Octopus Ballet

2005 off the Oregon Coast, the Octopus Ballet debuted as part of the Visions'05 expedition, featuring the ever graceful Grimpoteuthis bathynectes



TweetTip from Kaylin-Quinn

Squidilicious

Night diving, squid and reproduction...
what a combination! Be sure to read Miriam's writeup for all the details.

These two dives were 21 days apart, one from early March the other late March, notice any differences?

From the Night of March 7th:

Squid Spawning Grounds Off La Jolla from Gary Hawkins on Vimeo.

From the night of March 28th:

Squidilicious from Gary Hawkins on Vimeo.

Mimic this

If you've followed this space at all, you probably are aware of my fascination with cephalopod camouflage and behavior, so it should come as no surprise that this weeks video would be the Indonesian Mimic Octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus.

Octo-Box Rocks!

It's an octopus, it's a box, it's an Octo-box!

Jeff Ives, the New England Aquarium's resident Firend of the Invertebrates, brings us a wonderful sequence of their Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) having a little dinner. Check out the entire sequence of photos posted at the New England Aquarium's Giant Ocean Tank Blog.

A great demonstration of the intelligence and determination of the cephalopods.

Monday Movie: Cuttlefish Hunting

This one made the twitter rounds with tweets from Jason and KaylinQ. Excellent hunting behavior captured as it hunts shrimp inside sponges and the surrounding algae. Of course I'm mesmerized by the color and texture changes as it goes from hunting to capture to post capture. The concentric orange and white circles in the "white square" position of Roger Hanlon's experiments and the orange posterior triangle. The complex patterns that emerge at the moment of capture an immediately after are very cool as well. Amazing animals, these king of the molluscs.

Martin Wells

I received the sad news today that Martin Wells, imminent biologist, one of the founders of Churchill College at the University of Cambridgeand, a great friend of the cephalopods and all marine invertebrates, has passed away at the age of 80. Son of H.G. Wells, Martin was a highly accomplished biologist who was especially inspired by cephalopods and other marine invertebrates. His wonderful book Civilization and the Limpet portrays his love marine life. While aimed at the general audience, it should be, in my opinion, required reading for any future (or current) marine or invertebrate biologist, indeed it would be good for anyone with any interest in biology. The first time I sat down with it, I read it in one evening, it is that readable and good.

Squid Sex at Slate

Tentacular "high fives" are in order for Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster's Garter! Besides being one of our favorite invert bloggers and shanty singers, she is now a Slate author.

On Friday Slate posted a brilliant article by Miriam in their XX Factor section detailing The six secrets of squid sex - advice to a young Loligo opalescens on how to successfully complete the mating imperative and pass on it's genes to the next generation without being caught by the ultimate hectocotylized fourth blockers, human fishermen. In wonderful prose she describes all the beauty of squid orgies, but just to make sure there is no confusion (and to satisfy our voyeuristic desires) she includes an awesome video segment, from one of my favorite underwater filmakers and videographers – Howard Hall Productions, of male consort mating and a sneak attack attempt by a smaller male - simply beautiful!!

And just to keep the science cred's super high, she has a companion post up at the Garter with all the research citations, lab links and name drops of squidly delight!

Purely for your voyeuristic entertainment, here is another nice video from some scuba divers of the massive squid orgy off La Jolla from last year. Thousands of squid in flagrante delicto.

Cephalopod-tastic Friday

Roger Hanlon, from the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, came out to UCONN's Avery Point campus to present for our Friday seminar series. His presentation was a good overview of his lab's work on cephalopod camouflage behavior over the past decades, with the majority of the discussion on the work they have done recently with the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis. So I hope you will bear with me while I gush on a bit about my favorite group of animals and their amazing adaptations, which allow them to confound predator, prey, and researchers alike!

One of the first videos (of many) presented was one which leaked to YouTube in low res, but, of course, Roger had it in full resolution and projected large. The video is a magnificent example of high-fidelity camouflage by the octopus employing all its tricks. I've seen an octopus disappear in front of my eyes only once and it was simply amazing. I've seen Roger's video three or four times in high resolution, and each time I get the same wonder-filled reaction. I've probably seen it a hundred times in YouTube's low resolution and even there it makes me pause. For some reason the majority of people who view this think the tricks in the video are in post production not from the octopus...go figure.

Where's the octopus?
Image copyright Roger Hanlon

After the "Wow" example, Roger gave an overview of camouflage related capabilities and systems in cephalopods. He outlined their amazing skin with its dense network of chromatophores and their controlling muscles, underlying irridiphores and leucophores and their muscles, the base skin layer, and the vision and neural control system which allow the cephalopods to coordinate and change all of these structures along with changes in the texture of the skin as fast as they do.

