Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This is the perfect Friday afternoon video, showing a persistent man finding an octopus in a seafood store, taking it home, and teaching it to play the piano. I was mesmerized by both the octopus and the guy’s creativity (with the help of a friend).
Reader Norman, who sent it to me, said this:
Since you’ve been writing about that sad female octopus starving to death, I noticed this video on YouTube. It’s ridiculously amazing. Is it a young man teaching an octopus how to play piano? Or is it an octopus teaching a young man how to teach an octopus how to play piano? It’s your call.
Your readers may find this video fascinating, as I did. A welcome respite from Mamdani, ICE, and Trump.
It’s 18 minutes long, but do you have anything better to do? I love the ending. (p.s. Ghost the Giant Pacific Octopus still seems to be alive.)
UC Davis math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson sends us some intertidal photos (with one mammal). Abby’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
And don’t forget to send in your photos!
A late summer entry from the tidepools, including a mystery through the microscope:
First, two handsome chitons: these are the fellows who cling to rocks like a limpet, and, if dislodged, curl up like a pill-bug to protect their soft undersides:
Genus Themiste (peanut worm); the species is uncertain. The body of the worm lies below the sand. The tentacles are very active (and very skittish), sweeping in particles towards the mouth:
I’ve posted some pictures of the deer that often come down to the beach before dawn. The cliffs down to the beach are quite steep in places, and sadly sometimes the deer slip and fall. This must have been a fawn (based on size). Skip the next picture if you’re not a nature-tooth-and-claw person:
Dead deer- probably a mule deer, Odocoileus hemionus:
Diaulula odonoghuei (Northern leopard dorid): This species is typically further north, although I’ve found it here a few times:
The next three photos are a puzzle to me, maybe some readers have a suggestion. They’re through a microscope. I was looking at bryozoans on a piece of kelp, when I noticed some ring-like things on stems growing out of the bryozoans. The first picture is a side view showing the stems. In the second picture you can see the (greenish) rings forming inside one of the bryozoans- the rings seem to turn peachy as they mature. The final picture shows the mature rings from above. Inaturalist hasn’t come up with a suggestion so far. From what I’ve read of marine bryozoans, I don’t think this is part of their reproductive cycle. A tentative suggestion from the Bodega Marine Lab (thanks!!) is “stemmed diatoms”; the world is a mysterious place:
Thank Ceiling Cat we have a few new batches of photos. (I’m always amazed that they do come in!) Today’s contribution are tidepool invertebrates from UC Davis math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Some final tidepool pictures from the summer. Excellent low tides will start up again in November. Thanks as usual to experts on inaturalist for some of the IDs.
The first three pictures illustrate, somewhat graphically, the sex life of mussels (who knew). Something triggers the simultaneous release of sperm (the white stuff, picture 1) and eggs (the orange stuff, picture 2) into the water (picture 3). Water temperature is one of the triggers.
Google AI assures me that this event does *not* usually happen at a low tide, but, you know, here we are. Low tide seems like a not-bad moment to me, since the eggs and sperm can find each other in a small pool, but apparently mostly they are released into open water to meet up as best they can.
Superfamily Paguroidea- hermit crab. I’m not sure of the species. Most hermit crabs move into an empty shell; this one seems to be living in an abandoned worm tube. There aren’t too many types that can straighten out enough for a tube like this:
Ophiolis aculeata (tentative ID – daisy brittle star). A small-but-lively creature, about an inch across:
Today, mathematician and Hero of Intellectual Freedom, UC Davis’s Abby Thompson has more lovely intertidal pictures from California. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
The Northern California tidepools are filling with kelp, and creatures are hiding away under it. Here are some photos while there’s still a bit of summer left. These are from July, except for the pelicans (August 1). Thanks as usual to experts on inaturalist for some of the IDs.
