This is the weirdest deep-sea video clip: a crinoid scuttling across the sea floor on its feeding appendages. These are supposed to be sessile creatures, a stalk with a flower-like fringe of many slender arms, but it’s picked itself up and started crawling.
I swear, I’m going to check under my bed just in case they’ve ended up there. That’s almost as improbable.
Eeek, that is scary. Once they come out of the waters, we’ll have triffids.
Perhaps that’s what Tiktaalik and friends were escaping from.
Bob
I think I know what happened to my rhododendrons. They are under my bed with the cigar smoking cheap whiskey drinkin’ clowns…
See floor? No wonder the marine biologists get all the face time…
I’m still sitting here trying to figure out why that makes me uneasy…hmm…ah yes…lots of appendages moving like legs…neurological fear response that is automatic in my brain..yep, it’s official! I’m uncomfortable with the damn thing!
EXTREMELY cool. Raise your hand if you have any fossil crinoids in your collection! I’ve got a slab about 40 X 20 cm that’s one of my crown jewels. Love ’em!
The whole article (from 2005) is here.
Oh, crinoids. When I was an undergraduate I worked for one year in the museum of natural history in LA, sorting and labeling echinoderms..it was always nice to find a crinoid or two among the masses of others. I never imagined them doing this though!
I think it’s kind of neat.
(Or is that neet?)
(Sorry.)
Doesn’t creep me out as much as that giant centipede you had on about 18 months ago. I’m still trying to get the pucker marks out of my seat from that one.
I swear that crinoids vid and the original article have turned up in comments here 2 or 3 times before – I think a year ago, and about a year and a half ago.
“Raise your hand if you have any fossil crinoids in your collection!”
Western New York is pretty much made of fossil crinoids.
Uh-oh. It reminds me of the old B.C. joke — which was funny, originally, in the pre-fundy Johnny Hart days — about “Clams got legs!”
They crawl across the ocean floor, despite not having brains. There’s a moral there, somewhere.
Just don’t get too close!
We need Dungeons and Dragons stats for that. So very cool, and so very unexpected.
Just because an animal looks a lot like a plant doesn’t mean it necessarily functions a lot like a plant.
I’m not up on crinoid neurology, do they have any sort of brain? If they do, then I can see volitional movement. What with motile tendrils and a detachable holdfast.
I have been blaming my cats whenever I find my fossil crinoids on the ground.
Now I sorta wonder…
This doesn’t qualify as a marching moron?
It doesn’t qualify as a marching moron: it has no brain to neglect in the first place.
I remember seeing this movie file… Wasn’t this the one from that video of a crinoid crawling down from its stem and scurrying away when it was bothered by a sea urchin?
The original article on this is:
http://palaeo-electronica.org/2007_1/crinoid/index.html
The authors lay out a number of (paleo)ecological implications for this discovery.
It just reminds me of the FSM. (Except that it is creeping rather than flying). PZ, you wouldn’t like to be touched by his noodley appendages?
Would this be an example of a transitional form? Creeping crinoids might become a future norm.
Warren, I think they already are a transitional form. When the juvenile feather stars leave the plankton to settle down in the reef, they grow a stalk like the ancestral sea lilies, but later break off from the stalk to swim or crawl away.
Apparently the sub backed over it and knocked it loose. It’s running for cover.
I think it’s kinda cute.
They apparently do this as a response to sea urchins chewing on their stalks, so there’s not much more nervous system required here than would be for, say, a slime mold… They’re not going anywhere in particular, just “away”.
Still, this is some serious faceless horror going on here. DO NOT WANT.
DO NOT WANT indeed!
Think of the chaos that would ensue if plants took a lesson from the sea lilies…
Gardens would be in total disarray from the flowers replanting themselves.
Finally something I can be less afraid of than zombies. No brian, slow moving, and it can’t survive on land.
Can we speak of theistic crinoids? After all, they have no brains… Crawling theistic crinoids, now, that is an image of horror!
Can we speak of theistic crinoids? After all, they have no brains… Crawling theistic crinoids, now, that is an image of horror!
Lago (#2):They are under my bed with the cigar smoking cheap whiskey drinkin’ clowns…
Can’t fall asleep! The clowns^W crinoids will eat me!
Sorry about the double post. I kept getting an error message that said that my comment couldn’t be added.
*whimpers* Make it go away…
I said to myself when I read the post, I said, “Rebecca, don’t you click on that link.” And then I did it anyway.
Is that anything like “Leapin’ Lizards” ?
Bob (#5) , I found a Glyptocrinus with the gastropod Cyclonema Varicosum attached to the anal tube .