From Sutherland et al. (2008).

He broadly covered the use of color and patterns in cephalopods for communication, especially in sexual competition and courtship. Regretfully, he ran out of time at the end and didn't cover the wonderful tale of "cross-dressing" cuttlefish males and their success in tricking dominant males to think they are females. His lab also found that females showed a preferential choice of the "cross-dressing" male's sperm for fertilization of the eggs (Hanlon et al. 2005). But, he did show Caribbean reef squid males showing their "two-faced nature", always presenting the female they are wooing with a peaceful calm side, while showing all other squid an extremely aggressive countenance.

Two frames about 10 seconds apart from video by Roger Hanlon. In the first image the male is on the left of the female, showing her a calm, courting display. The stark white display facing away from the female is an aggressive display, warning other males to keep away. In the second frame the male has switched to the right side of the female when she moved and changed his color patterns to keep the docile pattern visible to the female and the aggressive warning showing outward to any other males. Total color change occurred in ~2 seconds.
Images from video, copyright Roger Hanlon

Once Hanlon laid the background information, which was especially important since his audience included physicists, chemists, biologists, and students ranging from age 8 to 70+, Roger moved on to the main focus of his lab's recent work: camouflage. While the octopus in the image at the top is a high-fidelity example of cephalopod camouflage, a near exact match to the background in color, pattern, and texture, in years of observing cephalopods with many thousands of video and photographic records as data points, Hanlon's lab has found that this high-fidelity form of camouflage is very rare. "Good enough" camouflage patterns are far more common. Most of the camouflage in cephalopods can be categorized into 3 broad templates (with variations) of patterning: a fine-grained, average intensity uniform pattern, a medium-grained varied contrast mottled pattern, and large-grained high contrast disruptive pattern. Using their visual records and captive cuttlefish, they have examined these templates extensively.

Each template is used in different circumstances and, with minor variation in pattern and the addition of color matching, is very effective in fooling the eye without having to exactly match the background. In a large variety of controlled tests his team has gradually narrowed in on the base templates and the cues that cuttlefish use to determine which pattern to utilize. The lab uses tanks with natural or laminated backgrounds placed at the bottom of the tank. They capture the reaction of the cuttlefish when the environment is changed using both HD video and still photography. To better quantify the results, they have been using black and white checkerboard and pixilated background patterns with varying sized squares.

The cuttlefish have an area on the top of their mantle that is referred to as the "White Square component" which is characteristically displayed in disruptive camouflage and is proportional to the size of the animal. It is also, even though not visible to the cuttlefish, key in the choice of disruptive camouflage by the cuttlefish.

Disruptive skin components of cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, including the "white Square Component" indicated by the number 2 at the joint of the "T" formation in the left figure. On the right is the result of comparing various sized cuttlefish with various sized grid patterns. At all sizes when the area of one square of the grid is between 40 and 120% of the area of the cuttlefishes white square component, it will utilize the disruptive camouflage. Below and above those relative sizes and the animal moves to mottled or uniform patterning.
From Barbosa et al. (2007).

In their recent research, the lab found that when presented any cue for disruptive patterning, even if it represents only a small percentage of the total environmental cues, e.g. two or three white rocks on sandy bottom, a cuttlefish will choose to move to the cue item and employ a disruptive pattern of camouflage. Interestingly, white pebbles cued the disruptive pattern, but black pebbles did not. They have also determined that the shape of the cue is not critical, but the area is.

In a recent paper, Barbosa, Litman, and Hanlon, set up both vertical and horizontal patterns to test the cuttlefish response against. Since cuttlefish are generally benthic, ideally they must remain camouflaged against predators from above (such as those pesky dolphins) and from the sides simultaneously. In these tests the cuttlefish appeared to weigh the patterns on the side of the tank over the bottom of the tank for choosing their pattern, but they also modified that choice by the bottom pattern. In their quantitative analysis it was found that there was a statistically significant difference between when the side or the bottom only were checkered and between when the bottom was checkered and both the bottom and side were checkered. These differences were displayed in three of eleven discrete skin regions of the cuttlefish.

