Looking for something invertebrate inspired to give for Christmas, Cephalopodmas or Chanukah?
Noadi may very well have you covered. In her etsy store she has a variety of primarily cephalopod themed earrings and necklaces. A small sampling can be seen in the photo below:
Today's a big outreach day!
First up, an outreach project I that has been part of my life for the past year is finally coming to be. This afternoon I will finally see the professionally printed version of my deck of cards that will be used to help teach molluscan diversity. They are still prototypes so I can't show them here just yet. Hopefully soon I can highlight a few of the cards along with some discussion about the animals on them and the process of making them. I am looking forward to hearing from the COSEE particpants at Avery Point who will be getting a sneak peak at them today through Saturday.
On a much larger scale Dr. M and Kevin have gathered together many of the top ocean bloggers to support some serious K-12 education outreach: Ocean in the Classroom Challenge. I just looked through the challenge and there are seven great projects in there, including several that are aquatic invertebrate centered. Personally I love the Invertebrates in my Tank, Waders and Coral Flip Book projects because they touch close to home, so to speak.
I would take the website hostage like the DSN boys are doing, but that won't work so well here where it has been so quiet lately. However, maybe the opposite will work, for each project that gets fully funded I'll put up a post on recent research about one of animals featured in the card decks.
La Princesse, part of Les Mécaniques Savants by La Machine, makes it's way through the streets of Yokohama. It is all part of celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Opening of the Port of Yokohama.
I would dearly love to see them marching down the streets of Mystic with the spider. Even better a shrimp or crab, or maybe, a deep sea isopod!
What if Captain Nemo's ship had been a squid or an octopus?
Ok, I have an admission to make, I love tech but also love nature, and I disparately miss the high craftsmanship (or at least the impression of it) of days gone by - yes I am often drawn to the world of steampunk design. So what happens when steampunk meets one of my favorite inverts - the octopus? Well one artists take on that marriage is that of digital illustrator and concept artist Alex Broeckel. He recently completed a beautiful rendering of his interpretation for a contest at CGTalk, one of my favorite haunts from my former life, which I obviously need to start spending more time at again..
Of course what I really like is watching the image evolve and develop in the CGTalk forums. I always love peeking over the shoulder of a creative person, seeing their creative and thinking processes develop as an idea or piece of art takes shape.
via: Matt's Marine Music Medley
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.
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.
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
From Sutherland et al. (2008).
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
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).
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)
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)
. 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? 
MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on Army research to remotely control a beetle's flight path via a neural microchip implant. Don't believe me? Check the video. Its fascinating!
"The beetle's payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver, and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board, along with six electrodes implanted into the animals' optic lobes and flight muscles. Flight commands are wirelessly sent to the beetle via a radio-frequency transmitter that's controlled by a nearby laptop. Oscillating electrical pulses delivered to the beetle's optic lobes trigger takeoff, while a single short pulse ceases flight. Signals sent to the left or right basilar flight muscles make the animal turn right or left, respectively."Hat tip to mocost via Twitter.
A couple of quick links that I wish I had more time to write up, but I don't want to wait to share:
These two links are from Southern Fried Scientist, a graduate student from the lab Kevin works in at Duke, who has splashed into science blogging with both feet.
This semester he is TA'ing an Invertebrate Zoology class for Cindy Van Dover, and made a request for "the best marine invertebrate zoology blog post". It's a great list with many entries from TO95, DSN, and from all over the blogosphere. I really have to thank SFS for prompting me to go back through most of the postings from here to pick the meatiest ones so I can highlight them for future applications (hopefully that won't be needed for a while!)
Also connected to his TA'ing activities is an awesome series of posts featuring short video productions, by the students in the class: Topics in Marine Invertebrate Zoology.
Ok, it a stretch, but this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien, for their "discovery, expression and development" of green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, providing scientists with a high resolution molecular level marker to track both inter and intra cellular processes. GFP has revolutionized scientist's ability to track cell division, gene expression, protein interactions, chromosome replication, transport pathways, organelle inheritance and more. GFP has also been used to create sensors which can be read from within living cells, reporting pH values and ion concentrations. All this coming from a sweet little protein first observed in a jellyfish.
