Squid A Day

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 12th is Fossil Day.I must confess, I'm glad today is the last of the Cephalopod Days. This heady pace is almost more than I can handle! The final day of ICAD is for celebrating fossil cephalopods, timed to coincide with National Fossil Day, which is totally a real thing. (Not that the other Cephalopod Days aren't a real thing, they're just differently real.)

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 12th is Fossil Day.I must confess, I'm glad today is the last of the Cephalopod Days. This heady pace is almost more than I can handle! The final day of ICAD is for celebrating fossil cephalopods, timed to coincide with National Fossil Day, which is totally a real thing. (Not that the other Cephalopod Days aren't a real thing, they're just differently real.)

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 12th is Fossil Day.I must confess, I'm glad today is the last of the Cephalopod Days. This heady pace is almost more than I can handle! The final day of ICAD is for celebrating fossil cephalopods, timed to coincide with National Fossil Day, which is totally a real thing. (Not that the other Cephalopod Days aren't a real thing, they're just differently real.)

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 11th is Myths and Legends Day.And what better way to celebrate than with an account of the newly discovered Triassic Kraken, you know, the one who made a self-portrait with the vertebral discs of dinosaurs a couple of millions years ago?

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 10th is Squid Day.It's the happiest day of the year here at Squid A Day! To celebrate (or perhaps it was just a coincidence) I attended Litquake's New Writers Workshop to get some tips on publishing my squid racing novel. The writers, agents, and publishers on the panels were very generous with their time and their advice; I came away with pages of useful notes.

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 9th is Nautilus Night.500 million years ago, at the time of the Cambrian Explosion, there was no life on land. The ocean held plenty of trilobites and other animals, but  they all lived on the seafloor--almost nobody swam freely in the water. Plectronocerus, the first fossil cephalopod, evolved and crawled on the floor just like everyone else.

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 8th is Octopus Day.There are some weird octopuses out there, I'll grant you. The tiny-but-deadly blue-ringed octopus. The Dumbo octopus with its "ear flaps"--actually fins. But I propose that Haliphron atlanticus, the seven-arm octopus, outdoes them all.Color version (from TONMO) of Figure 1 from O'Shea 2004.

Drawn by the newly arrived throngs of Humboldt squid in Southern California, an underwater photographer hopped in the water with them to snap some photos.They're smallish for Humboldts, but note how he's grabbing this one--and he didn't get bitten, not even a little bit!Of course, Schwartz was not without trepidation, especially when he snapped this shot:

I'm so used to calling computers, phones, and all sorts of other devices "electronics" that I tend to forget that word means something very specific. It means those toys are manipulating the flow of electrons--everyone's favorite itty-bitty negatively charged particles.That's particularly notable in contrast to biological systems, like you and me. Of course, our bodies are constantly manipulating all kinds of things, from lipids and proteins to vitamins and minerals, but when you get down to the really small stuff, we tend to rely on protons and ions.

To be specific, the Humboldt squid are back in California. Their opening act was a mass stranding on Black's Beach in San Diego last Saturday. A lifeguard had the most poetic commentary on the matter:"Of course, as you might imagine, there were some odors associated with that," he said. "The only thing left on the beach right now is the scent of dead squid and seagull footprints."As usual, everyone seems to be afflicted with amnesia regarding the regularity of such strandings over the past decade.

A hot new study in Nature has rearranged the molluscan family tree--with some surprising results!No one can deny that cephalopods (squids, octos, and cuttles) are the brains of the family, with their cousins the gastropods (slugs and snails) coming in a close second. We'd all assumed that these two groups were closely related, with cephalopods evolving from a gastropod-like ancestor, refining a brain that already existed.However! As summarized in the New Scientist:

Octopoteuthis is a curious animal. As the name suggests, it's a squid that looks like an octopus. Babies have eight arms and two tentacles, but they lose the tentacles as they grow up--becoming the only adult squid with eight appendages.They have other intriguing features as well. We tend to think of squid as relatively sociable animals traveling in schools or shoals, but Octopoteuthis lives a solitary life in the deep sea, rarely coming across another member of the same species.