What happens when the vertical and horizontal patterns are radically different? Qualitatively, the cuttlefish appear to weigh the vertical visual cues over the bottom cues slightly. Quantitatively this is born out in only three areas of the cuttlefish's body.
Figures from Barbosa et al. (2008)

The team at the MBL, having made progress on the cues for disruptive patterning camouflage, is also looking into the effects of substrate contrast and size for uniform, mottled, or disruptive body patterns. For this work they have turned to image processing to grade and analyze the cuttlefish responses to varying check sizes, as before, but also with varying contrast between the check patterns. As with the previous experiments with black and white and other high contrast checks, the cuttlefish camouflage pattern depended on the size of the checks. Disruptive patterns were employed when the check was between 40% and 120% of the area of the animals white square component. When the pattern was altered to a lower contrast (e.g. shades of grey) however, the camouflage pattern was independent of the check size, and was of the uniform/stippled pattern. At intermediary contrast levels the mottled pattern is seen with small area checks.

Evaluating background pattern contrast as well as check size as cue for uniform, mottled or disruptive camouflage pattern employment by S. officinalis
From Barbosa et al. (2008)(b)

Even with all the headway the lab is making on camouflage patterns in cephalopods, there is still much for them to look at. Especially vexing right now is the issue of color. Cephalopods have excellent color matching capabilities, at least during the daytime, at night they still employ excellent pattern camouflage but the color is off, in hue if not in intensity (Hanlon et al. 2007). What researchers wonder about however is how they are able to "see" the colors that they are using in their camouflage. Cephalopod eyes are beautiful structures, able to see polarized light, but they only have one receptor for color information. Cephalopods are colorblind (Mäthger et al. 2006) and see only in a blue-green at 492nm. So how do they "see" the colors they are imitating, since they are able to imitate the colors around them?

Lydia Mäthger and others from the lab are examining just that. They have recently had a paper published from experiments in which they measured the spectral reflectance of S. officinalis and of several marine substrates which would evoke the three different main camouflage patterns. They found that the spectral signatures, while not a match, do correlate closely, suggesting that the color variations in substrate and animal skin can be very similar and this may let the cuttlefish effectively match color without color vision.

So, yeah, that was a very cool seminar. All the better for the brief conversation afterward at the post-seminar social. It was exciting for Johann as well, since he was able to ask several questions and get answers straight from the guy who wrote the book. Since we lingered so long, my family decided to get Thai for dinner from a new restaurant near the school. First two items up on the specials for the night?

#1 Fried cuttlefish with Chili sauce. (sorry DC!)
#2 Jumping Squid with Thai Basil and Chili

Oh, yeah... Cephalopodtastic!


UPDATE:Want to get a taste of the video Roger treated us to? Want to see the invisible octopus, two faced squid, disappearing cuttlefish and moving rock?

David Gallo presented some of Roger's work at a TED talk a few years ago and has 3 minutes of the cephalopod porn video with all the requisite "Ooohs" and "Aaaaahs" from the crowd at Monterey Bay. I'll embed the low res version for your immediate gratification, but a high res version is also available for big screen drooling viewing pleasures. The cephalopods come after 2 minutes of almost as (if not as,) cool, deep sea bioluminescence.



A Barbosa, L Litman, R Hanlon (2008). Changeable cuttlefish camouflage is influenced by horizontal and vertical aspects of the visual background Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 194 (4), 405-413 DOI: 10.1007/s00359-007-0311-1

A Barbosa, L Mäthger, K Buresch, J Kelly, C Chubb, C Chiao, R Hanlon (2008). Cuttlefish camouflage: The effects of substrate contrast and size in evoking uniform, mottle or disruptive body patterns Vision Research, 48 (10), 1242-1253 DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2008.02.011

A Barbosa, L Mäthger, C Chubb, C Florio, C Chiao, R Hanlon (2007). Disruptive coloration in cuttlefish: a visual perception mechanism that regulates ontogenetic adjustment of skin patterning Journal of Experimental Biology, 210 (7), 1139-1147 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.02741

R Hanlon, M Naud, J Forsythe, K Hall, A Watson, J McKechnie (2007). Adaptable Night Camouflage by Cuttlefish. The American Naturalist, 169 (4), 543-551 DOI: 10.1086/512106

R Hanlon, M Naud, P Shaw, J Havenhand (2005). Behavioural ecology: Transient sexual mimicry leads to fertilization Nature, 433 (7023), 212-212 DOI: 10.1038/433212a (Open Access)

L Mäthger, C Chiao, A Barbosa, R Hanlon (2008). Color matching on natural substrates in cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 194 (6), 577-585 DOI: 10.1007/s00359-008-0332-4

L Mäthger, A Barbosa, S Miner, R Hanlon (2006). Color blindness and contrast perception in cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) determined by a visual sensorimotor assay Vision Research, 46 (11), 1746-1753 DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2005.09.035

R Sutherland, L Mäthger, R Hanlon, A Urbas, M Stone (2008). Cephalopod coloration model. II. Multiple layer skin effects Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 25 (8) DOI: 10.1364/JOSAA.25.002044 (Open Access)

Happy Invert New Year!

