Wake up, babe. New MBARI species just dropped. 🤩 

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.

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.

Rabbits

Keep reading

⭐ So you want to learn pixel art? ⭐

🔹 Part 1 of ??? - The Basics!

Hello, my name is Tofu and I'm a professional pixel artist. I have been supporting myself with freelance pixel art since 2020, when I was let go from my job during the pandemic.

My progress, from 2017 to 2024. The only thing that really matters is time and effort, not some kind of natural talent for art.

This guide not be comprehensive, as nobody should be expected to read allat. Instead I will lean heavily on my own experience, and share what worked for me, so take everything with a grain of salt. This is a guide, not a tutorial. Cheers!

hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

Jumping spider mimic bee fly, Geminaria canalis, Bombyliidae

Found in the American southwest, this species of bee fly is thought to mimic a jumping spider to deter predation. The false eyes are a modified scutellum (part of the thorax) and not real, functional eyes.

Photos 1-4 by kueda, 5 by tiwane, 6-7 by psyllidhipster, 8-9 by bryanjbd, and 10 by janepannor

Interestingly, this exists in reverse (Abracadabrella elegans):

REMINDER: the part of a comb jelly that looks like a mouth is in fact a mouth

Turns out I do need to clarify that these particular comb jellies are actually not filter feeders :)

these are also the true actual first animal group that’s ever thought to have existed; comb jellies or ctenophores are survivors from the *ediacaran,* the point in time where we can’t even guess what kind of animal most of the fossils are. But, maybe all of them were just wacky shaped comb jellies???? we will never know. this one ate them all.

CTENOPOG

2023 Art Summary

Some of the many things I worked on over the past 365 days. More details below.

If you're new to the Halloween articles on bogleech.com these are some of the common Halloween decorations I have given their own names and lore over the years

HOCUS: witch hats with legs, sometimes created by a witch from her hat, but sometimes the hat simply absorbed her and took over.

POCUS: the cauldron version. Sometimes happens because the witch just never properly cleaned it. Sometimes Hocuses and Pocuses spring to life because their witch died, and they try to continue her witchery themselves, but they aren't great at it. It can be disastrous.

SEEMORE: flowers given eyes and sentience by black magic, usually grown from a corpse or from the eye of a dead person as the "seed." Used by their creators as a magical security camera network and can transmit spells to curse trespassers.

RAGAMUMMIES: if you see something wrapped in mummy bandages that's not shaped like any dead person or animal or even part of one, it's actually the haunted sentient bandages of a long-gone mummy that have found a new "host." Can also be made deliberately by dark magic of course.

CORPSE CANDLES: the name is an alternate folkloric term for Will O' Wisps. Candles used to be made mostly of wax rendered from animal fat, so a Corpse Candle is of course a sentient candle creature made from the fat of a dead person, their ghost now bound to it.

HEEBIE JEEBIES: biologically inaccurate Halloween spiders are actually not real spiders at all, but lesser goblins that manifest from fear itself. Why spiders? It might be influenced more by the ancient, collective primordial fears of several trillion insects than because of arachnophobic humans, and it may be that Heebie Jeebies have been around long enough, they're the real reason humans so easily come to fear spiders at all.

SKLIDERS: spider ghosts that usually take the dead body of a normal spider as a vessel, but as they grow more powerful they seek larger and larger forms until there's simply no Earthly spider that can contain them, so they start making the best spider they can out of other solid corpse matter.

SUGAR FIENDS: parasitic spirits that possess candy and want to be eaten, turning the host into a crazed candy addict. When they're done draining their victim of life they emerge larger and stronger until they can just eat candy and/or people themselves.

There's a lot more of these on my site, which I always illustrate as well, and I made a little book version of this with illustrations by @bynineb !

Oddly enough, the best and simplest summary of what the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are about is contained in this extremely sweary Phil Jupitus cartoon. People have been asking me to summarize. This does the job.

(Can someone do the alt text?) I'll do it as a picture and as a link.

[ID: A twelve panel webcomic posted by Phil Jupitus @/phillipjupitus7276 on Instagram.

The first panel reads "Mark Ruffalo and his Sweary Buffalo" in bubble writing with an angry cartoon buffalo saying "Monkey Cock". All the ensuing panels are a conversation between Ruffalo and the buffalo on a red background with speech bubbles.

Ruffalo: Oh blimey! The Screen Actors Guild have called a strike! And me about to pay for speech therapy for my sweary buffalo!

Buffalo: Shit the bed!

(Ruffalo is now wearing a black shirt that says "Hell no, we won't appear on your show" and holding a black sign that reads SAG AFTRA WGA STRIKE.)

Ruffalo: As much as I would like to curtail my ungulate's potty mouth, the strike has to take precedence

Buffalo: Great big sweaty bollocks

(Ruffalo's shirt now says "Mark Smash")

Ruffalo: What the industry fails to address is the changing way the consumer is granted access to the labour of both actors and writers

Buffalo: Knob cheese

(Ruffalo's shirt now says "Act Up!")

Ruffalo: The fact that the payment model for residuals has not been properly adjusted to take into consideration the way that viewers now access content is a major issue

Buffalo: TIt wank tit wank tit wank

(Ruffalo's shirt now says "Actor-vist")

Ruffalo: Also the implications of AI and ownership of the image of an individual requires clarification

Buffalo: Buggery fucktwat

(Ruffalo's shirt now says "Unionize")

Ruffalo: Another sticking point is that streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus will not share viewing figures...

