Cephalove

To get psyched up for a second post on the Eurpymna/Vibrio symbiosis, I decided to raid Flickr for the best images I could find of bobtail squid! As a quick note, I’ve decided to only use images licensed under Creative Commons licenses – it saves me the trouble of getting explicit permission to use each image from the owner, and I generally like to support open-access media of all types. Thanks in advance to all the photographers whose work I’ve embedded for generously letting the world use, remix, and share their photos!

On to the squids! This first series shows an adorable little specimen burying itself in substrate:

Next we’ve got a floater!

And… back to the sand:

This is, in a nutshell, what bobtail squids do – sit in the sand, float around, catch some food, repeat. What would an animal photography post be, though, without some hanky-panky?

Thanks for reading/looking! Be sure to click through and check out the photographers’ other works – there’s a lot of great underwater shots in their photostreams.

Alistair Merrifield, today’s featured cephalopod photographer, is a biostatician who lives in Sydney. He has great photos of a variety of subjects on his Flickr page.  The images should be click-through-able, so you’ll should go check out the high-resolution versions on Flickr.  All the photos in today’s post are owned by Alistair.

We’ll start out with some cuttlefish.  These next two shots are all of Sepia apama, the Australian giant cuttlefish.  In case you didn’t know, these guys are the largest cuttlefish in the world, and are absolutely beautiful.  They’re a popular tourist attraction of the southern Australia coast, because they’re apparently pretty easy to find and very fun to dive with.

The latter one reminds me for all the world of the painting “American Gothic”.

This next image is of  Sepia mestus, the reaper cuttlefish.  They have a rather restricted range off the Australian coast, and exhibit a large degree of sexual size dimorphism, with the females getting to be much larger than the males.  Still, they do not get very big, especially compared to S. apama.

Moving along, check out these two shots of the striped pyjama squid, Sepioloidea lineolata.  Although called a squid, it is actually a cuttlefish,  being in the order Sepiidae.  It is one of the few known poisonous cephalopods along with such illustrious characters as M. pfefferi, the flamboyant cuttlefish and H. lunulata, the blue-ringed octopus, two other poisonous species.

Finally, we’ll close with a close-up of the eye of a blue-ringed octopus.  You can get a good sense of the scale of this shot by looking at the grains of sand on the animal’s skin in the upper right quadrant of the photo.

Thanks for reading/viewing!

Today’s cephalopod photographer of note is Barry Fackler, a physical therapist originally from Pennsylvania who lives and dives in Hawai’i.  All of the photos in this post are his, and they’re all click-through-able, so check out the larger sizes.  It turns out that octopods (mostly O. cyanea) are the only cephalopods in his Flickr portfolio, so I’m sorry to disappoint the squid and cuttlefish lovers out there.  I promise they are all wonderful photos, though!

Here is an O. cyanea showing a mostly white color pattern while jetting, a behavior often associated with defensive flight.

Here is another gorgeous octopus of the same species, giving the camera an inquisitive look.  This was taken at at Keone’ele Cove in Honaunau (another place to add to my “List of incredible spots to visit when I get money” spreadsheet.)

I always love to see octopuses express dramatic papillae.  In this next shot, we see an octopus who is apparently trying to look like just another chunk of coral, even if he’s not doing a terribly good job.

This next one shows an octopus (O. cyanea again) in a defensive posture.  Notice the high contrast color pattern, the curled arms, and the spread interbrachial web.  The point of this behavior is to look big enough to make a potential predator think twice before he eats you – it’s a common strategy among prey species.  According to Barry, the animal adopted this pose when approached by some fish.

I like this next shot simply because you can see right into the octopus’s mantle.  It’s somehow fascinating to me to see the inside and outside of an animal at the same time like this.

These next two photos show some behavior that I had never heard of before reading the photographer’s description.  Apparently, the fish (a peacock grouper) was following this octopus around to feed on small prey that the octopus stirred up as it foraged over the reef.  According to Barry, they usually follow eels, but he found this one hanging around a hunting O. cyanea.  I’d argue that it is probably not cooperative hunting per se, as it’s unclear how the octopus would benefit from it, but it’s fascinating behavior nonetheless.

