Carl Zimmer tells us all about the recent big dodo find, in both the pages of the Grey Lady and a podcast. He’s a master of multimedia, that guy.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Carl Zimmer tells us all about the recent big dodo find, in both the pages of the Grey Lady and a podcast. He’s a master of multimedia, that guy.
Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that’s another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they didn’t. The lesson was that if you wanted to learn how your brain worked, often the most fruitful approach was an indirect one, using comparative studies to work out the commonalities and differences in organization, and try to correlate those with differences and similarities in function.
At about that time, I also discovered the work of the great physiologist, JZ Young, who had done a great deal of influential work on the octopus as a preparation for studying brain and behavior. (Young, by the way, went by the informal name “Jay-Zed”, and there you have another clue to my affectation of using my first and middle initial as if it were a proper name.) It was around then that I was developing that peculiar coleoideal fascination a few of the readers here might have noticed—it was born out of an appreciation of comparative biology and the recognition that cephalopods represented a lineage that independently acquired a large brain and complex behavior from the vertebrates. To understand ourselves, we must embrace the alien.
Young’s attempts to understand mechanisms of learning in memory in the octopus were premature, unfortunately—they have very complex brains, and we made much faster progress using simple invertebrates, like Aplysia, to work out the basics first—but it’s still the subject of ongoing research. I was very pleased to run across a general overview of the octopus brain in The Biological Bulletin.
It’s a bonus movie for the Friday Cephalopod: the octopus is a master of camouflage.
O Australia! I wish I could switch continents!
It’s got bats, it’s got clever giant albino centipedes, it’s got sudden death: it’s the perfect lunch hour movie for Pharynguloids.
Maybe half of my audience here will be familiar with this problem. You’re a man, and you’re hauling this massive, ummm, package around in your pants everywhere you go. Other men fear you, while the women worship you…yet at the same time, your e-mail is stuffed to bursting with strange people making friendly offers to help you make it even bigger. It’s a dilemma; you think you would be even more godlike if only it were larger, but could there possibly be any downside to it? (There is a bit of folk wisdom that inflating it drains all the blood from the brain, but this is clearly false. Men who are stupid when erect are also just as stupid when limp.)
A couple of recent studies in fish and spiders have shown that penis size is a matter of competing tradeoffs, and that these compromises have evolutionary consequences. Guys, trash that e-mail for penis enlargement services—they can make you less nimble in pursuit of the ladies, or worse, can get you killed.
Some of you may recall a movie of mating slugs I mentioned before…now here’s a site with photos of the act.
In case you’re baffled, the strange translucent blue sheets hanging down are the interwined penises of the two slugs. Don’t they make a beautiful couple?
(Thanks, Craig Clarke! Does your mother know you browse the web for molluscan porn?)
There are always a few strange leads to cephalopod miscellany in my mailbag…people have this odd idea that I like tentacled molluscs. So here we go, a few strange things on the strange ol’ internet.
This t-shirt is anatomically incorrect! I’m not sure what that thing is, but it’s no cephalopod I’ve ever seen. Although I suspect he’s wondering what that strange pink beast does with those two stumpy tentacles.
I wish I had a giant squid at my dinner table. At least it’s anatomically more reasonably drawn.
There are an awful lot of knitters with a strange fascination with cephalopods.
One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and wormlike, and that it lived over 600 million years ago, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of beast likely to be preserved in fossil deposits.
We do have a tool to help us get a glimpse of it, though: the analysis of extant organisms, searching for those common features that are likely to have been present in that first bilaterian; we’re looking for the Last Common Bilaterian by finding the Least Common Denominators among living species. And one place to look is among the flatworms.
This really sounds delicious.
Hand-grilled in iron molds by cooks behind a large display window, the octopus dumplings are made from wheat flour paste mixed with fish stock, spring onions and boiled octopus chunks, and drizzled with a sweet sauce, dried bonito flakes and seaweed.
I could go for some takoyaki right now. Unfortunately, the bad news is that it’s from a story about introducing cephalopods as mass-market fast food in the US. If they became popular here, kiss a lot of beautiful molluscs good bye.
I’m going to have to advocate more vegetarianism, I’m afraid. Maybe we could indulge in some octopus dumplings on a few special occasions, but we’d be better off turning fruit and vegetables into the next big food fad.
<sigh> But seafood tastes so good…
