The official DOOM octopus thread

[cranefly]

Oh, crikey (Krackeny?).
LCF keeps pointing me to insect and tarantula mounting classes at Paxton Gate.  But I don't know.  Just not into preserving exotic bugs and insects that way in the home these days.

But an octopus?  So tempting.  And so bloody not a good idea -- for me, at least.

Because I wouldn't be arranging it for mounting on some wall plaque.

I'd be bringing along a nude female clay sculpture I did a few years ago and...

Need I say more?

Again, so tempting.  But no.  Must not do.

(But I'll be checking back here later today for an animated gif.)

[Drunk Monk]

back here later today for an animated gif.

[thatguy]

back here later today for an animated gif.

[Drunk Monk]

[Greg]

Here at the Venn diagram intersection of the Doom Octopus thread and the Japanese food thread I give you:

Japanese Company Creates Sea Creature Teabags That “Come Alive” Inside Your Cup
June 18, 2019

Available online, these will turn your tea sessions into lessons on marine biology.
Japanese tea bag maker Ocean-Teabag has been making waves by creating little parcels of aroma in the shape of marine animals. Luckily for us, their wide range of tea bags are available at online Japanese novetly retailer Village Vanguard, maker of such fine products as Space Tea and cat-shaped kitchen utensils.

[img=700x0]https://moon-child.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/squid-octopus-ocean-teabags-japan-13-5d089d7d16a3a__700.jpg[/img]

[img=700x0]https://moon-child.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/squid-octopus-ocean-teabags-japan-12-5d089d7962f77__700.jpg[/img][img=700x0]https://moon-child.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/squid-octopus-ocean-teabags-japan-10-5d089d7553f3c__700.jpg[/img]

[img=700x0]https://moon-child.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/squid-octopus-ocean-teabags-japan-6-5d089d6d74da6__700.jpg[/img]

You can find out more here: Octopus Tea Bags

[Drunk Monk]

[Drunk Monk]

HOME / PHOTOGRAPHY / UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY

Rare Octopus With Transparent Head Caught by Blackwater Photographer [Interview]

By Madeleine Muzdakis on December 7, 2020

Wonderpus octopus larvae (Photo: Wu Yung-sen)
The depths of the ocean are a powerful draw for researchers, experienced divers, and photographers alike. The vast bodies of water which cover over 70 percent of the planet’s surface are still being explored and documented. Lured by mystery, blackwater photographers dive at night into icy, pitch-dark depths. Taipei-based photographer Wu Yung-sen has been deep sea diving and photographing marine life for four years. On a recent blackwater dive—unable to see the bottom and surrounded by impenetrable space—he chanced upon a rare larval Wunderpus octopus. A stunning image captures the encounter; it shows the delicate and transparent baby octopus encasing its own brilliantly red brain, a sight few ever witness in the wild.
The Wunderpus octopus—called Wunderpus photogenicus, literally meaning photogenic wonder—was only first officially described by researchers in 2006. The animal is still understudied compared to other octopi. The species lives in the coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean south of the Philippines. The adults are a rusty red with white spots and stripes. They possess an ability to contort themselves to mimic other similarly shaded sea creatures, such as the venomous spiny lion fish. This protective mechanism, however, does not benefit the young translucent larvae.
The specimen encountered by Yung-sen while blackwater diving in Anilo in the Philippines was in this lifecycle phase and presented a visible brain within its translucent head. The avid diving photographer—who also works as a business consultant—knew he was seeing a rare phenomenon. Luckily, he snapped the image before the young octopus could drift away.
Yung-sen was able to capture this elusive creature—and many others—by using the special techniques employed by blackwater divers. These enthusiasts hope to encounter the unusual, solitary life forms in the open ocean. Blackwater divers take a boat out to sea until the depth exceeds two kilometers. Lights on long lines are lowered first, then the divers descend. They remain tethered to the boat for safety and stability, as they sit and wait about 50 meters below the surface. The lights first attract microscopic zooplankton. The plankton in turn draw small planktonic creatures which feed on the minuscule organisms. Jellyfish, squid, and larval (baby) fish drift in to feed under the suspended light. In blackwater photography images such as those of Yung-sen, the tiny marine life appears isolated against an endless expanse of darkness. Up and down are indistinguishable as the strange species hang suspended under the single lightsource.
For Yung-sen, blackwater photography is a way to explore the limits of the natural world, unseen by many. However, he is also an award-winning photographer in much shallower waters. The ambitious photographer won the Taiwan National Award in the Sony World Photography Awards for his image of migrating salmon in British Columbia, Canada. To get the shot, Yung-sen lay in the freezing river for hours.
Whether he is lying in a river or deep sea diving, Yung-sen's wildlife photography brings aquatic wildlife to a global audience. My Modern Met recently had a chance to catch up with Yung-sen to discuss blackwater photography and his memorable octopus photo. Read on for our exclusive interview with the intrepid wildlife photographer.


