Oh, those brilliant molluscs…
#TGIF! Time to wash the off the stink of the work week & get ready for the weekend!
#fridayfunny #cuteanimals #poolparty #bathtime #anteater #sandiegozoo #awesomeanimals
Another cool video of a camouflaged octopus. When spotted, the octopus tries to impress the enemy by quickly changing color – mostly white (fear and aggressiveness)). It will also inflate itself to appear bigger, thus more frightening. How cool is that ?
As you may know by now, octopuses can control both their color (thanks to their chromatophores) and their skin structure. The size of their skin projections, called Papillae is controlled through muscular hydrostat.
A muscular hydrostat is a biological structure mainly made of muscles with little or no skeletal support, which can easily change shape to bend, extend, etc. Some other examples of muscular hydrostats are our tongue and an elephant’s trunk. This is how the octopus can appear smooth, bumpy or spiky at will.
This video is a close-up of the octopus’s papillae. You can clearly see the muscular hydrostats at work, amazing !
All good things must come to an end, and #CephalopodWeek is no exception. But take heart! Before we close out this celebration of some of the world’s most astonishing invertebrates, we’re highlighting some of great content that this event inspired.
Our colleagues at @sciencefriday explored both the biology and psychology of octopuses (not octopi!) in this video:
Meanwhile, the @montereybayaquarium Research Institute (MBARI) assembled a remarkable highlight reel of cephalopods from around the world:
Check out much more content at the @cephalopodweek blog.
(via amnhnyc)
It’s Cephalopod Week, and all week we’ll be sharing photos of these miracle mollusks! Today, check out this octopus that Nautilus Live spotted on a recent ROV dive near Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
We’ve teamed up with the E/V Nautilus to explore the deep habitats of many of our West Coast national marine sanctuaries this summer. Learn more here and watch livestreams of the dives at nautiluslive.org!
(Photo: OET/NOAA)
Source: youtube.com
Have you ever seen an octopus run before?
From @sciencefriday:
Crawling, swimming, squeezing, jetting—the range of movement available to an octopus is impressive. Yet some species occasionally choose to stand up on two arms and “run” backwards. Chrissy Huffard, a Senior Researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, explains the pros and cons of this seemingly silly behavior and why an octopus might find looking foolish useful.
Learn why here:
[Some footage courtesy of The Shape of Life]
(via cephalopodweek)
Source: sciencefriday.com
A funny thing about introducing a new queen into a hive that has lost its queen (or one that you’ve killed because her brood was too fighty).
You have to introduce the new queen into the hive with these special queen cages that are stopped up with candy, and are open enough to let the hive smell the new queen, but not open enough that they can get in there and kill her.
Because they will kill her.
When you first put the new queen in she smells like an intruder, but by the time it takes the bees to eat through the candy and free the queen, the queen’s pheromones will have had time to work and the hive will have gotten used to her.
From the outside this kinda seems like:
“Yeh, we were all going to murder you to death before, but we’re full of candy now, so we’re cool. Oh yeh, and how about you be the new queen and stuff. Yeh, that’s cool too.”
(via moreanimalia)
Source: ben-has-feelings
