Excellent, my minions!

more funny caterpillar pictures

This very cute caterpillar is steepling its fingers… er, hands… er, pods.

Hope for horseshoe crabs

Falling numbers of migratory birds awakened the wildlife authorities in the eastern U.S. to the vital role that horseshoe crabs play in feeding them on their journeys. The crabs, an ancient lineage dating back 400 million years, were caught by millions to be cut up for bait, pet food, and even fertilizer. To protect them, or to protect their cute feathered predators, catching horseshoe crabs has been restricted or banned by nearby states. The numbers of crabs coming to the beaches to mate and lay eggs have slowly begun to rise from dangerously low levels. Perhaps it’s not too late for them, if people remember to refrain from killing them.

Horseshoe crabs serve another useful purpose. They react violently to meningitis bacteria, so their blood can be used to detect it. They also have a one-step blood-clotting mechanism, so they prove that blood clotting evolved gradually over eons.

John G. Shedd Aquarium, Chicago

While in Chicago, I’m hoping to visit the John G. Shedd Aquarium.

That’s one thing I think Toronto needs–a public aquarium. Shedd Aquarium from street:

Here’s the LOLcat version:

more funny cat pictures

Squid dissection recordings

You can go to the Web site of the Te Papa Museum for recordings of their lectures and webcasts about the recently dissected squids. The colossal squid is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and the giant squid is Architeuthis.

Lectures recordings

The audio recording of Science Express is available:
http://www.tepapa.govt.nz
/ScienceExpress/ScienceExpress.May.2008.Colossal.Squid.mp3

The other lectures have been filmed. The videos will be available later. Some copyright issues need to be sorted too, so this might take a little longer than expected.

Webcast retransmission

A retransmission of the last hours of the webcast are available here:
http://www.R2.co.nz/20080427/squid-1.asx

Squid dissection online: tentacles!

The dissection of a colossal squid in New Zealand is proceeding, and by popular request the museum personnel are showing some details of the tentacles, suckers, and hooks. The colossal squid is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.

Squid dissection online

I got a comment last week from “tepapamuseum”

If you are interested in giant and colossal squid, Te Papa will host and webcast the dissection of 4 giant and 2 colossal squid starting Sunday 27 April. More info can be found on our website: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/squid/ and of course, on our blog.

For more information, visit the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

You can see the Architeuthis here: “Rare giant squid washes up in Australia.”

Mock Ness monster is here

Thanks to a comment in Pharyngula, I found a very amusing T-shirt: the Loch Ness Imposter, and ordered one online. Tuesday, it arrived from Threadless. Actually, two arrived: one for me and one for Andie. We’ll be contra-dancing and biking in our matching tees!

Pharyngula’s Friday cephalopod: Octopus abaculus

As someone mentioned, today’s Friday Cephalopod has a rather fractal appearance.

Octopus abaculus is found only in the Phillippine Islands. It was formally described and named in 1997 by M.D. Norman and M.J. Sweeney ¹:

The shallow-water octopuses of the Philippines are diagnosed on the basis of material collected in a series of expeditions by the Smithsonian Institution to the region between 1978 and 1990. Twenty species of shallow-water octopuses are recognised, 18 in the genus Octopus, and one species each in the genera Hapalochlaena and Cistopus. Three new species are described from Philippine waters: Octopus abaculus, O. nocturnus and O. pumilus. Octopuses reported in the earlier work of G. L. Voss on the cephalopod fauna of the Philippines are reviewed and identifications updated. A diagnostic key and illustrations are provided along with information on taxonomy, distribution, aspects of life history and importance in fisheries.

Here’s some information about benthic octopuses (PDF), written by M.D. Norman, from a FAO species identfication guide².

You can see its classification at Zipcode Zoo or the Animal Diversity Web.

1. Norman, M.D. and M.J. Sweeney. The shallow-water octopuses (Cephalopoda: Octopodidae) of the Philippines, Invertebrate Taxonomy, 11 (1), 89-140. Full text doi:10.1071/IT95026.
2. Carpenter, Kent E and Volker H. Niem. FAO Species Identification Guide for Fishery: The Living Marine Resources of the Western Central Pacific, Volume 2: Cephalopods, crustaceans, holothurians and sharks. ISSN 1020-6868.