[b]What first got you interested in blackwater photography?[/b]

Blackwater is the ultimate frontier for me. The purpose of blackwater photography is to explore an unknown world, and to look for new life and new species in the vast sea, showing the side of creatures that people barely know.


[b]What is the biggest challenge of this type of photography?[/b]

The most difficult thing is finding creatures. First, it’s a matter of luck to encounter creatures. Afterwards, taking photos in a gravity-free environment seems like I am chasing alien creatures up and down. That’s exactly how I feel!
You must meet the four factors of black water photography:
1. Top neutral buoyancy
2. Experienced diving center
3. Suitable lights, reliable equipment
4. Wait
[b]What is the appeal of blackwater photography for you?[/b]
Because most of the blackwater creatures are larvae, they are mostly transparent, and some of them even expose their organs. The most interesting thing about blackwater photography is that larvae and adults are totally different. I didn’t know what I would get before shooting. For example, the stomach of some species of flounder larvae is exposed outside the body. Because of that, the viewers are stunned by these precious pictures. I hope that everyone can understand this strange and beautiful new world through my photos. The fun of shooting in blackwater is that you can meet unknown larvae. Most of larvae have exaggerated and transparent looks, so I want to show these incredible alien-like creatures through photography.
[b]Do you have a most memorable photo?[/b]
The larva of Wunderpus [see lead image]. Unlike the adult, the head is very large and the body is transparent. Especially, when it opens the tentacles completely.

[b]Wu Yung-sen: 500 PX | Facebook[/b]
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Wu Yung-sen.

[Drunk Monk]

https://octonation.com/

[Greg]

Spoiler Alert: This trailer is tentacle free despite the title and the bait and switch left this reviewer cold.

[Drunk Monk]

An Octopus Could Be the Next Model Organism
Big-brained cephalopods could shine light on the evolution and neurobiology of intelligence, complexity, and more—and inspire medical and technological breakthroughs