You may ask "What's so special about GFP that makes it different from other fluorescent compounds?"
What's really cool, and what makes GFP so useful as a marker is that it needs no other compounds or structures to cause its fluorescence. The chromophore is formed spontaneously from the structure of the protein and it only requires oxygen fluoresce. This means that the protein by itself can be placed into any organism and it will maintain it's fluorescent properties when it is expressed. The protein is also non-toxic and has been expressed in many organisms with no or minor physiological effects on the organism. The gene for GFP can also be combined with genes for proteins scientists want to study. This doesn't change the study protein's normal activity, yet the GFP remains fluorescent so the protein can be tracked by its fluorescence signature (400nm excitation peak -> sharp peak 505nm emission).
While the original GFP comes from the jellies, GFP-like proteins have been found in other cnidarians, primarily in the corals (anthozoa), allowing GFP monitoring with a range of spectral signatures to be used like with the red glowing cat below!
As a note one of the recipients, Osamu Shimomura, worked extensively on Cypridina ostracods, one of several bioluminescent ostracods. However they are not molluscs, contrary to what is in the Nobel Prize report (pdf).
The Invincible Wasserbär! What? What do you mean it's not a water bear??
Some how that title just screams "Piiiigs iiiinnn Spaaa-aace!" to me...
but the news is in about the space faring water bears aboard the shuttle.
Vacuum ? bah,
Freezing ? Ho-hum
Dessication? So what!
Uh, oh cosmic radiation?!
Nope got that covered too.
Cosmic radiation plus direct solar radiation?
Ok, that one hurts.
But still enough of us will survive and quickly start up again!!
We haz no kryptonite! We iz invincible!
For more see Miriam's posting at The Oyster's Garter.
Next stop MARS!!! Bwaa ha ha!
I need to get to Nantes to see Les Machines de l'île first hand!
Oh, did I mention the Squid?
Rep a mechanical reverse propulsion squid you can ride...
The Deep Sea Lovers will find plenty to enjoy as well. I would love to ride in a DS Angler Fish at night!
A quick deviant art post with cephalopod inspired sci-fi / fantasy art from a newly accepted student in the University of Indonesia's biology program.
Update: I was going to post a LifePhoto entry tonight, but we seem to be in a bit of a blackout here in S.E. CT. so hopefully tomorrow. Battery is down to 15 minutes so time to go light the candles and sing some (deep) sea chanties and invert ballads.
Artist and "Rogue Entomologist" Judith Klausner has created a mantispiece using mantids to re-enact famous scenes of beheading. Such as the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes below. Go to the link above and check out more!
Hat tip to Boing Boing.
Carcutter ants, Sydney, Australia.
Awesome "leaf"-cutter ant sculpture exhibit in Longleat Safari Park, Wiltshire, UK. You absolutely must check out the 'making of' website to get an idea of scale and appreciation!
Wooden ant installation, Chicago, Illinois. From Picasa.
From fire ant festival, Ashburn, Georgia.
Ants on Canyon Rd., Sante Fe, New Mexico.
The Portsmouth, New Hampshire Giant Ant by Nathan Walker. Read more about its creation!
Andrew just put up a great video post up of some recent (c. 2006) developments of Stanford's RiSE project. Watching the video I was reminded of the TED talk I watched featuring Robert Full, a Biologist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Full is very active in biomechanics and biologically inspired robotics and gets much of his inspiration from invertebrates such as crabs and cockroaches.
He was a speaker at TED in 2002 where he introduced the audience to the concept of self-stabilizing motion without the use of a brain. The stabilization mechanism is a part of the form itself. He shows some of the early collaborations between his lab and Stanford RiSE project on Sprawl and the University of Michigan's RHex robot. Lot's of great video of centipedes, crabs and other arthropods running on treadmills. He also talks about the discovery of gecko stickiness through van der Waals forces (DOI:10.1073/pnas.192252799).
