O. deletron, is a deep sea dwelling cephalopod and is under multiple scientific studies due to its handful of strange traits.
It is unique to the O. deletron to be (one of the?) only squid to have only eight arms and no tentacles. Babies (bottom left) lose their two tentacles as they mature. Light flashing photophores at the tips of the arms attract prey, and possibly mates. O. deletron is able to drop parts of its arms at will. The sharp “teeth” on its arms hook onto predators and prey. If needed, the squid can detach any arm at any length (unlike an octopus that drops the entire tentacle). Like a lizard tail, the arms grow back.
Also unusual among squid, the O. deletron sports a large penis. In the photos, o. deletron displays small white dots on near its mantle. These are sperm packets deposited by passing males. Since they are solitary and live in the deep sea, finding a mate is difficult. Whenever a male o. deletron meets another member of its species, it will deposit its sperm packets regardless of the gender of its companion.
In a never-before-seen phenomenon, a fish commandeered the body of a jellyfish for protection. Although it is common for fish to swim through jellyfish tentacles to avoid predators, this particular defense mechanism has never been seen before.
Footage of the incredible moment an octopus bravely hunts down an extremely venomous stone fish off the coast of Egpyt.
The video, filmed by a diver in June this year, shows the large octopus chasing down the creature, apparently unconcerned by its lethal stings.
The filmer later wrote online: “Why does the stone fish not use its incredibly poisonous stings?
“Maybe the octopus is immune to this lethal predator or he is intelligent to a point that he knows how to catch the stone fish, avoiding the dangerous stings.”
Another video from Xcalak, Mexico! I know octopus are inquisitive, so I set my gopro right beside his burrow and backed off to see what he would do. I wasn’t disppointed! In fact, it’s a good thing I had my red lens on a lanyard, or I probably would never have got it back.
Cannibalism is not so unusual in the deep sea, especially for squid,
but until recently the diet of Gonatus squid was largely unknown. By
using ROVs to make observations of these squid in their natural habitat,
scientists now know a great deal more about their feeding behavior.
A
recent paper by Henk-Jan Hoving and Bruce Robison reveals that the diet
of the two similar Gonatus squid species—Gonatus onyx (bttm image) and Gonatus
berryi (top) — have a higher than expected incidence of cannibalism.
Hoving is a
former MBARI postdoctoral fellow and is now with the Helmholtz Center
for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany; Robison is an MBARI senior scientist
and midwater ecologist.
Read more about this new research in our news story:
Here’s a comforting thought. When you arrive home and open the front door or enter your bedroom, the spiders can hear you.
It has long been known that spiders can hear sounds via leg hairs that bend in response to vibrations arriving through the air or through solid objects such as floors or walls. But until now, we thought they could only hear airborne vibrations a few centimetres or “spider lengths” away at most.
It now seems that this same approach actually lets them hear sounds up to 5 metres away.
Gil Menda at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues were studying a type of jumping spider,Phidippus audax, that they assumed relied almost completely on sight and vibrations they can feel through other objects, such as leaves or floorboards.
But microelectrodes implanted in the spiders’ brains showed that neurons responded to sounds such as chairs scraping and people clapping even when the noises were made 3 to 5 metres away.
“We were very surprised,” says Menda. “Our studies extended the range of auditory sensitivity to more than 3 metres – over 350 body lengths – for our spiders.”
The team established that the spiders freeze when exposed to low-frequency sounds of about 80 to 400 hertz that resemble a low hum, or buzz. They discovered that this overlaps with the wingbeat frequency of predatory insects such as parasitoid wasps and flies, concluding that the hearing abilities they found in jumping spiders have evolved to help them avoid predators.
This makes it even LESS plausible that they would crawl in your mouth while you are sleeping, or bite you for any reason. You are a mountain that creates wind and thunder, they only want to avoid you.
WELL, to quote my former coworker who is an entomologist:
It’s not technically “hearing” as they have no ears or tympanic membranes but all the hairs sense changes in vibrational patterns. The fact that they can sense this and from such a distance is pretty amazing.
Amphipods are small crustacean that inhabits all acuatic environments, from ocean depths to groundwater, in freshwater systems, also found in caves and sea ice. Their feeding strategies are various: detrital feeders, herbivores, scavengers and suspension feeder, over 800 Species of amphipods are know worldwide. These amphipods of the families Epimeriidae and Iphimediidae are among the prettiest, these living gems are predominantly red, and fades quicly with increasing depth. They are foud in the Southern Ocean and are tiny, just 2-4cm long. At 1950 m Epimeria larsi, aka the pink gem holds the deepest known species record for the genus, and was collected from the northern Ross Sea slope.
Photo: Top left: Epimeria rimicarinata; Top right: E.larsi; Middle row: E. schiaparelli (named after the photographer); Bottom right: Epimeria robusta. The bottom left image is of a closely related genus, Echiniphimedia, aptly named the ‘prickly’ amphipod. Credit: Stefano Schiaparelli (University of Genoa) and David Bowden (NIWA)/ IPY CAML voyage TAN0802.
Y'all please take a moment to laugh at this ridiculous animal.
As his enrichment for the day, I put two Easter eggs, a seahorse dive stick, and a blue disk that clicks together into a fish bowl. My goal was for him to go into the bowl and find the pieces of shrimp that were hidden inside a few of the objects.
Instead, this crazy octopus simply grabbed ALL of the objects out of the bowl and carried them over to his little cave to keep to himself (will post video later). What a rotten, hilarious, and incredibly smart little nugget! 😂😝❤️
