I’ll take two baby octopodes and a Sharktopus, please.
September 25, 2010
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Posted by Mike Lisieski
As I promised in the title, here are some baby octopodes (Octopus rubescens, the east Pacific red octopus, to be exact.) These guys are so small that you can see the individual chromatophores on them (the reddish spots)!
For comparison, here’s a photograph of an adult O. rubescens, graciously provided to the world by Taollan82:
Those little buggers have quite a bit of growing to do!
Moving on: “Sharktopus”, the long-awaited film about a Navy-engineered half-shark half-octopus monster, airs tonight on Syfy. Not having a TV, I won’t be watching, but it looks pretty incredible. Check out the trailer:
Two things I noticed: first, whoever performed that theme song deserves lots of credit – it makes the preview. Secondly, Sharktopus seems to have an appetite for skinny women in bikinis. You’d think that, being a presumably efficient predator, it would be attracted to prey with more body fat (eg. prey that would yield a higher calorie intake to expenditure ratio,) and it seems like there’s no danger that a large person could hurt it – but it still almost exclusively goes after skinny beach babes. How could the producers fail to consider the probable features of Sharktopus’s energetics? They must not be biology geeks.
Thanks for reading!
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tags: Chromatophores, news, Octopus, video
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“Every scientist, sooner or later, must face something like this.” ~Megashark versus Giant Octopus
I really wish I had a TV! SHARKTOPUS!
io9 did a piece called “”Sharktopus” is the “Inception” of giant monster movies” — TOO DEEP!
http://io9.com/5647477/sharktopus-is-the-inception-of-giant-monster-movies
Every time I see these trailers, I just start wondering… does it have a mouth on each end? If so…
Then I stop myself. Nothing good comes from this line of thought.
Sadly, “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” (on afterward) was a better bad movie than “Sharktopus”.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but do baby octopods show signs of intelligence and learning like their older selves?
As far as I know, the behavior of juvenile octopuses is not well studied. Most species go through a larval stage where they float around in the plankton for a while, and so they’re harder to maintain and require a different aquarium set up than adult octopuses to care for. They also have a very high mortality rate in captivity, because of the technical difficulty of providing the right conditions for them.
Juvenile cuttlefish, on the other hand, have been the subject of a number of studies on learning – it turns out they can learn food choices by imprinting and by association from a very young age (in the case of imprinting, even before they hatch.)
Cute! We found one a lot like it at Lizard Island last summer. Seeing the ‘huge’ chromatophores opening and closing is priceless.
Is that video of O. rubescens that you took?
Nope. They are embedded via YouTube, originally posted by the user “stellamaroo4598″.
goodpoints there. I did my own search on