Fast forward to 2005 when he presented at TED again and many of the things he talked about his lab working on in 2002 have been built and a new generation develoed from the lessons learned. From RHex, Sprawl and the gecko inspiration he and his collaborators have developed SpineyBot and FootBot the predecessors to StickyBot. While there is a little bit of overlap (sorta needed for the background), most of his 2005 presentation was new material. More great invert footage, biomechanics footage and a fun presentation.
From CNN.com:
"We thought, 'wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could build a robot with the same versatility as snails?'" Hosoi told CNN. "We like to think of them as nature's all-terrain vehicles."Read the article to learn more and check out the video!
Hosoi is part of a growing group of engineers around the world who are turning not only to snails but also other animals, like cockroaches and crickets, as a source of biological inspiration for designing new robots capable of going places and accomplishing tasks that traditional droids have not been able to do before."
"Bugs" and computing are intimately linked throughout computing history (and electronic engineering in general). Moths were the nemesis of early vacuum tube computer operators as they would fry themselves on the circuits and tubes, occasionally causing the tube to fail as well (er...that's the moths that would fry themselves, not the operators). Even before then "bugs" and "debugging" were common vernacular for engineers as they are now for all coders. While it's doubtful that "bugs" or "debug" will exit the jargon, recent discoveries in photonic computing materials are leading to a better reputation for bugs in the computer engineering world.
Researchers at Brigham Young University, IBM'S Almaden Research Center, and the University of Utah have discovered that the weevil Lamprocyphus augustus has scales whose internal structure of chitin is arranged in the same configuration as carbon atoms in diamonds — a lattice configuration that has been described as the ideal configuration for the photonic crystals needed to power future optical computers. Natural diamonds are too dense to use to manipulate visible light. Even though there have been advances in synthetic diamond crystals, none of them have the desired visible light spectrum properties.
The weevil's scales are 200µm by 100µm and composed of hundreds of chitin crystals, each with a slightly different orientation. All of them reflect light at 500 to 550nm wavelengths (green), but because of the orientation variation, each crystal reflects a slightly different wavelength back to the viewer, giving the beetle an overall iridescent green color. Because of the structure, the different chitin crystal orientations and their extremely small size, the iridescent effect appears from all angles the beetle is viewed. This is unusual for an iridescent material. Like all iridescent materials the color is not from a pigment, but from the base structure of the material; however, with most iridescent materials, the color and effect changes depending on incident light and viewing angles.
So what?
The lure of using this beetle's scales in photonics is in the structure and iridescent effect of the chitin crystals. The structure matches the "ideal photonics crystal" and the iridescent effect demonstrated is the effect photonics engineers are after — creating a tunable bandgap that will selectively block transmission of certain wavelengths of light through a circuit. The authors hope that their dissection, and reconstruction of the crystals 3D structure will aid in the creation of a synthetic crystal with similar properties, which would help advance optical computing and solar power applications.
Of interest to me is how this research actually came about. It began when one of the authors, Lauren Richey, was pursuing a high school science fair project on biological iridescence. She had a small sample of the weevil and recognized its potential as an iridescent insect, but needed a complete sample for her project. BYU biology professor and co-author John Gardner and his lab were assisting her, while University of Utah grad student and co-author Jeremy Galusha was using the BYU electron microscope and heard about the project. Galusha brought the project to the attention of his advisor and co-author Michael Bartl, a physical and materials chemist with strong interest in photonic crystals.
After getting a complete specimen and conducting painstaking SEM ablation techniques, they were able to unwrap the structure of the chitin crystals of the weevil's scale. Using the chitin as a mold, they may be onto the crystal structure of future photonics. Time will tell...but if it works out, we'll have the weevil L. augustus and a high school science fair project to thank.
For more details on the photonics and materials science aspects see the University of Utah press release, or Physical Review E, where the paper was published online 10 days after the press release, and most reviews, went out.