• By Rachel Nuwer | Scientific American March 2021 Issue
  

The first octopus genome sequenced was from a California two-spot octopus (species pictured here). Credit: Joel Sartore
Humans are more closely related to dinosaurs than they are to octopuses. Our lineage split from that of cephalopods—the spineless class that includes octopuses, squids and cuttlefish—half a billion years ago. Octopus brains lack any of the major anatomical features of vertebrate brains, and most of the animals' neurons are distributed across their arms rather than in their head.
Yet octopuses are extremely intelligent, with a larger brain for their body size than all animals except birds and mammals. They are capable of high-order cognitive behaviors, including tool use and problem-solving, even figuring out how to unscrew jar lids to access food. Increasingly, some researchers are suggesting octopuses' combination of smarts and sheer difference from humans could make them an ideal model for inferring common rules governing complex brain function, in addition to revealing novel neurological workarounds cephalopods have evolved.
Scientists have often turned to animals, among them Drosophila fruit flies, zebra fish and Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes, to gain biological insight and understanding. But of all the widely studied “model species” that are easy to raise in the laboratory, rodents such as mice have been most instrumental in understanding how the brain works.
“The advantage of the mouse is that its brain is remarkably similar to the human brain, whereas the advantage of the octopus is that it's remarkably dissimilar,” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. Comparing and contrasting these systems with our own, she says, “gives you that logical power of reduction.” Nematodes and fruit flies are also very dissimilar to humans, she notes, but octopuses eclipse these fellow invertebrates in terms of complexity. Recognizing the unique opportunity cephalopods provide as vastly different yet highly sophisticated creatures, Dölen and other neuroscientists are rooting for them to become the field's newest model organism.
Using octopuses to gain insight into our own species was originally proposed in the 1960s by neurophysiologist J. Z. Young. The idea moved within reach in 2015, when scientists sequenced the first octopus genome, for the California two-spot octopus. “A whole genome opens up huge levels of information you didn't have before,” says Clifton Ragsdale, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the octopus genome study in Nature.
As was the case with other model species, publishing the octopus genome paved the way for critical modes of investigation, the researchers say. These include using genetic engineering to probe how the brain works, zooming in on where specific genes are expressed, and exploring evolution by calculating differences between octopus genes and those of other species.
“We're at a really exciting moment for working with these remarkable animals,” says Caroline Albertin, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and lead author of the genome study. “There's just a vast ocean of research and questions that we need to explore.”
Toward that end, researchers have begun developing cephalopod versions of the same molecular tools that those working with mice or flies take for granted. Last summer in Current Biology, Albertin and her colleagues described the first cephalopod gene knockout (inactivating a gene to study what it does). Now the same team is working on gene knock-ins that will, for example, let scientists insert activity indicators into octopus cells. This process will let them study the animals' neural activity in real time, says Marine Biological Laboratory researcher Joshua Rosenthal, who co-authored the knockout study. “Once we get that next step,” he says, “I think the community is just going to start exploding.”
Research is already accelerating. In 2018 Dölen and co-author Eric Edsinger dosed octopuses with MDMA and found that although they are typically antisocial, they respond to a drug-induced flood of the neurotransmitter serotonin the same way humans do: they relax and become more sociable. Through genome analysis, the scientists also confirmed that octopuses possess the same serotonin transporters that MDMA binds to in vertebrates. As reported in Current Biology, this finding suggests that sociality could involve a molecular mechanism rather than being rooted in specific vertebrate brain regions.
Other labs are investigating how octopus arms sense and interact with their environment with minimal input from the brain. Last fall researchers reported in Cell that specialized receptors in octopus suckers detect chemicals on surfaces they contact, enabling them to taste by touching. “This is an example of how we need to consider studying life in all shapes and sizes to really understand how molecular and cellular adaptations give rise to unique organismal features and functions,” says Nicholas Bellono, a molecular and cellular biologist at Harvard University and senior author of the Cell study.
Scientists will soon have even more resources to draw on. In 2016 the Marine Biological Laboratory launched a cephalopod breeding program to culture research animals. Albertin and program manager Bret Grasse are now working with Dölen and other colleagues to sequence the genome of Octopus chierchiae—a golf ball–to tangerine-sized Central American species that is the leading candidate for an octopus model organism. O. chierchiae's small size would make it ideal for raising in a lab, and unlike a number of other octopus species, scientists have figured out how to breed it.
Cephalopods will no doubt bring more insights into fundamental biology. Technological breakthroughs could follow, too. Materials researchers are interested in the animals' skin for its incredible camouflage ability, for example, and computer scientists may someday draw on octopuses' separate learning and memory systems—one for vision and one for tactile senses—for new approaches to machine learning.
Octopuses could also inspire biomedical engineering advances. Rosenthal is studying cephalopods' incredibly high rates of RNA editing, which could someday lead to new technologies to erase unwanted mutations encoded in human genomes. Ragsdale is investigating how octopuses quickly regenerate their arms, nerve cords and all; this might one day contribute to therapies for humans who lose limbs or have brain or spinal cord damage. “Biology has pretty much figured out a solution to almost everything,” Rosenthal says. “We just have to find it.”