Tegula funebralis (black tegula): I love these tracks on the sand at low tide; it looks as though the snails are trying to tell us something:
Closeup of the barnacle-encrusted snail from the first photo:
Hesperocyparis macrocarpa (Monterey Cypress). The trunks get stroked by many hands as people pass them on their way down to the beach:
Pelecanus occidentalis(brown pelican): There must have been a large shoal of fish near shore; the pelicans (it seemed like hundreds of them) were going nuts. Their lethal dives, with those incredible beaks, makes their relation to dinosaurs look very convincing. The Point Reyes peninsula is in the background:
Family Ammotheidae (Pycnogonid-sea spider): The lumpy white spots on the legs are eggs (what a place to carry them!), which I believe makes this a female. The males carry the eggs after they are fertilized:
The next few photos are through a microscope. I have an ancient Leitz Wetzlar dissecting scope, with an old iphone precariously clamped over one eyepiece. There must be a better way, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
Diatoms: Genus Isthmia; Lou Jost’s beautiful post on WEIT on the Challenger Expedition and the diatoms they found was inspiring. It’s disconcerting, as a non-biologist, to look through a microscope at a fluffy, frothy bit of seaweed (the reddish stuff) and see, scattered all through it, these incredibly regular geometric shapes:
Phylum Foraminifera: This was a surprise to me, partly because I had never heard of foraminifera, but mostly because it turns out they’re single-celled organisms (like diatoms), so that’s one cell you’re seeing. Google AI says this about the difference between diatoms and foraminifera: “Diatoms are photosynthetic algae with silica cell walls, while foraminifera are amoeboid protists with calcium carbonate or agglutinated shells.”
There are many more elaborate/complex ones than this one (there’s one that looks a lot like a loaf of challah, for example). It’s worth googling “foraminifera” and “Ernst Haeckel” to see some amazing illustrations. The Challenger Expedition discussed by Lou Jost also collected and documented foraminifera. According to Wikipedia, the first picture of one was by “…Robert Hooke in his 1665 book Micrographia”. This book (available through WikiSource online) has charming sections like: “Of the Teeth of a Snail”, and “Of blue Mould, and of the first Principles of Vegetation arising from Putrefaction”. The possible foraminifera appears as figure X in Schema 5. He says (in Observation XI) “I view’d it every way with a better Microscope and found it on both sides, and edge-ways, to resemble the Shell of a small Water-Snail with a flat spiral Shell:” Imagine being one of the first to be able to peer into this world!
The camera for the first six pictures in an Olympus TG-7.
Today we have some lovely tidepool photos from Intellectual Heros Abby Thompson at Davis. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Thanks to her and other people who sent in photos yesterday. They will all eventually appear.
Some pictures from the late May northern California tidepools, starting with an Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone). I’ve posted several of these; they have strikingly different colors and patterns. This one seemed particularly photogenic:
Anthopleura sola (Sunburst anemone). These are common, large, and occasionally this spectacular, almost fluorescent, green (they all fluoresce under UV light).
Lissothuria nutriens (Dwarf sea cucumber). This looks like a stray chunk of starfish (it was about 1” long). You can see a few of its tube feet sticking out of the side. If caught at the right time of day, or tide, the pinkish area on the left side would expand into frilly tentacles (see the next picture from a few years ago).
Lissothuria nutriens (from 2020) showing the tentacles:
Genus Caprella. The caprellid shrimps are everywhere, like a Greek chorus for the rest of the sea life. This one is pregnant- you can see the eggs in her belly:
Epiactis handi. This is an uncommon species of Epiactis, named after the biologist Cadet Hand, who was a Director of the Bodega Marine Lab: There is (only) one cluster of these that I’ve found in a cave-like bit of the coast. It’s distinguished by the beautiful swirling pattern on its disk, and the way sand and other debris adheres to its column, unlike other Epiactis species:
Today we have photos sent in by Mark Joseph, all taken by one of his friends and reproduced with permission. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are photos from the fourth and last of my photographing friends in the local Audubon group (previous sets can be found here, here, here, and here. Her name is Connie, and these are pictures from the large city park in Grand Rapids, where the group walks every Thursday morning (and where the birds are considerably less exotic than on the birding trips of my other friends). She tends to be more “artsy” and less “birdy” than the others, and has a good eye:
Droplets on a plant:
Mini-icicle:
Patterns in the water on a pond:
But she also takes very good bird (and other critter) photos:
Yellow warbler(Setophaga petechia), a serious candidate for the cutest bird in the world (my vote probably goes to the Piping plover, but this guy might just be a close second):
Female, sitting on a nest just off of the path; we’ve seen her each of the last three Thursdays (May 22, 29, June 5); there were chicks in the nest on June 12:
That does it for now, but I will come back to my friends (I have lots of great pictures from them). Next time I’ll (re-)introduce myself, explain why I’m not much of a photographer, and present one nevertheless truly astounding picture.
