Quite literally, the veined octopus (Amphioctopus marinates) carries its nuts around with it- specifically the half-shells of a coconut. It reconstructs the shells and disappears inside it or underneath it when it wants to stay hidden from predators or if it wants to sneak up on prey. See the video to watch this octopus do its thang…
It has been hailed as the first invertebrate to use tools.
A team led by biologist Julian Finn of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, was observing 20 veined octopuses on a regular basis.
The researchers noticed that the animals were frequently using their approximately 15-centimeter-long tentacles to carry coconut shells bigger than their roughly 8-centimeter-wide bodies.
An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment.
This, on its own, astonished the team. Then they noticed that the octopuses, after using the coconut shells, would arrange them neatly below the centers of their bodies and “walk” around with the shells—awkwardly.
“I’ve always been impressed by what octopuses can do, but this was bizarre,” said study co-author Norman, senior curator for mollusks at Museum Victoria.
To carry the shells, a veined octopus has to stick its arms out and over the edges of the coconut and walk around as if on stilts—making the octopus, while in motion, more vulnerable to predators—study leader Finn explained.
“An octopus without shells can swim away much faster by jet propulsion,” he said. “But on endless mud seafloor, where are you fleeing to?” In other words, a coconut-carrying octopus may be slow, but it’s always got somewhere to hide.
Octopuses of many species are well known for their intelligence. In captivity they’ve been known to navigate mazes, seem to be able to remember past events, and are cunning escape artists.
There are more than 360 species of sharks: Big ones, wee ones, aggressive ones, sweet ones, sleek ones, and …really awkward-looking ones — specifically, the nine species of hammerhead sharks. The scientific genus name of hammerhead sharks is Sphyma, which comes from the Greek word for hammer. And hammer it does resemble. Unlike the aerodynamic streamlined heads of most sharks, the hammerhead has a big clunky head that appears to be at odds with the rest of its body, like a showgirl with an extra-cumbersome headpiece.
Although sharks are fish(rather than marine mammals), they give birth to live young rather than hatching eggs. If you’re wondering about the physical logistics of the hammerhead in this scenario, take solace in knowing that when the pups are born, their heads are round. It’s not until they reach maturity that the hammer-shaped head is in full swing.
The question is: Why, in all of her infinite wisdom, would Mother Nature lead an animal down such a curious evolutionary path?
Well, these are sharks we’re talking about, so it’s little surprise that the answer has to do with finding prey. Hammerhead sharks are voracious predators and their mallet-shaped heads boost their ability to find that which they like to eat. The wide expanse of head allows for a broader spread of highly specialized sensory organs that they use to find food. And beyond smell and vision, these sensory organs are rather high-tech. The “ampullae of Lorenzini” group of organs allows the stealth hunters to detect electrical fields created by prey. The hammerhead’s increased ampullae sensitivity helps it track down its favorite meal, stingrays, which are usually hidden under the sand.
In addition, that funny wide head allows for very special placement of the eyes which results in — as counterintuitive as it may seem —outstanding binocular vision. The position of the eyes also allows the sharks to see above and below them at all times. In the meantime, by moving their head sideways as they swim, they can observe much of what is behind them. All the better to help find those stingrays.
And once they find dinner, hammerheads use that brute head to pin the stingray to the seafloor for the kill.
The largest of the hammerhead species can grow to be up to 20 feet in length, although more commonly they are relatively small. They have few predators and are considered harmless to humans. For the stingrays, it’s another story.
Growing to be almost three feet long, the clown knifefish (Chitala chitala) is found in the rivers and wetlands of southern Asia. This fish swims equally well forward or backward, with an undulating motion of its large anal fin. It is often seen at the surface, splashing as it rolls over, exposing its silvery flanks. It’s also popular as an aquarium trade fish.
It is also a member of the order Osteoglossiformes, which are bony-tongued fishes. This order of fish also includes the arapiama, the freshwater butterflyfish, and the elephantnose fish. Bony-tongued fishes are named after the tooth-studded tongue and palate found in most species. Most fish of this order are relatively large (up to 3m long) and live mainly in freshwater in the tropics.