Cephalopod shibori, originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

May your new year be invert-tastic!

Te Papa now serving...

Colossal squid –



(Hat tip to DSN)

Help! My squid shrank!

Ok, finally got all that writing stuff done so I can connect to the net again. Jack in and what do I find?

Almost every way of preserving it makes it shrink!

The Te Papa staff are counting down the days to their new exhibit of the colossal squid:



Of course in the original press surrounding the capture of the squid, it was mentioned by many sources that the squid was thought to have a total length in excess of 6 metes and possibly as long as 8m. When it was dissected and preserved, it measured out at 4.2 meters. The museum researchers and staff decided to see if there was a cause for the discrepancy and found that the original, unpreserved flaccid length was probably about 6 meters. Of course since squid have no bones and extremely elastic tissues, when it was alive and under the proper stimulation the squid may have exceeded 8m in length.

I only wish there was a way for me to get down to NZ over the break. Hmmm... wait there is a symposium on deep sea coral in NZ next week... maybe Professor A. would take me with him...I can ride in the suitcase for deep sea coral associate ecology and Te Papa... Passport's ready and up to date...besides, I wanted to check out grad school opportunities down there. Hmmm....

Carnival of the Blue #17

CEPHALOPODS HAVE TAKEN CONTROL of this month's Carnival of the Blue!!! There is much fine tentacled offerings over at the Cephalopodcast. Jason lays it out real nicely and offers entertaining commentary. Lots of great links so be sure to drop by for a visit and check the place out! Deep Sea News will be hosting the next edition of the Carnival of the Blue in November, so be sure to write some great posts on anything related to the oceans and let them know!

Also be sure to read the International Cephalopod Appreciation Day post where you can find such great fun as the "Top 10 Things You Can Do on Cephalpod Appreciation Day" which includes listening to my song Giant squid Breakdown. I also wrote another song starring a cephalopod, Big Dead Squid.

Ceph Love!

(hat tip to wwwEPARKsk via Rustbeard)

Saturday Morning Funnies - Sunday Invert Lineup

It actually was linked to from one of the stories on Steve O'Shea... so...



and in related news...

Next Sunday (August 31st) looks to be an Ocean and Invert bonanza on the Discovery Channel.

It starts off at 3pm with all 4 hours of the Blue Planet.
At 7pm we start up three marine invert hours of fun with the Killer Jellyfish! The story about the search for the Irukandji

At 8pm comes "Giant Squid, Caught on Camera" from dives in the Gulf of California, and the night is capped off at 9pm by....

Colossal Squid - the show on the capture, transport and examination of the colossal squid dissected earlier this spring.

of course check local listings blah blah blah...

For one day in August I wish I actually had TV considering I won't be able to get outside much that weekend.

Giant Gelatinous Breeding Blob

Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the Colossal squid, is usually thought to be a pretty aggressive deep sea squid, but based on his research of the recently dissected speciment Steve O'Shea has this to say:

"We are looking at something verging on the incredibly bizarre. As she got older she got shorter and broader and was reduced to a giant gelatinous blob, carrying many thousands of eggs,"
"Her shape was likely to have affected her behavior and ability to hunt. I can't imagine her jetting herself around in the water at any great speed, and she was too gelatinous to have been a fighting machine."

Of course this is an early hypothesis based on the examination of one specimen...

“It’s not sitting down there sipping on cups of tea or anything like that."

You just gotta love cephalopods!
More on the story

Haeckel Squid Oil

Working to finish up a deep sea PSA that will hopefully one day be seen by the wider public, so not much time for invert love, but there have been some good online distractions today...

If you haven't been to the Catalogue of Organisms yet today, you might not know that you too can Get Kunstformen! and have Haeckel on you hard drive, an absolute must for any bio-bibliophile (thanks Christopher!). It's hosted at BioLib where they have scanned some 474 biology books gook back to 1545, most from 1800's and early 1900's. Personal favorites include p.237 and 247 (among others) Yours?


Meanwhile in squid news, yesterday Peter brought us some jerky but beautiful video from an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. A Magnapinna spp. squid hangin out 7800' (2.3km) down. Yeah, turns out oil platforms can be a great source of science exploration too. When they send their ROV's down, they are working all the way down, inspecting the platform and the well head etc. Often though, they have no mission on the return trip and they have to do periodic missions just for training and proficiency. These non-oil-rig oriented mission hours can be used with the vehicle turned outward to watch for squid, whales and greenland sharks.


