Remember, it’s International Cephalopod Awareness Day! Send me links to your articles that express your appreciation of our 10- and 8-armed friends, and I’ll periodically put them up right here on Pharyngula.
Deleted at the request of Brian Batson
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This ad campaign is going to have some troubles, I suspect. It’s saying something I want to hear: they’re marketing wild seafood from Alaska, and they’re trying to convince me that it is a sustainable fishery. I have my doubts; but they are about to start a series of ads to tell me that it is, and they’re pushing salmon and king crab. Mmmmm. I want to believe. Delude me, baby, I want to taste your sweet, sweet lies.
The slogan is “Grab a fork, and eat all you want. There’s a lot more out there,” though, which I find appalling. And worse, far worse, I watched the ads. Who is mouthing that slogan? Ben Stein. I heard it, and my brain instantly clicked into full cynic mode. “He’s freakin’ lying,” my brain whispered to me, “Don’t trust a word he says.” And now I’m convinced that evil goons are chumming the North Pacific with baby seal blood and killing the fish with dynamite. So, DON’T BUY WILD ALASKA SEAFOOD. It’s evil.
Ah, the power of advertising.
For all the facts on fisheries, check out blogfish—in particular, you can find out more on the topic of Alaska at this link.
Like these.
Chris Clarke callously infected me with a meme. I’m supposed to answer these five questions.
An interesting animal I had
An interesting animal I ate
An interesting animal in the Museum
An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
An interesting animal in its natural habitat
My first thought was, “Dude! These are awfully personal questions. Why are you asking for these intimate details of my sex life?” But then I noticed that he brought up my little friend Snowball (you may not want to read that), and all of his stories were about non-human animals. Oh. Never mind. That’s completely different.
Or maybe not so different…
One concept that is sometimes used in developmental biology is the idea of the “master control gene” or “master switch” — a single gene whose expression is both necessary and sufficient to trigger activation of many other genes in a coordinated fashion, leading to the development of a specific tissue or organ. It’s a handy concept on which to hang a discussion of transcription factors, but it may actually be of rather limited utility in the real world of molecular genetics: there don’t seem to be a lot of examples of master control genes out there! Pax-6 is the obvious one, a gene that initiates development of the eye, and other genes may be mentioned in certain stem cell pathways, but even in the eyes of vertebrates, for example, eye development is more complicated than a single switch, and similarly, many other developmental processes seem to use multiple or redundant regulatory controls — the cases where we have a single gene bottleneck are either rare or poorly represented in the literature.
They’re still at least pedagogically useful, though — it’s a simple case of imposition of a specific developmental pathway on a patch of tissue.
Feathers only rarely fossilize, so the distribution of feathers in dinosaurs is difficult to determine. Sometimes feathers mark the bones, though, and bones do preserve well. Here’s an example: the forearm of a Velociraptor retains an array of small bony bumps evenly spaced along its length. What could they be?
People, don’t do this to me. I’ve got all this work I’ve got to get done so that I’m free to go on a date this evening, and you keep sending me these distractions. Like, for instance, this link to a collection of Marine Invertebrate Video and Film Stock Footage. Cephalopods and nudibranchs and crustaceans and salps, all categorized (there’s even an invertebrate mating category! With 421 clips! It’s free porn!) and with thousands of high resolution videos. The previews are all free, but you can also license HD video of these beautiful action shots.
I will be disciplined, though. I’m closing the web page. I will get my writing done. I will put these links here though, so I can later return to “Brain coral spawning” and “Moray tears arms from octopus” and “Flamboyant cuttlefish feeding” and “Siphonophore With Extending Tenacles”.
Back to work.
Maybe there’s time for “Pelagic Tunicate In The Twilight Zone”?
No. Work. Get things done.
Oh, but I want…!