Here’s a cutie that’s more poisonous than a rattlesnake. It’s a kind of puffer called the balloonfish, also called blowfish and globefish. Some balloonfish are among the most poisonous animals on earth, and one of the most deadly kind has enough toxin to kill 30 adult humans! Puffers don’t poison people from bites, though, like rattlesnakes, because the toxin is in the innards, so it’s eating puffers that can be dangerous. There are more than a hundred kinds of puffers in the world, and most are pretty cute, especially when they inflate with water or air to make themselves look bigger than a fish eyeing them for lunch. A predator may also remember that a previously eaten puffer gave it a bad bellyache, and leave other puffers alone.
THERE IS NO LIMIT TO HOW STRANGE THE MARINE WORLD IS…
The ocean is the earth’s last frontier, and just as we always suspected, it’s full of sea monsters. Like …
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#10. The Fish That Looks Like the Predator
Well, it has the Predator’s mouth, anyway. In some ways, the sarcastic fringehead (yes, that’s its actual name) is more horrifying, because before it opens its mouth, it just looks like a regular fish with old geezer jowls …
If reincarnation is real, this is what Nixon’s coming back as.
… before its entire face opens up into a gaping sprawl of predatory terror. Sarcastic fringeheads are incredibly territorial, by the way, and they use their enormous jaws to battle each other in a ritual that looks like two parachutes trying to make out:
And no, we don’t know why they are called that. They don’t look very sarcastic to us, but their name makes them seem less frightening and a lot more douchey.
“No, dude, totally, eat all my fries, I didn’t pay for them or anything.”
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#9. The Venus Flytrap of the Sea
They look like something you’d find in a meteor impact crater, but really, predatory tunicates are a kind of sea squirt that live in deep-sea canyons off California. What sets them apart from their placid sea squirt cousins is that the predatory tunicate is like an underwater Venus flytrap — it sits there, rooted in place, waiting for some unwitting prey to pass close to its gaping, incandescent mouth, and then snatches it up. With that kind of diet, they can’t afford to be very picky.
“Zooplankton, again?”
The tunicates also can have sex with themselves if they can’t find another to mate with. Which is helpful since, you know, they’re stuck to the ground. What else are you going to do to fight the boredom?
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#8. The Fish That Kills from Below
That monstrosity is called a northern stargazer. OK, whose goddamned idea was it to call it that? The word “stargazer” brings to mind some wispy fish with bright hippie colors and big cartoon eyes; this looks like the mud has spontaneously grown a face. Well, you know who else gazes up at the stars? The devil, from his throne in hell, apparently.
The northern stargazer is actually a kind of fish, if you can believe that. Most of it exists under the mud, so you can normally only see the horrible bits.
“Go ahead, Scooter, get a real close look. I dare you.”
The northern stargazer has its eyes and mouth on top of its head due to its feeding strategy — when it feels like a snack, it buries itself in the dirt in as little as four seconds flat, becoming nothing but a grimacing skull-face in the mud. When something tasty swims by overhead, the last thing it ever sees is something out of Jim Henson’s nightmares.
“For the last time, I am not the Pumpkin King!”
Look at the expression on that thing’s face!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they apparently have organs above their eyes that can emit electrical shocks. Thanks, Nature!
“Don’t mention it.”
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#7. The Shark That Looks Like a Throw Rug
OK, what are we looking at here? Is that a plant? Whatever it is, it’s coming unraveled around the edges.
That is the carpet shark, which also goes by the ridiculous name of tasseled wobbegong. It obviously gets its name from the fact that it looks like a throw rug, except that it’s a throw rug full of jagged teeth that will eat the crap out of you. It’s like a welcome mat for the ocean that also hates you. Here’s one that’s in the process of swallowing another shark whole, face-first:
When photographers came across this shark-on-shark action, at first they figured that there was only one shark on the scene, and that its head was somehow obscured from view. And it wasn’t moving, so maybe it was asleep or something. Luckily, the reality is less frightening than their next thought, which was that the seabed had become sentient and rose up to swallow a shark whole.
