I found a familiar octopus, and dove in repeatedly for a closer view. S/he retracted into the save haven and then stared blowing me away with a jet of water from the mantle. It literally pushed my camera aside, and I felt the freakish flow of water over my hands. Then s/he released a burst of white spew…. twice… I caught it on video, the second segment in this compilation (please click the large screen mode).
Just watched the video compilation – saw the Eagle Ray (is that what it is? Delta wing jobby with a large CB antenna hanging out back end) – very impressive! Any idea what the evolutionary purpose of that CB antenna is? I understand he sports some venomous barbs but they are elesewhere, so what’s the tail for? It’s no good as a flight control surface…
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitze1942] — good question… vestigial S&M whip…
metaid – thanks for the heads up on the Boxbe bug. I am checking on that. Meanwhile, sure, all of my photos are free to use forever with a simple photo credit:
“Photo by Jurvetson (flickr)” with a link to the original page.
I have many photos on wikipedia, and and delighted with how it works.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] I got this eco-porno feeling looking at your pixs and I thought I must be weird, but reading the link, I see I wasn’t that far off the mark.
Eating pulpo a feira will never be the same again.
Oh, that is such an unpleasant image to me now!
And I realize that the whole vampire squid banking phenomenon is riding a really positive association with some of the most fascinating creatures on Earth… They are are even showing up as decorative decoupage on hispter skis.
And they are the highlight from Gallo’s TED Talk on the mysteries of the deep:
“I wish I had more footage of this. The Vampire Squid. In the darkness of the deep sea, it has glowing tentacles. It has glowing eyes on its butt. How cool is that? It’s just an amazing animal.”
Cue up to minute 2:30 of the David Gallo’s Talk for images of cephalopods performing masterful tricks of disguise -– to hide, fight or court the ladies — sometimes at the same time. They can portray different images on their bodies to two moving observers, one male the other female, and flip the image at will as the relative positions change. Their whole body is a 200 DPI display screen that can be used for camo or comms.
They have three hearts and cool eyes too.
I got some close ups:
… 
The cuttlefish can see the polarization of light through their W-shaped pupils. Like frogs and salamanders, they can *fix* their more complex retinas when injured or damaged. They have a population of stem cells that hangs out in the glial cell population and dedifferentiates upon injury to start forming all the cell classes again, essentially remaking their retinas. (from BW)
Oh, oh, oh…and they harvest symbiotic bioluminescent bacteria to selectively erase their shadows under moonlight…. hijacking the quorum sensing pathways the bacteria use to communicate… See minute 3:08 of Bonnie’s TED talk.
And from a reseacher’s love story with octopus:
“I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink.
Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed.
Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. It is as if each arm has a mind of its own… For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.
For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.
But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officials, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.”
And if that was not strange enough, the detachable arms that think for themselves take on a whole new meaning for the males…
Which brings us back to the topic at hand here; I like they way you move. Like the jellyfish, heir pulsating motion through the water is asymmetric, forming ring vortices in one direction versus laminar flow in the other. Or, in other words, they exploit the difference between blowing and sucking.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Sexy images aside, these critters are really good eating too. Squid, cut into rings, deep fried a la romana in olive oil, wash it down with a not so dry white wine… Alboriño maybe. Yummy.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/24270806@N06] It’s (her?) something that has us worried.
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