Friday Cephalopod: GIANT SQUID, of course!

You’ve probably already heard the news: video of a living giant squid in its natural environment has been captured for the very first time.

giantsquid

The bad news: all we’ve got right now is teasing little snippets of the video. It’s a slightly disturbing use of science in that it’s getting sensationalized for commercial purposes: it’s going to be shown on the Discovery channel on 27 January at 8pm — a very strange outlet for a scientific discovery.

The good news: Steve O’Shea, the cephalopod expert, has seen it and offered his opinion.

I can assure you that you will not be disappointed when you watch the show. In press release and title they demonize the animal again, and there has been an outcry from those involved at their doing so (but I cannot and will not get drawn into the ‘behind the scenes’ politics of all of this), but when you see this animal, alive, full-grown, beautiful, well, demon it is not. It is the most exquisite thing you will see, and it is no fleeting glimpse either – you see a LOT for a LONG time, in full colour, full HD, complete focus.

I have probably said more than I should have; I am awaiting confirmation that we can talk about it, because this announcement caught us off-guard (we had no forewarning that it would be announced today).

27 January is a day you want to mark in your calendars!

OK, now that tantalizes me. I’ll alert you all on the 27th again, and you can pretty much guarantee I’ll be glued to the TV that night.

Ah, so that’s the limit to gas consumption and global warming

Here’s how we end our dependency on fossil fuels: once it gets hot enough, we won’t be able to pump gas anymore!

The country’s all-time record of 123.26 degrees Fahrenheit was set in 1960 at the Oodnadatta Airport in Southern Australia, but it’s already so hot that people can’t even pump gas. Nikki Staskiewicz and Angela Blomeley were stranded in Oodnadatta — which bills itself as “the driest town [in] the driest state of the driest country” in the world — when they tried to fill up their tank, only to find the fuel vaporizing in the triple-digit heat.

I think gasoline vaporizes at around 60°C…so that’s plausible if their car had been baking in the sun for a while. Watch out for sparks!

It looks like it’s getting a bit warm down under. They had to add new colors to the temperature spectrum.

ausweather

Frontiers in desert tentacle sex

Joshua tree, Grand Wash Cliffs in background, Meadview AZ

In the course of writing a piece this week for KCET on the possibly upcoming Joshua tree mating season, I found a paper entitled “Asymmetric hybridization and gene flow between Joshua trees reflect differences in pollinator host specificity,” published in the most recent issue of Molecular Ecology*. You know the feeling you get when your area of expertise gets upended and you have to fit a new, fun piece of information into your worldview? This paper did that for me.

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