“The shark eats you, I eat the shark, nothing in the goddamn ocean touches me. Circle of life.”
—————————————————————-#6. The 56-Foot-Long Fish
The giant oarfish, or “King of Herrings,” as it’s referred to by the lower-class herrings, is the world’s longest bony fish. How long is it? Above is one being carried by a contingent of Navy SEALs, who probably had to do battle with it at some point. It’s extremely rare, and most of the specimens found have been dead.
At up to 56 feet long, scientists speculate that the giant oarfish may have been the source of the sea serpent legend — hey, we told you sea monsters were real. And speaking of which …
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#5. The Real Kraken
OK, we know there’s something called the giant squid out there, but it’s hardly the kind of beast that could drag your ship down to Davy Jones’ Locker as described by old-timey sea legends. We used to assume that such a thing never existed — until 2007, when fishermen dragged aboard something that we’re now calling the colossal squid.
“Hyper squid” just sounded too much like a rejected Metal Gear character.
Scientists don’t use the term “colossal” lightly. At over 900 pounds, with tentacles stretching 13 feet, it’s by far the largest squid ever caught. Its eyes are described as being “as wide as dinner plates,” and if you tried to make calamari out of it, the rings would be as big as tractor tires and flavored with the screams of hundreds of old-timey fishermen.
The folks who caught it had no choice but to freeze it on board their vessel, we assume after a spectacular battle like the Kraken fight scene from one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Since then, it’s been on display in a museum in New Zealand, because apparently the best way to exact revenge upon a mighty beast from the days of yore is to simply humiliate it.
“As you can see, we’ve glued a hat onto it.”
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#4. The World’s Biggest Fish
The reaction to this kind of photo is always the same: “So what? The diver is probably like 100 feet away, and the fish is about to lick the camera lens. So how big is that fish really?”
Well, the mola mola, or ocean sunfish, is the heaviest fish in the world.
That little girl has a lot of faith in some sailor’s ability to drunkenly tie knots.
The huge sunfish gets its name from the fact that it spends its time “sunbathing” at the surface of the water, in part to invite birds to fly down and gorge themselves on the skin parasites that infest it.
“Come, my friends, and let my atrocious personal hygiene be your feast!”
They are apparently harmless to humans, which is a good thing, because as you can see, your whole torso would fit into its mouth.
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#3. The Fish That Walks
Ever wondered what it would be like to give a fish a high-five? Now you can find out! This is one of nine new specimens of handfish that were recently discovered near Tasmania, Australia. Not only do they have four “limbs” where their fins should be, but they use them to walk around down there. And look how friendly the little guy is! There’s no way that little face is about to tell us to scram!
Seriously, though, the best way to understand how creepy that is is to see it in action:
Looking at them, we’re pretty sure evolution is only about three generations away from granting these guys the ability to flip us the bird.
Also, they almost look wrong without a cigarette hanging from their mouths.
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#2. The Fish That Looks Like a Xenomorph
Nobody made the mistake they made with the northern stargazer of giving this undersea horror a harmless, goofy name. That there is the black dragonfish. Of course it is.
The black dragonfish lives deep in the ocean where light can’t reach it, but it has a strategy for seeking out its unlucky prey — its body emits a kind of infrared light that only it can see, meaning that it’s basically wearing a little pair of night vision goggles while everything else is swimming around blind.
By the way, every image you see of one of these things is female. The male of the species doesn’t have such impressive teeth, and in fact, he doesn’t even have a working stomach. It’s theorized that the males are used for breeding purposes only, which means they are born with no other destiny but to have sex with a 15-inch death eel.
Which, now that we think about it, is almost certainly some dude’s fetish.
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#1. The Clam That Looks Like a…
First of all, kudos to the guy in that picture for handling that thing without gloves.
This thing is called a geoduck, pronounced “gooey-duck” because that makes no sense. It’s a kind of clam whose body is too big for its shell, and on top of being the most phallic thing in the ocean, it lives for an incredibly long time (up to 140 or so years) and can grow to be disturbingly big.
