That army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids idea? It looks like it might be old hat. Owlmirror found an old and rather cryptic
Japanese print of armored warrior cephalopods…and there’s a much, much higher resolution image of the same at that link. I can’t quite make out what they’re fighting, though…an army of dumplings? Meatballs? Who reads Japanese out there?
I have no idea what the cephalopods flying over the city have to do with the ecological message in the small print, but heck, it’s a cool picture anyway.
Maybe it has something to do with octopuses swimming over flooded cities, but they look airborn to me.
Seattle is experiencing a surge of homicides (which are probably not statistically significant in number.) Seattle is also experiencing a surge of squid. Some irresponsible journalists are suggesting these two observations might or might not be linked.
These scurrilous allegations should be addressed by a trustworthy source, like The Typing Octopus. I mean, seriously, the murders are on dry land, with guns. I’d suspect the Sasquatch before I would some disgruntled cephalopod…and even there, the fact that the victims weren’t slammed with hurled tree trunks should let Bigfoot off the hook.
Some light reading, and otherwise…speak your mind in the comments.
The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week’s issue of Nature. Remember, it’s not too late to keep the pressure on.
This fish has an absolutely perfect name: the Rosy Lipped Batfish.
It isn’t much better in Latin, either. Ogcocephalus porrectus. No wonder it’s scowling.
Carl Zimmer wrote on evolution in jellyfish, with the fascinating conclusion that they bear greater molecular complexity than was previously thought. He cited a recent challenging review by Seipel and Schmid that discusses the evolution of triploblasty in the metazoa—it made me rethink some of my assumptions about germ layer phylogeny, anyway, so I thought I’d try to summarize it here. The story is clear, but I realized as I started to put it together that jeez, but we developmental biologists use a lot of jargon. If this is going to make any sense to anyone else, I’m going to have to step way back and explain a collection of concepts that we’ve been using since Lankester in the 19th century.
They even show up on the weather radar. I think a weather report that predicted a chance of buzzing clouds of arthropods would be cool.