Buffalo: Shit prick turd balls

(Ruffalo's shirt now says "Fuck the algorithm")

Ruffalo: One industry organisation actually proposed scanning actors and owning their very likenesses for future projects without consent or compensation.

Buffalo: Fucksticks

Ruffalo: The issues are complex at least. But producers and studios need to recognise that a proper debate must take place with the unions.

Buffalo: Management are CUNTS

/End ID]

Thank you for spreading the message, Neil! As a fellow screenwriter (non-WGA but still supporting), this is important and a great comic.

Made a fakemon for a podcast I was on this past week!

Meet Snatchem, a ghost/electric type!

Pokédex entries:

Other Stuff:

Check out the podcast! I draw the casts' Pokémon live and they do the same for Snatchem!

A nearly complete 1st century BCE carnyx found in 2004 at Tintignac, France (the one in the left picture, with a reconstruction in the right). Fashioned as a snarling boar, the carnyx was a war horn used by the Iron Age Celts between c. 200 BCE and c. 200 CE

fun fact, the first reconstruction of the carnyx was built in Scotland in the early 90s, and John Kenny brought it to my dad's photographic studio (our house) to have publicity pictures taken. I was very very young, but I had a precocious interest in history, and Kenny showed me the detailed boar's head, which had an articulated tongue that would give the effect of a subtle ululation when it was played. He played it for us in our garden, and I can still remember the sound. It sounded like a trumpet, if a trumpet was a wild prehistoric animal capable of throwing back its head and howling. It sounded like something great and tusked and angry and brass that knew what blood was and wanted it.

I don't know how old I was when I heard it, I think it must have been after its debut at the museum, but I do remember Kenny telling us we were among a very small handful of people who had heard the carnyx in 2,000 years. I remember my nextdoor neighbour's pigeons all taking off from his loft, and the wide silence that rang out afterwards, that more often came in the wake of foghorns from the harbour. I wonder, in retrospect, what all those people packed around us in their tenements in the poor part of Leith thought they'd heard. what does an ancient celtic war horn sounds like, floating through the window while you're doing the dishes?

here’s what it sounds like. holy shit

@petermorwood

Now imagine what a whole bunch of these would sound like, played together before the start of a battle.

I just this moment learned about Kurikin a pokelike DS game in which the monsters were microscopic samples you collected from everyday places and grew in petri dishes, please be bitter with me at the timeline where this never left Japan and never even took off as a whole series there

and yet my favorite is just this single puff of mold with sad eyes. It’s so similar to a mold mortasheen I sketched forever ago and never developed any further

Revealing the Hidden Patterns of Birds in Motion

Dennis Hlynsky, a film and animation professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, creates videos at the intersection of art and science. Hlynsky transforms ordinary footage of birds and insects into ethereal illustrations by digitally tracing the paths they travel. 

Hlynsky’s work is typically featured in galleries, where the video is projected on large screens with recorded sound. To see more videos from Hlynsky, please visit his Vimeo channel. 

GIFs by ARCHatlas Text + video via

🐛 Hammerhead worms 🐛

all of them vicious predators and also many of them have little black eyespots but you can barely see them because they’re typically on the very edges of the hammer head just like a shark!!

ALSO you can see on this one where it got broken once and grew back!! Where the stripes are misaligned!!

P.Otiosus - Adult female

Lyssomanes viridis - Adult male

P.Otiosus - Subadult female

Lyssomanes viridis - Adult female

I love this series of photos because they showcase a very interesting feature of jumping spiders: Their retinas.

Jumping spiders have excellent vision. Where most other spiders hunt through vibrations and smells, jumping spiders primarily use sight. Their eyes are wildly different from vertebrate eyes, though, and especially from human eyes. While human depth perception is based on parallax, jumping spiders instead use image defocusing.

Basically, to judge the distance of an object, humans focus both eyes on the object at once. The slight differences in perspective are then translated into a three-dimensional image in the brain. Animals that can’t move their eyes as much as humans (such as birds) have to bob their head to get the same effect.

Jumping spiders, on the other hand, have eyes with several layers of photoreceptors that each perceive light in a different way. Some layers receive high contrast, sharp images, while others receive blurry and out of focus images. When the focused and unfocused images blend together, they allow the spider to perceive depth.

What this means is that 1) jumping spider eyes are long and cone shaped, rather than round, to account for all the layers, and 2) jumping spiders can perceive depth while moving their eyes independently of each other. To us, it looks something like this:

Because the retinas absorb light, they appear very dark. Which means, when a jumping spider’s eyes appear completely black (and the species doesn’t have black chitin), it’s looking directly at you :)

A couple of years ago I became obessed with slugs and made this sweet creature, a slug with legs called Sluguenda, in a time of being uncertain and depressed, she lifted up my spirits and along with her I made up the ‘Molluscat’ species for fun. I hope you like them!

I just want to say i read all your tags, your comments, they all make me smile and laugh so hard!! I’m so so happy you love them as much as I do, AHHHH!!! SO HAPPY!

I am SO in love they are beautiful majestic creatures… Hope they never run out of yummy mushrooms! ~~also are there any sketches of their skeletons??~~

Hahah, good question, i was actually debating if they should have a skeleton, but it would be so cute to draw one xD ahh you guys kind of motivate me to pick up this project again 🥺

For anyone interested, someone reached out to me and made this DnD profile for the Molluscats, its very nice and if you want to use it you are welcome to!  Document: https://www.docdroid.net/fKnJQgZ/molluscat-pdf :)