News is not only slow, but what news we have is depressing. Plus I had to sit by the pond this morning while they cleaned out the algae, which scares the ducks, making them flee and hide. And they hide so well that you can’t find them or even see them. Fortunately, after a two-hour absence, they just returned (11 a.m.) and so I’m much relieved. This is why the presence of a mother duck is essential: the ducklings don’t know what to do. She herds them to a secluded spot and somehow makes them lie down and be quiet.
But nos let’s read about a colossal squid—a rarity just spotted, in a juvenile form, in the depths near the South Sandwich Islands. No, this is not an ancient squid “de-extincted” by Colossal Biosciences, nor is it what most of us thinks of as the “giant squid“, which is in another family. But this species is, as you’ll below, perhaps the biggest squid we know of in terms of mass. It also happens to be the heaviest invertebrate on Earth.
The colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is a species of very large squid belonging to the family Cranchiidae, that of the cockatoo squids or glass squids. It is sometimes called the Antarctic cranch squid or giant squid (not to be confused with the giant squid in genusArchiteuthis) and is believed to be the largest squid species in terms of mass. It is the only recognized member of the genus Mesonychoteuthis.
The species is confirmed to reach a mass of at least 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), though the largest specimens—known only from beaks found in sperm whale stomachs—may perhaps weigh as much as 600–700 kilograms (1,300–1,500 lb),making it the largest extant invertebrate. Maximum total length is ~4.2 metres (14 ft). Larger estimates exist, however these include the feeding tentacles measured on dead specimens as in life the squid’s tentacles are hidden, only released when capturing prey. If tentacles are considered, lengths of 10 metres (33 ft) and 14 metres (46 ft) exist, but the former estimate is more likely. The colossal squid has the largest eyes of any known creature ever to exist, with an estimated diameter of 27–30 cm (11–12 in) to 40 cm (16 in) for the largest collected specimen.
Voilà: an 82-second video.
Wikipedia gives a size comparison of an adult squid with a human:
A faintly fluttering specter, at first hardly visible among bits of marine snow falling in slow motion, emerged from the deep-sapphire void. The pilot of the underwater robot brought the creature to the center of the frame, giving scientists on a ship at the ocean’s surface a good view of the strange life-form. Its mostly transparent, speckled dome was topped with fins that busily flapped like tiny wings, and its tentacles were drawn up underneath it, toward its glowing red undercarriage.
There was little fanfare—just a few minutes of quiet, almost reverent observation. But the encounter, 100 years in the making, marked the first time a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) had ever been caught on film in its natural habitat.
“This is one of the planet’s true giants, living in one of our most pristine marine ecosystems,” says Kat Bolstad, an associate professor at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, who helped independently identify the creature from the footage. “It’s a source of fascination and wonder, and it also plays a huge role in Antarctic food webs.”
. . . . “We filmed it because it was beautiful and unusual, and then we kind of descended back all the way down to the seafloor to do the exploration that the rest of that dive was focused on,” the expedition’s chief scientist, Michelle Taylor of the University of Essex in England, said during a press conference. It wasn’t until a few days later, after the team heard from some glass squid experts, that the researchers fully realized the observation’s significance.
. . . “To get footage of a juvenile is so wonderful,” said Aaron Evans, an independent glass squid expert, at the press conference. Scientists know colossal squid are born tiny, and some adult specimens are preserved in collections, but their time between those stages isn’t well understood. “So for us to see this kind of midrange size, in between a hatchling and an adult, is really exciting because it gives us the opportunity to fill in some of those missing puzzle pieces to the life history of this very mysterious and enigmatic animal.”
