish known, who also happens to be an Australian lungfish. Granddad has lived in Chicago since 1933, making him at least 80 years old. Next time I head over Chicago-way, I plan on paying my respects to this venerable fish.

I later ended up at Primitivefishes.com, which is pretty much a goldmine of these guys: bichirs, lungfish, coelacanths, gars (the first fish I ever caught), bowfins, bonytongues (arapaimas), knifefish, etc; awesome fish who I plan to talk about more in-depth later. This site in turn links to their forum, Aquatic Predators.com, which I intend to join and drool over - c'mon, they have a mormyrid forum! Everybody loves mormyrids!

Who can say no to a face like that?

I'm not the only lungfish lover out there, though: there's Lungfish.info and Anne Kemps Lungfish for all your lungfish info needs.
Nature also has an unfortunate editorial circa 2006 about the damming of the river that the Australian lungfish inhabits. Checking up on Wikipedia (always the scholarly source), it doesn't appear that the dam has been constructed yet (the projected timeframe was 2011) and there is substantial local opposition. Lungfish aren't the only species that would be affected by the dam: other non-human residents who'd be affected include the Mary River Cod and the Mary River Turtle, both endangered species.
More information can be found at Savethemaryriver.com, "...the official website of the SaveTheMaryRiver Coordinating Group - an organization dedicated to preventing the construction of a proposed dam on the Mary River at Traveston Crossing (Qld)."
NEWS FLASH: There was a substantial lungfish kill reported on June 25th below the North Pine Dam. More links to news articles may be found here.

Fish Tattoos

2009-06-13T21:14:00.003-04:00

Sadly, this is not about tattoos on people of fish, which I encourage if you're so inclined (although seriously people, there are other fish to get tattooed on you besides koi). No, this is about injecting fish with dye/paint under their skin to make fake varieties of fish. If you've visited your local Wal-Mart aquarium lately, you've probably noticed some guys that looked like this:

Often marketed as "painted tetras", "painted skirt tetras", or "painted glass tetras" it's a literal name - color has been injected into the fish (which is not a tetra, by the way).

The following sites provide information on this phenomenon better than I can, including details on other ways fishes' colors are altered:

Painting Live Tropical Fish, at FirstTankGuide.net
Painted Fish - Animal Cruelty, at Nippyfish
Dyed Fish Campaign at Practical Fish Keeping, a UK tropical fish magazine
Painted Glass Fish and Other Questionable Practices, at Badman's Tropical Fish
Death by Dyeing, at About.com
Painted Fish at Aquatic Community

Even my beloved corydoras are not exempt from this treatment. So yeah, just say no. I'll freely admit that I had a pink painted skirt when I was 11 and didn't know any better; I think its name was Nun. There are plenty of naturally vibrantly colored tropical fish that can grace your aquarium that haven't been subjected to sketchy procedures. Know your fish ethics!

Welcome!

2009-06-12T02:50:00.000-04:00

Hello! I am A. and this is my blog about ocean life, which is probably longer in coming than it should be.

First, some relevant info: I am not a scientist. I have been called a "science guru" before by a fourth grade teacher, which I guess means someone who knows some science stuff and really enjoys it but don't actually do science. Don't get me wrong, I would do it if I could, but I can't hack the math so I instead I study geography and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). However, I like science better and make no secret of it.
Here are some recent posts from other ocean blogs I've found of interest:

What some fisherman are saying about the spiny dogfish, courtesy blogfish.
The ecological disaster that is dolphin-safe tuna, from Southern Fried Science

Corydoras are cuter than harp seal pups and you know it.

FUTURE TOPICS:

Fictional fish
Creepy/scary fish that don't usually show up on scary/creepy fish lists
Being angry about fish marketing/labeling practices; I rant about incorrectly labeled red snappers in my dreams, so you know it's serious business
Love for batoids and pretty much anything that lived in the water during the Devonian period
Freshwater aquarium fish
Catfish fansites from the Middle East
The mysterious Oxyrhynchus fish
The exciting world of competitive betta breeding and showing
And more!

I welcome suggestions!