All this talking I've been doing about those nasty ol' sperm whales hunting down and devouring poor defenseless squid (okay, they're not quite defenseless, but still) might make you think I'm a whale-hater. Not so! In fact, I harbor (heh heh) considerable sympathy for the cetaceans of the world, especially with regard to their tragic toxic burden.

Just saw a PR blurb about a new iPhone game called Squid Kid.

Squid Kid lets the player swing in any direction, cut corners, find short cuts and capture the most notorious villains the ocean has ever seen, what more do you want! . . . SquidKid's touch control system is simple to learn while the levels have hidden depths, giving users days worth of fun game play. Squid Kid adds a twist to the normal run and jump, Super Mario Bros style platform games, as you can swing and fling yourself in any direction.

Okay, this is really cool. It's an interdisciplinary project between biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to understand and, eventually, mimic cephalopod skin.

One of Hanlon's many discoveries is that cephalopod skins contain opsins, the same type of light-sensing proteins that function in eyes.

"The presence of opsin means they have some primitive vision sensor embedded in their skin," Halas said. "So the questions we have are, 'What can we, as engineers, learn from the way these animals perceive light and color? Do their brains play a part, or is this totally downloaded into the skin so it's not using animal CPU time?"

Cephalove recently had a couple of lovely posts about that most famous of squid symbioses: the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes and the bioluminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri. It's become a model system for all kinds of questions about bacteria-host relationships, including pathogenic ones (read: bacterial disease). And it's an excuse to add adorable photos to otherwise not-very-photogenic stories about microbes! See:

Almost nothing in the ocean can resist eating squid. That includes the macaroni penguin, which "live almost entirely on krill" but "do supplement their krill diet with up to five percent squid."

I wonder if they get specific nutrients from squid that are lacking in krill? Someday when I have more time I'll have to pursue that . . .