We can’t vouch for the authenticity of this old-timey photograph, but we will note that it’s from an era long before Photoshop.
Oh, and did we mention that this thing is considered a delicacy? At least that’s what we have to assume people are doing with them.
Every man has had at least one discouraging moment like this.
Because it’s a pricey delicacy, farming them makes for quite a lucrative business. And if you haven’t eaten in the last 48 hours, you can safely watch Mike Rowe wade around in a sea of them on Dirty Jobs. If you’re a male, have fun trying to cut into one of these things on your plate without involuntarily cringing.
The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis, lit. “vampiresquid from Hell”) is a small, deep-sea cephalopod found throughout the temperate and tropical oceans of the world. Unique retractile sensory filaments justify the vampire squid’s placement in its own order:Vampyromorphida (formerly Vampyromorpha), which shares similarities with both squid and octopuses. As a phylogeneticrelict it is the only known surviving member of its order, first described and originally classified as an octopus in 1903 by GermanteuthologistCarl Chun, but later assigned to a new order together with several extinct taxa… [more]
As its name suggests, the upside-down jellyfish lies upside down with its bell against the sea floor. The jellyfish vibrates its bell, causing water to flow into its tentacles to allow for feeding and respiration.
Nature can do action movies just as well as Steven Spielberg.
To the unseeing eye, sea anemones look just like a little glob of jelly stuck on to rocks with a tangle of tentacles floating around in the current.
A bit like this:
People are often scared of their sometimes quite potent sting and often don’t want to touch sea anemones-but some of them are harmless, e.g the Beadlet sea anemone Actinia equine (if you go rock-pooling make sure you take a guide to check out sea anemones first before you go poking them, there’s a simple one here for free). They might be relatively harmless to us, but if we were something tiny like a shrimp or prawn, we’d be toast (prawn toast).
In a previous post, we looked at how a sea anemone’s mouth is also its anus (great to tell the kids), and I promised we’d look more into how they catch their prey.
Well, sea anemones have fronds which are the wavy bits which encircle the top of the sea anemone around the anus/mouth and transfer food into it. When an unsuspecting victim swims past or is transported haplessly towards the sea anemone by the current, they often brush against the sea anemone’s fronds. This brushing sensation causes a reflex to occur where tiny explosive cells along the fronds, called ‘nematocysts’ or ‘cnidae’, spring into action. A hair-like trigger on the outside of the cell called a ‘cnidocil’ is activated. These nematocysts contain a microscopic hollow tube which contains a toxin (a bit like a harpoon), curled up inside a bulbous-like cell. These burst out of the cell and into the prey, potentially hundreds and thousands of them at once, although they are not re-useable. Such a microscopic explosion takes only a few nanoseconds (700ns) to complete and the acceleration force behind it can reach up to 5,000,000 g. Once harpooned, the sea anemone is attached to their newly paralysed/dead prey and ready to devour it.
This bad boy is a ‘spent’ nematocyst under an electron microscope… the pointy bits around it are the hair-like triggers.
Over 30 types of cnidae are found in different cnidarians. They can be divided into the following groups:
Penetrant: a harpoon-like structure used to penetrate, referred to as nematocysts
Glutinant: a sticky surface used to stick to prey, referred to as ptychocysts and found on burrowing (tube) anemones, which help create the tube in which the animal lives
Volvent: a lasso-like string that is fired at prey and wraps around a cellular projection on the prey, referred to as spirocysts
Depending on the species, one or several types can appear simultaneously on the organism.
It doesn’t stop with just sea anemones….nematocysts and cnidae are found in all types of cnidarians such as jellyfish and squid (which is funnily enough how they get their name). These animals also use this cellular technique to trap prey and discourage predators.
The most dangerous and toxic nematocysts to humans are found on the Box Jellyfish such as the Sea Wasp Chironex fleckeri.
ARGH AND GROSS.
Before a cell has erupted (discharged), they are (awesomely) called a ‘CNIDOBLAST’ which makes it sound a bit like a type of TNT.
OK, what are we looking at here? Is that a plant? Whatever it is, it’s coming unraveled around the edges.
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