Untitled

Girl look at that body,

Girl look at that body,

Girl look at that body,

We should probably call the police who knows how long it’s been in the river.

♡Love/Couples♡

Brinicles are super saline, super cooled water that sinks beneath the surface, freezing the water immediately around it. It continues sinking until it reaches the bottom, where it then starts to spread out covering the ocean floor with beautiful icicles.

Cnidaria, Light Sheet Microscopy

Immunostaining of planktonic Cnidari (Cnidarians). Acetylated tubulin (green), myosin (red), nuclei (blue). Image taken with ZEISS Lightsheet Z.1 during the EMBO course on Marine Animal Models in Evolution & Development, Sweden 2013. Sample courtesy of Helena Parra, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Barcelona.

VITRELEDONELLA RICHARDI: the glass octopus

Habitat: tropical and subtropical seas || mesopelagic to bathypelagic zones

_________________________________________

PHYLOGENY Eukaryotes  >  Animalia  >  Bilateria  >  Mollusca  >  Cephalopoda  > Octopodiformes  >  Octopoda  >  Octopodoidea  >  Incirrata  > Family: Vitreledonellidae Robson, 1932  >  Genus: Vitreledonella  > Species: Vitreledonella richardi Joubin, 1918

[sources: TOLweb and Wikipedia] _________________________________________

Acknowledgment to Pharyngula for posting a photo of Vitreledonella richardi as the January 10 2014 Friday Cephalopod.

SOURCES: News - DeepSee, Tree of Life Web, Wikipedia

A fleet of tiny cephalopods. Masters of intrigue and optical illusion. 

Learn more here.  photo by Ken Kasuga

http://lessthannotatall.tumblr.com asked: “howdy! do you know what kind of animal this is? post/49490428447”

It is called the Bobbit worm. They can grow up to 3 meters (9 feet) long, and sometimes attack their prey with such speed that the fish is sliced in half.

The Sand Bubbler Crab (Scopimera inflata) is found in regions of the tropical indo-pacific. They are significantly tiny, usually around 1 cm in size. Sand bubblers sieve detritus from the sand, regurgitating unwanted particles in the form of tiny balls deposited all over the beach.

Sand Bubblers live in burrows in the sand where they remain during the high tide. At low tide they feed, forming inflated pallets all over then sand. The crab feeds on material of very low organic matter concentration which is able to be increased by the egestion of indigestible material.

Starting in 1995, strange underwater patterns were spotted on the seafloor off the coast of southern Japan. These 2m (6.5ft) intricate patterns in the sand were a complete mystery, with no sign of their origin to be seen.

It wasn’t until 2011 that the culprits were discovered — each circle is created by a tiny male pufferfish, swimming back and forth over the sand and carving out the patterns with his fins. It seems that the pattern serves to attract a female, and once eggs have been laid and fertilized in the center the complex grooves and ridges neutralize water currents to protect the developing offspring.

[Image source and more information.]

Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini)

Source: Giant Pacific Octopus - All About Octopuses (National Aquarium Baltimore)

Got plans this weekend? 

We’re going shark diving » 

See you in the tank! 

Photos of the very unusual mantis shrimp by Roy Caldwell from Wired’s Absurd Creature of the Week feature. Check it out for plenty of fun facts about this “honey badger of the sea”.

Doodlin’ today.

Cuttlefish Remember What, Where and When They Ate

In 1998, Nicky Clayton from the University of Cambridge published the first of many seminal experiments with western scrub-jays, showing that they can remember where they had stored food and which hoards were freshest. In other words, these bird brains also have episodic-like memories. We say “episodic-like” since we can’t really know if the animals store their what-where-when information into single coherent memories in the way that we do. Still, it’s clear that the components are there.

Since then, the episodic-like memory club has grown to include the great apes, rats, hummingbirds, and pigeons. But these are all mammals and birds. Christelle Jozet-Alves from Normandie University wanted to know if the same skills existed in animals that are very different to these usual suspects. She turned to the common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis).

Like octopuses and squid, cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) are cephalopods—a group of animals known for their amazing color-changing skin and sophisticated intelligence. Cuttlefish are separated from birds and mammals by almost a billion years of evolution. But Jozet-Alves, together with Clayton and Marion Bertin, has shown that they too can “keep track of what they have eaten, and where and how long ago they ate”.

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