Today I was translating a Splatoon webcomic and revising some terms and names of
places to be translated. This time I crossed with the famous Octo Valley. It has a easy
translation, but I always look to the Japanese term to have a second option and
I found something very curious that I didn’t know!
In Japanese, the place is called Takotsubo Valley (タコツボバレー) and
Takotsubo means “Octopus Pot”. I did some search and I found that Octopus Pot is
an well-known Octo trap used in Japan.
Made of ceramics and
sometimes concrete, this trap is largely used to bait mollusks and crustaceans in
general.
I replayed the Octo Valley in order to find anything visual that connected to the Octo Pot, but I didn’t find anything. Nothing very obvious, at least. I realized something, instead:
Aside the big octo structure here, if you look around you realized that the whole Octo Valley is a huge hole in the middle of the ocean. As it’s a giant pot itself, trapping the Octarians where we face them.
The octopus is pretty much just chilling and pushing water over it’s gills via the siphon (the hole you see pulsing that tentacles poke out through at the beginning) in order to breathe. It’s a pretty vigorous motion compared to most resting/sleeping octopus I’ve seen, so I might guess it’s paying attention to something. Sometimes you can tell an octopus’ mood from skin texture or changes in color, but it tends to be very specific to each individual.
The whole ‘tentacles poking through the siphon’ thing is pretty fascinating. Octopus don’t totally have purposeful control of all of their tentacles, as far as we know. They do, however, have neurons that go all the way down each arm - it’s sort of thought each arm operates independently because of that - they don’t really check in with the central nervous system for instructions each time there’s sensory input, instead responding locally to the stimulus. The brain gives the arms high-level commands like ‘catch a fish’ or ‘pass the food to the mouth’, but the instructions for how to do so and the neural impulses required to make the details of the actions happen come from each arm. So a lot of time, the arms move pretty independently… and sometimes end up in weird places, like poking through the siphon.
’s aquarium, actually). So. It’s not necessarily that the animal totally doesn’t know where its arms are or what they’re doing, or else they would be losing arms left and right. This behavior here is actually a very purposeful grooming of the gills and siphon, kind of the octopus equivalent of picking your nose. They shed dead skin about once a week, and rubbing their their arms (tentacles are those feeding appendages that squid and cuttlefish have) over their bodies. The GPOs in my lab in Alaska do this too!
Magnapinna pacifica is a species of bigfin squid known only from three immature specimens; two caught at a depth of less than 300 m and one from a fish stomach. M. pacifica is the type species of the genus Magnapinna. It is characterised primarily by its proximal tentacles, which are wider than adjacent arms and bear numerous suckers.
Happy Halloween! Lemurs, like cats, have a tapetum lucidum, or a layer
of tissue in the eye that reflects light back through the retina,
creating eyeshine. All of this means lemurs can look pretty scary at
night.
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.