I’ll finish up with two gorgeous portraits of O. cyanea just sitting on the reef.  I love the colors of these octopuses.

Thanks for reading!  Make sure to click on over to Barry’s photostream and check out his other underwater photos.

Next on my (long and growing) list of cephalopod photographers to feature here is Klaus M. Stiefel, a neurobiologist who currently works in Okinawa.  All of the photos in this post were taken by him.  He was cool enough to release them under a creative commons license, so feel free to use them, just don’t use them for anything commercial and make sure to give him credit (lots and lots of it.)  You can click through on all of the photos to access them on Flickr, including larger versions (which I always recommend – they make great desktop wallpapers.)  Let’s dive right in, shall we?

To start off, a portrait of an adorable cuttlefish of unknown species (if anybody can tell, please post it in the comments – I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’m very bad at identifying species):

Moving right along, we have these two lovely photos of the flamboyant cuttlefish, Metasepia pfefferi.  Klaus calls this posture a “threat display”, although I’m pretty sure it is used both as a defensive behavior and during hunting, especially for shrimp and prawns.  My favorite thing about pictures of M. pfefferi is that they always look so relaxed, just because of the shape of their pupils.

Last in our illustrious lineup of cuttlefish is an unidentified individual who is expressing its papillae beautifully and showing off its ability to use binocular vision by looking at the camera with (count ‘em) two eyes.

You want squid?  We’ve got squid!  Well, a squid.  This is a juvenile squid (species unknown, though one of the commenters on Flickr suggests that it’s a bigfin reef squid, Sepioteuthis lessoniana) floating among the fronds of a sea lily.

Here is an octopus (again, species unknown) expressing a very striking white ring around its eye.  This looks to me like it might be related to the eye-bar body pattern component, which is used during defensive behavior by adult octopuses to obscure the shape of the eye or make it appear larger than it really is.

Here’s a great shot of some octopus arm suckers, showing various degrees of flexion of the suckers themselves.  I wish I knew the species of octopus that these belonged to.

I just love pictures of octopuses peeking out of things!  Here is the obligatory inquisitive-octopus-eyes shot:

In this series of photos, Klaus captured a dramatic color change in an octopus.  It looks to me like the octopus tried to camouflage itself, then decided that wasn’t going to work and began to hide under the rocks.

 Finally, we’ll close with a gorgeous photo of a cephalopod that is too often ignored: the Nautilus.

 Thanks for reading!

I stumbled upon the Flickr group: Cephalopods , and decided that it was about time to put up some more eye candy on the site.  I’ve gotten in touch with some of the photographers whose cephalopod photos are in the group, and I’ll be doing a series of posts with each post featuring the work of a single photographer. 

First on the list is Lawrence Tulissi. All of the photos in this post are click-through-able if you want a larger image – which I highly recommend – and are his property (so don’t steal them.)

First is an octopus (looks like it could be O. cyanea to me, but I’m not the best at species identification) in a neat posture, with a very striking pattern of coloration.  This was taken at Truk Lagoon, which sounds like an incredible place to dive.

This next one shows the suckers of a giant Pacific octopus.  I like that you can see suckers in various states of contraction, showing the great flexibility that having multiple sets of muscles in each sucker affords the octopus.

This next one is of O. briareus, the Caribbean reef octopus, showing off its long arms and exhibiting some great body patterning.  This posture is probably defensive, judging by how conspicuous its coloration is and the fact that the interbrachial web is spread.

This picture shows the eye of a giant Pacific octopus.  The description of the photo says that the octopus was in its den, and the closed pupil slit indicates that it was likely resting.  In a neat case of functional homology, octopuses, like many vertebrates, tend to close their eyes when they rest – it’s just that, since they have no eyelids, they do this by closing their pupils.  If you don’t believe me check out Brain and behavioural evidence for rest-activity cycles in Octopus vulgaris by Brown et al. (2006).

Moving on from octopuses (as much as it pains me), we’ll finish up with two wonderful shots of Carribean reef squid, Sepioteuthis sepioidea:

Thanks for the photos, Lawrence!

Everybody else, thanks for reading.  I’ll be writing on some brand-spanking-new research on the role of serotonin in the octopus learning system next week, so I’ll see you then!