@spiralshellsreblogs / spiralshellsreblogs.tumblr.com
From here. If you think arachnids with long legs are just scary please watch this solifugid dig her nest (or try to) like SUCH a goofy little person creature. Look how she shoves dirt with her mouth and then gives it a little pat. Is she even making any progress?!
OH it just clicked to me why they're shaped like that. They're just like. Hamster shaped for digging, huh? Same big teeth for it too
Seven-arm Octopus (Haliphron atlanticus), family Alloposidae, Salish Sea off the coast of WA, USA
photographs by Eric Askilsrud (scuba.eric_)
This is also the octopus answer to a mola mola!! An octopus that evolved to be big and conserve a lot of energy, often floating idly, because its primary diet consists of jellyfish.
Both jellyfish and cephalopods are booming as the seas warm, so if there's any meager silver lining to climate change you need to cling to...maybe this thing is happy.
MBARI researchers have discovered a remarkable new species of sea slug that lives in the deep sea. Bathydevius caudactylus swims through the ocean’s midnight zone and lights up with brilliant bioluminescence.
With a voluminous hooded structure at one end, a flat tail fringed with numerous finger-like projections at the other, and colorful internal organs in between, the team initially struggled to place this animal in a group. Because the animal also had a foot like a snail, they nicknamed this the “mystery mollusc.”
The team first observed the mystery mollusc in February 2000 during a dive with the institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon offshore of Monterey Bay at 2,614 meters (8,576 feet) deep.
They leveraged MBARI’s advanced and innovative underwater technology to gather extensive natural history information about the mystery mollusc. After reviewing more than 150 sightings from MBARI’s ROVs over the past 20 years, they published a detailed description of this animal.
Learn more more about this dazzling new denizen of the deep on our website.
Slug squid!
These have been sighted for decades but photos were so vague no one could even guess what it was! Only now do we apparently understand exactly what it's related to and which end is even which. And oh my god. It's a big swimming round mouth propelled around by a tentacle fan on its back. And it's a snail. There are lots of weird swimming snails but I'm pretty sure this is a completely unique shape. This is an abyssal animal as odd as any other that have been memed and marketed, like the giant isopods or vampire squids or barreleyes. I can't remember the last time it felt like something expanded the roster of iconic deep sea characters like this.
WYURM
ELECTRIC - VOLT ABSORB
It chews out a portion of a wire before connecting itself to either end, draining power while allowing some to flow through to avoid suspicion. If they happen to prey on a fiber optic cable, the internet's wicked influence will quickly drive them mad.
LYVWYURM
ELECTRIC/DARK - DOWNLOAD
Cruelly digs its spiky body into its prey before flooding them with dark electricity. If it's in a pinch, it will connect its tail to a modem to flood the internet with lies about its opponents.
I found another porcelain inspired fabric to try out. As much as I love the symmetry of the other fabric I really think the floral is winning me over. Which one do you like better? Let me know in the comments. This killer queen is Catherine✨💙✨
Raoul, but he's a catboy.
I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.
Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:
And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)
There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:
And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:
There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:
No for real:
Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!
Beautiful footage of the nefarious sea demons also :)
Also because I can't reblog every addition together:
Okay where's the other 1199
I absolutely adore Humboldt squid. I saw a doc once where a scientist was cage diving to study them, and one of the squid squeezed it's entire massive body through the cage bars, bit the guy and squeezed right back out.
not many people know about it, but i wanna point everyones attention to the best forum fight i ever saw; some guy getting pissed off cause his friend traded him a duskull called ‘dudeskull’
I agree, this is one of the greatest threads Ive seen in my life
this is a must read
"Cenote" - Luca
long distance relationship
O sapo-de-chifres ou sapo-folha (Proceratophrys boiei) é uma espécie de anfíbio da família Odontophrynidae. Essa espécie é endêmica do Brasil e é encontrada em várias regiões do país. Sua distribuição inclui principalmente áreas de Mata Atlântica, que é um bioma caracterizado por florestas tropicais úmidas e diversidade biológica excepcional
man’s insanity is heaven’s sense
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. -Herman Melville
