Now that's a worm

Ok, there are bigger ones out there, but "Barry" was living in a marine aquarium at Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium in Cornwall, England. Unknown to the aquarists and visitors Barry sneaked in, probably with a shipment of "live rock" (I really don't like that misnomer) a common invasion vector for bristle worms, and ruled the roost as it were, growing to a remarkable 4 feet long. Barry fed on the corals and fish of it's aquarium. After being coralled by aquarists, Barry now has his own tank at the aquarium where everyone can revel in the beauty of marine polychaetes!

The original Daily Mail posting stoops to the, unfortunately too familiar, derogatory epithet of "Monster". They also point out repeatedly that the bristles can be quite a pain and even cause numbness if you get a little too personal with them. I guess it's fortunate that they didn't comment on the hyper cool, but horror movie inspiring, evertable pharynx and the jaws which look awfully like giant fangs.

Personally I would love to see Barry firsthand.

What Google Says

In an interesting Navel Gazing and Social experiment Rick MacPherson of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice & Sunsets came up with a meme finding a number of search terms (other than the blog title) that result in a #1 google ranking for the blog. Somewhat predictably MBSLS came up # 1 on such searches as “coral reefs, conservation, queer” and "moray, rick". Somehow it also came up as the number one place to turn for “zelnio, conservation, blog, coral, drunk”.

I know Kevin and I long ago evolved into more or less responsible drinkers, but this is devastating news. Even though he is a friend, that's some important territory we need to win back from Rick. Kevin, we gotta do more drunk blogging about inverts and conservation! ;-)

Ok, while the scallop beer and lobster vodka chill, I'll respond to Rick's meme tag. It's a great excuse to procrastinate doing mindless GIS exercises.

First search is the obvious one:

1. "zelnio heupel" or is that "heupel zelnio" #1 either way (yes, with google sometimes word order does matter)


2. "chaetognath phylogeny" beat out some heavy hitters like the Tree of Life, Springerlink, and Oxford Journals.


3. "barnacle evolution" scored another top spot with Kevins awesome tribute to Alan J. Southward and summary of a great paper on Barnacle Evolution


4. "whale lice conservation" gets a nod as number one for the Quixotic mission to get Right Whale Lice listed as an endangered species


5. the "Nobel Jelly" surprised me with a number 1 spot as well

But then things get a bit weird:

6. "sea squirt porn" a search phrase that also consistently shows up in our logs...weird! There must be a lot of lonely sea squirts out there tapping into the lab computers, or desperate tunicate researchers, or.. well I really don't want to know if it's not the one of the first two.


7. "ostracod penis" got a top result, but not "ostracode penis" which only got a #2 result.


8. "squirt en masse" was a number one result that I really don't even think I want to know about


9. "sperm races" Beg pardon?! What? Oh, but that reminds me I need to set up the video to record those urchins, last time it was a photo finish

Looking through our logs some time ago I noticed "porn" was one of the top words that led people from Google to us so on a whim...I added "porn" to the end of a number of species we talk about and found out TO95% owns:
"whale lice porn" and "snail porn" with top ten results for "chaetognath porn", "mollusc porn", "cephalopod porn" and "arthropod porn". Interestingly Pharyngula beat us out on all of those except "arthropod porn" where Blackwell Synergy stomped our telsons.

So to be a meme it has to be self replicating...so if they would like to participate, I'm asking The Brine Queen, Bobbie and Jerry, Jason and Peter to gaze into their navels through Google and see what floats to the top.

Invert Inspired

New Species from Australian Reefs

You probably saw all the posts about the new species found on and in the Australian reefs from the recent Census of Marine Life efforts there.

The video of Heron Island sampling at the CoML website is a great watch, good invert sampling in the last half of the video.

A second video from New Tang Dynasty Television is available on YouTube which actually does a decent job of reporting on the discoveries, including showing a good photo of the tongue eating isopods (outside of their hosts).

6 of the Deadliest Killer Insects

From the WebEcoist:

These deadly insects are naturally designed to kill. The effects of their bites range from painful to deadly for humans, and they inject their prey with lethal salivary secretions that immobilize them and ease ingestion and digestion. These six represent some of the stranger and more interesting assassins of the insect world.

Hat tip to Maria.

Insect Nation

House Crab

Giant Ukrain Terrorizing Triops!

20cm long triops!

Reportedly up to 20cm long! Could this be the much sought after Lepidurus batesoni?

Phone cam video is poor quality, but still...

Dinner Mate?

Male's fate, originally uploaded by artour_a.

The ultimate urge - to reproduce and pass on our genes. For some however, it is a fatal desire?

Here a female Polyspilota sp. mantis from Madagascar is chewing off the head of a male while mating with him.

So from some of the experts in the crowd...

What evolutionary advantage is there in the death of the male?
Less resource competition (mating and future competition with the young for food)?
Elimination of a potential predator of the young?

(Thanks to artour_a at flickr for the excellent photo!)

Beware the Geoduck

Geoducks are large, often very old, muscular clams. Occasionally they have been known to deface belligerent clam diggers.

Invert Horror!

So I just finished writing the cicada photo posting, with the closing comment about the old B horror movies, when I check the RSS feeds and see a new posting at Snails Eye View. A news item from Stuttgart Germany about snails taking out Beemers and and Porches on the Autobahn... "like something from a horror film."

I thought first of an award winning animated film Les Escargots (Loving animation, why not?) In which giant snails drive people out of a French village.

Then I remembered an old late night 1950's B-horror with a snail, but I couldn't remember the name. Two minute on Amazon and IMDB grabbed a pair of the old movies I had seen so many years ago (someone actually took the trouble to put them on DVD too!) The one I remembered was The Monster That Challenged The World. And what do you know... the original trailer and one of the scenes are available on YouTube too.

The other one I vaguely remembered was Attack of the Giant Leeches, another classic invert B-Horror flick. With not only the trailer but the whole movie available online. I love that these leeches have suckers like a cephalopod... Hirundia + Cephalopoda = badass monster?

Kevin quickly volunteered the 1988 movie "Slugs" by Juan Piquer Simón, the same man who subjected...er, that is, brought us to Pod People. Kevin's link was all the best scenes of the movie in 3½ minutes - the best way to watch carnivorous molluscs devour western society.

Of course all these movies may be corny (the 50's stuff) or even over the top gory (Simón's) by our standards today, but does it (or did it) help cause irrational invert fear in some people?

I would bet most of us know people who "Eeeewww" when we tell them we like/study/eat inverts... or worse some that get totally irrational about even lady bugs.

So what's your take? Or what's your favorite old late-late-night invert horror movie?
Are there any invert hero movies?

Inverts in the Ear

The Blieman brothers have put up an invert post about a tiny crab invading the ear of a friend with painful results.

This one touches a childhood fear of mine: an invert in the ear. Specifically for me it was a fear of a spider or an earwig crawling in my ear when I was asleep.

Scorpions? No problem. In my boots? Sure, whatever.

Tarantulas, yeah I loved them as pets (Much to Mom's chagrin!)

Earwig on my sleeping bag... Holy Sh*t! Get it (or me) outa here.

Fortunately I eventually outgrew that as an irrational fear, but earwigs are still my least favorite invert. Of course Ceti Eels in the Wrath of Khan did nothing to help matters.