This article was originally published with the title "A Model Octopus" in Scientific American 324, 3, 12-15 (March 2021)

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0321-12

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)



Rachel Nuwer

• [url=https://twitter.com/@RachelNuwer][/url]
  

Rachel Nuwer is a freelance journalist and author of Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking (Da Capo Press, 2018). She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Credit: Nick Higgins

[thatguy]

Ok, it's NOT an octopus, but...


https://www.livescience.com/23634-galler...-hell.html

Gallery: Vampire Squid from Hell
By Stephanie Pappas October 02, 2012
Vampire of the Deep

(Image credit: Kim Reisenbichler © 2005 MBARI)
Vampyroteuthis infernalis, literally "vampire squid from hell," is a mysterious deep-sea species. Research published in September 2012 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals that these strange animals "fish" for ocean detritus using a long filament appendage, seen here in white.
The Vampire's Mouth

(Image credit: © 2011 MBARI)
Vampire squid get their name from their cloak-like webbed arms. The squid's mouth is at the center of its arm web. Finger-like projections on the arms may help the animal move food to its mouth.
Feeding Vampire Squid

(Image credit: © 2008 MBARI)
This close-up view shows a vampire squid using its arms to scrape food off of one of its filaments.
Vampire Squid

(Image credit: © 2011 MBARI)
This frame grab from an underwater video shows a vampire squid in a typical feeding position, drifting horizontally in the deep sea with one of its filaments extended.
RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU...
Vampire Squid Filament

(Image credit: © 2008 MBARI)
Vampire squid have two filaments, but normally only extend one. This passive scavenging strategy allows the squid to survive in low-oxygen areas of the ocean without expending much energy. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute observed this feeding behavior in the wild and in captive squid.
Vampire Squid

(Image credit: © 2010 MBAR)
The vampire squid's filament allows it to collect "marine snow," or floating debris. Squid end up chowing down on a mix of dead crustacean bits, larvae and fecal matter.
Vampire Squid

(Image credit: © 2004 MBARI)
According to study researcher Henk-Jan Hoving, the vampire squid is the first known cephalopod not to hunt live prey.

--tg

[cranefly]

That last photo of a vampire squid above...  I'm thinking that it would make a wonderful hat.

Especially for when skiing down a black diamond slope.

[Drunk Monk]

This is kind of a gamechanger. I've always considered the octopus to be sentient and squid to be dumb, kinda like Yeti's take on yetis vs. sasquatches. I haven't formed an opinion on cuttlefish but until now, I've been lumping them in with squid.

Sepia officinalis. (Schafer & Hill/The Image Bank/Getty Images)