Of course that doesn't mean I support irresponsible expansion of our offshore drilling program. Miriam takes on the propaganda coming from certain quarters to play on the public gas-price pains and fears with a push for increased offshore oil-drilling. After tearing up the main points of McBush Sen. McCain and the GOP's arguments, Miriam adds a compelling new twist - she doesn't want us to give jellies the keys to the liquor cabinet.

Jetpropulsion in juvenile squids and cuttlefish

I'm in the process of narrowing down my options for masters programs for next fall and ran across the Marine Biology program at the University of Groningen and its opportunities for masters research page. A number of interesting projects there, but one that caught my eye especially was the Jetpropulsion in juvenile squids and cuttlefish with Eize Stamhuis & Henk-Jan Hoving. Combines molluscs (even better cephalopods), juvenile forms, physics and scuba for sample collecting!

"Juvenile squid and cuttlefish start to swim immediately after hatching from the eggs. Adult squids and cuttlefish propel themselves by jet-propulsion, that is by accelerating a mass of water through the siphon outwards by contraction of their mantle. This process relies on inertial forces only: action = reaction ( Newton ’s third law). Freshly hatched juvenile squids and cuttlefish are so small (2 to 5 mm) that viscosity may also be a ruling factor. Till today, nobody has studied the flow producing capacities of juvenile cephalopods in relation to adults. Here we plan to have hatching squid and cuttlefish eggs in the lab to study the swimming behaviour of the juveniles as well as their flow production capacities immediately after hatching to study how they deal with the balance between viscosity and inertia."

Polydactypus!

When directed to the Pink Tentacle for some potentially cool reef spying equipment by Deep Sea News, I, of course, was drawn to the entry further down about a 96 armed octopus.

All the offspring were normal...but... here's another look at the 96 armed momma:


Check out the Pink Tentacle for more mutant Japanese octopi, or if you read Japanese...the Shima Marineland Aquarium has a few log entries on cephs.

I did a quick search at TONMO and found that though seemingly very rare, this branching is not entirely unreported in the literature.


Unfortunately all the articles are unavailable through my institution! If anyone has access to any of these...

Okada, Y.K. 1935. An octopus with branched arms and mode of branching. Annot. Zool. Japon. 15: 5-23.

Okada, Y.K. 1937. An occurence of branched arms in the decapod cephalopod, Sepia esculenta Hoyle. Annot. Zool. Japon. 17(1): 93-94.

Okada, Y.K. 1965a. On Japanese octopuses with branched arms, with special reference to their captures from 1884 to 1964. Proc. Jap. Acad. 41(7): 618-623.

Okada, Y.K. 1965b. Rule of arm-branching in Japanese octopuses with branched arms. Proc. Jap. Acad. 41(7): 624-629.

Smith, E.A. 1907. Notes on an "Octopus" with branching arms. Ann. Mag. Natur. Hist. 7: 407-411.

B-Grade Squid Horror

Keeping with the B-grade horror flicks starring inverts...

On a gently rocking vessel in the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez, a young oceanographer earnestly watches her computer screen while colleagues lower a cable into the water. Instruments aboard the ship, the Pacific Storm, ping sound waves toward the cable. The oceanographer’s eyes flicker across the screen to make sure the signal is clear. Tethered to the cable is a 5-pound Humboldt squid, and the sound waves, set at 38 kilohertz, bounce off the squid. An image shows up on the screen.

The oceanographer raises her fist in triumph. It marks the first time scientists had clearly picked up a strong sonar signal for squid, which lack the bones and swim bladders that give away other marine creatures.

Suddenly a second image appears, darting up from below. The acoustic signal tracks it from the depths toward the cable — and the tethered squid. It is another squid, larger than the first, and it attacks the tethered animal. The oceanographer screams.

Fade to black.

Read the whole story behind the scenes of Professor Benoit-Bird's recent paper (and current work) on sonar tracking of squid in a joint LiveScience and NSF "behind the scenes of science" article.

Flamboyant Sex and Hot Moths!

Since the Daisy Hill Cuttle Farm video of flamboyant cuttlefish mating is currently unavailable (Though Dorid saved the day with some good voyeuristic vids from her personal collection!) I thought I should endeavor to find some good cuttle porn. This cephalopod sex clip is from a longer piece available at YouTube. The rest of the piece is good, but it's mostly vertebrates teasing and eating each other. As a bonus the video has egg masses and cuttles hatching.



Zooilogix has some amazing moth pictures (and one butterfly) from Igor Siwanowicz. Simply Stunning.