Books: Bugs in the System by May Berenbaum

This is a book that I read several weeks ago Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs is a breezy look at the taxonomy and economic impact of insects. The author, May R. Berenbaum, is an associate professor of entomology.

It’s so breezy that she thinks xylem and phloem are kinds of sap. But I was enlightened about the costs of controlling insects and the benefits of useful insects to our lives.

Prof. Berenbaum covers taxonomy, physiology (the physics of being very small), behavior and senses, social lives, herbivorous insects, predatory insects, parasites, other appetites, the effects of insects on people (e.g. diseases, pest control), and appreciating insects.

How to catch giant isopods

It’s a little-known fact that they have a fatal weakness for crunchy snacks.

see more funny pictures

This is cute, but as we all know, trilobites are not isopods.

Butterflies of North America

The butterfly index tells you how to attract butterflies and links to a list of North American butterflies (and butterflies of North Carolina).

Cephalopod development and evolution from Pharyngula

A news story about an ordinary octopus that developed only six legs prompted PZ Myers at Pharyngula to refer readers back to one of his detailed articles, “Cephalopod development and evolution.”

One… question is how oysters could be related to squid; one’s a flat, sessile blob with a hard shell, and the other is a jet-propelled active predator with eyes and tentacles. Any family resemblance is almost completely lost in their long and divergent evolutionary history….

One way to puzzle out anatomical relationships and make phylogenetic inferences is to study the embryology of the animals. Early development is often fairly well conserved, and the various parts and organization are simpler; I would argue that what’s important in the evolution of complex organisms anyway is the process of multicellular assembly, and it’s the rules of construction that we have to determine to identify pathways of change. Now a recent paper by Shigeno et al. traces the development of Nautilus and works out how the body plan is established, and the evolutionary pattern becomes apparent.

He’s referring to “Shigeno S, Sasaki T, Moritaki T, Kasugai T, Vecchione M, Agata K. (2007) Evolution of the cephalopod head complex by assembly of multiple molluscan body parts: Evidence from Nautilus embryonic development. J Morphol. [Epub ahead of print].”

Horseshoe crab lineage gets pushed back

I believe that this discovery pushes back evidence of horseshoe crabs another million years. You can read the abstract of the paper here:

Abstract: A remarkable new fossil horseshoe crab, Lunataspis aurora gen. et sp. nov., from recently discovered Upper Ordovician (c. 445 Ma) shallow marine Konservat-Lagerstätten deposits in Manitoba (Canada), is characterized by fusion of opisthosomal tergites into two sclerites. A broad mesosoma of six or seven fused segments, followed by a narrow metasoma of three reduced segments, represents an advanced transitional condition in the development of the xiphosurid thoracetron. Lunataspis further possesses a large crescentic prosomal shield bearing lateral compound eyes on weak ophthalmic ridges that flank a low cardiac lobe, and a keeled lanceolate telson. Lunataspis is much older than the proposed ‘synziphosurine’ stem lineage of Carboniferous and post-Palaeozoic Xiphosurida, yet is strikingly similar to crown group limuline horseshoe crabs, indicating that major features of the distinctive and highly conserved xiphosurid Bauplan evolved considerably earlier in the Palaeozoic than was previously suspected. In addition to establishing a new temporal benchmark for assessing hypotheses of early chelicerate relationships, the discovery of horseshoe crabs in a Late Ordovician marginal marine setting marks the earliest definitive record of this persistent ecological association.

Reference:

DAVID M. RUDKIN, GRAHAM A. YOUNG, GODFREY S. NOWLAN (2008)
THE OLDEST HORSESHOE CRAB: A NEW XIPHOSURID FROM LATE ORDOVICIAN KONSERVAT-LAGERSTÄTTEN DEPOSITS, MANITOBA, CANADA
Palaeontology 51 (1), 1–9.
doi:10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00746.x

The lead author, David M. Rudkin, is at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Ammonoids and nautiloids

Check out these neat images of cephalopods: extinct ammonoids and nautiloids from TONMO.

Merry Squidmas!

I trust this looks sufficiently Christmassy.

It’s an engraving of Siphonophores by Ernest Haeckel, from his 1904 book, Artforms of Nature (Kunstformen der Natur).