This darling denizen of the deep is a Helicocranchia, aka a piglet squid. Scientists on the Ocean Exploration Trust's E/V Nautilus caught footage of the rarely seen creature at a depth of 4,544 feet near Palmyra Atoll in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The commenters' delightful descriptions really make the clip.
(MNN via Kottke) Read the rest
Squid ancestors were happy creatures with shells until about 400 million years ago, when the emergence of fish with jaws set off an evolutionary arms race between fish and cephalopods. Read the rest
Spoiler: a squid did it. Read the rest
Daily Grail posted this nightmarish excerpt from the 2014 book Preparing the Ghost, by Matthew Gavin Frank.
Read the restSquid corpses, even when cooked, retain their sexual reflexes and have been known to inseminate our mouths. After eating calamari...a South Korean woman reported experiencing "severe pain" and a "pricking foreign-body sensation" in her mouth. From her tongue, inner cheeks, gums, throat, her doctor exscised "twelve small, white, spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms." These were spermatophores, which possess seriously tenacious ejaculatory apparati, and a cementlike body, which allows for their attachment to materials like the tongue, inner cheeks, gums...
"Born Like Stars" (2011) by Brent Hoff. Read the rest
Joshua sez, "I've been nagging my wife (a jeweler; you posted her sci-fi wedding rings a few years ago) to make a squid ring for years. She finally did it. Sort of art nouveau meets Jules Verne. It's hand carved from wax and cast into 18k gold. The prototype is mine, but the design's also on Etsy."
(Thanks, Joshua!) Read the rest