NATURE
A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children

MICHELLE STARR
3 MARCH 2021
A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence.
Cuttlefish have been put to a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appear to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew.
Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in.
The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told if they can manage not to eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they'll get a second marshmallow, and be allowed to eat both.
This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such as future planning, and it was originally conducted to study how human cognition develops; specifically, at what age a human is smart enough to delay gratification if it means a better outcome later.
Because it's so simple, it can be adjusted for animals. Obviously you can't tell an animal they'll get a better reward if they wait, but you can train them to understand that [i]better[/i] food is coming if they don't eat the food in front of them straight away.
Some primates can delay gratification, along with dogs, albeit inconsistently. Corvids, too, have passed the marshmallow test.
Last year, cuttlefish also passed a version of the marshmallow test. Scientists showed that common cuttlefish ([i]Sepia officinalis[/i]) can refrain from eating a meal of crab meat in the morning once they have learnt dinner will be something they like much better - shrimp.
As a team of researchers led by behavioural ecologist Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge point out in a new paper, however, in this case it's difficult to determine whether this change in foraging behaviour in response to prey availability was also being governed by an ability to exert self-control.
So they designed another test, for six common cuttlefish. The cuttlefish were placed in a special tank with two enclosed chambers that had transparent doors so the animals could see inside. In the chambers were snacks - a less-preferred piece of raw king prawn in one, and a much more enticing live grass shrimp in the other.
The doors also had symbols on them that the cuttlefish had been trained to recognise. A circle meant the door would open straight away. A triangle meant the door would open after a time interval between 10 and 130 seconds. And a square, used only in the control condition, meant the door stayed closed indefinitely.
In the test condition, the prawn was placed behind the open door, while the live shrimp was only accessible after a delay. If the cuttlefish went for the prawn, the shrimp was immediately removed.
Meanwhile, in the control group, the shrimp remained inaccessible behind the square-symbol door that wouldn't open.
The researchers found that all of the cuttlefish in the test condition decided to wait for their preferred food (the live shrimp), but didn't bother to do so in the control group, where they couldn't access it.
"Cuttlefish in the present study were all able to wait for the better reward and tolerated delays for up to 50-130 seconds, which is comparable to what we see in large-brained vertebrates such as chimpanzees, crows and parrots," Schnell said.
The other part of the experiment was to test how good the six cuttlefish were at learning. They were shown two different visual cues, a grey square and a white one. When they approached one, the other would be removed from the tank; if they made the "correct" choice, they would be rewarded with a snack.
Once they had learnt to associate a square with a reward, the researchers switched the cues, so that the other square now became the reward cue. Interestingly, the cuttlefish that learnt to adapt to this change the quickest were also the cuttlefish that were able to wait longer for the shrimp reward.
That seems like cuttlefish can exert self control, all right, but what's not clear is why. In species such as parrots, primates, and corvids, delayed gratification has been linked to factors such as tool use (because it requires planning ahead), food caching (for obvious reasons) and social competence (because prosocial behaviour - such as making sure everyone has food - benefits social species).
Cuttlefish, as far as we know, don't use tools or cache food, nor are they especially social. The researchers think this ability to delay gratification may instead have something to do with the way cuttlefish forage for their food.
"Cuttlefish spend most of their time camouflaging, sitting and waiting, punctuated by brief periods of foraging," Schnell said.
"They break camouflage when they forage, so they are exposed to every predator in the ocean that wants to eat them. We speculate that delayed gratification may have evolved as a byproduct of this, so the cuttlefish can optimise foraging by waiting to choose better quality food."
It's a fascinating example of how very different lifestyles in very different species can result in similar behaviours and cognitive abilities. Future research should, the team noted, try to determine if indeed cuttlefish are capable of planning for the future.
The team's research has been published in [i]Proceedings of the Royal Society B[/i].

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Smart Calamari ™

[Drunk Monk]

Smart Calamari ™

Band name?

This Species Of Octopus Has A Detachable Penis
[img=713x0]https://cdn.iflscience.com/assets/site/img/ifls-placeholder.png?v=1.3.51[/img]
FEMALE ARGONAUTA ARGO WITH EGGCASE AND EGGS. BERND HOFMANN/WIKIPEDIA COMMONS CC BY-SA 2.0.
By Danielle Andrew
22 AUG 2015, 18:14

The argonaut, the only cephalopod to secrete and live in a shell of its own making, is a unique sea creature that swims via jet propulsion – using powerful jets of water squirted through a funnel in its shell.
Male argonauts tend to grow to up to a few centimeters in length, only about 10% of the size of the females, which can reach up to 2 meters long, depending how much they grow their shells.
This sexual dimorphism poses an obvious question – how is reproduction possible when your potential baby daddy is only a fraction of your size?
It’s been found that argonauts have an interesting way of resolving the little issue of copulation. And although live male argonauts have never actually been observed in the wild, an understanding of their reproduction processes has been gleaned from observing a dead male and a live female.
The tiny male throws a modified arm containing spermatozoa (called a hectocotylus) at the female, which will then swim toward the female's mantle (the sac which stores her organs), finding its way inside and subsequently fertilizing the eggs. A female's eggs can actually be fertilized by more than one hectocotylus by storing them in the mantle cavity.
The male's modified arm develops in a pouch under its eye until it’s called upon, at which points it explodes out of the cavity and swims across to the female, attaching itself to her mantle via suckers, and wiggling its way inside.
Sounds sexy right?
Males will die after throwing their tentacle at the female. However, unusually for cephalopods, the females don’t die after laying eggs. Instead, they continue to grow and reproduce.
[H/T The Independent]