Arthropods, Cephalopods, Gastropods

[montereybayaquarium]

[dailydot]

These #CephalopodWeek infographics shows everything you should know about squids

It’s the third-annual #CephalopodWeek and we’re celebrating the cephalove for squids, octopuses, nautiluses, and cuttlefish! There are a lot of neat facts about cephalopods, like how octopuses have little mini-brains in each of their tentacles, probably accounting for how they move.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If all the cephalopod info out there seems dizzying to you, start with our infographics. 

[cephalopodweek]

🐙🐙🐙

[staceythinx]

Underwater photographer Alexander Semenov’s sea slugs show off their cerata.

[stripeysnail]

Stripey the snail says: My friend Pale was checking out this apple. Somebody already had taken a chunk out of it. Somebody really big, looked like. Pale considered the wisdom of eating an apple that belonged to someone big.

[thelovelyseas]

Bobtail Squid (x)

[kirin-riki]

small noot eats a leaf snack (x)

[ghoulgaara]

you can see the leaf through its head aw

[nestcreep]

oh my god

[stilil]

This is me rn. Goodnight tumblr.

[pods-pods-pods]

gastropods It’s an albino giant african land snail! Here’s the video it comes from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNCuJvlvSug

[dynamicoceans]

The paper nautiluses, Argonauta sp., are not nautiluses at all, they are octopuses! The paper thin white calcareous ‘shell’ is actually an egg case made by females. 

The shell is made of a thin calcite the female secretes as she matures. It also functions as a swimming aid, females use the shell to ‘gulp’ a measured volume of air at the sea surface, seal off the captured gas using flanged arms and forcefully dive to a depth where the compressed gas buoyancy counteracts body weight. When scientists removed the air from the octopuses’ shells underwater, the octopuses tended to sink before swimming to the surface, taking in more air and then jetting back down to where they were weightless.

Source Video Image

[bogleech]

What’s really amazing is how the shell looks SO MUCH like that of a Nautilus, even though it doesn’t grow as a part of the body like a true shell. It’s produced an entirely different way and there wouldn’t actually be any point at which one derived from the other in their evolution.

The shape is similar either by convergence, which is likely, or according to some hypotheses, because these animals may have once borrowed the shells of nautiloids back when such animals dominated the oceans. The paper could have begun as a lining for the borrowed home and continued to be useful even after most of the shelled cephalopods died out.

[typhlonectes]

Science Today: Colorful Cephalopods

The California Academy of Sciences gives us a brief and gorgeous introduction to this ocean dwelling group of mollusks, that includes octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses.

(via: California Academy of Sciences)

[thelovelyseas]

Phyllodesmium serratum by Klaus Stiefel

[awesomearachnids]

Lynx Spider by melvynyeo

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(via Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

[pods-pods-pods]

(via Nautilus | Having survived relatively unchanged for millions… | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

[catherinepapeillustration]

[pods-pods-pods]

(via Image from page 266 of "Zöology; a textbook for colle… | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

[pods-pods-pods]

(via Image from page 425 of "The terrestrial air-breathing… | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

[regnumanimalium]

[featherandmoss]

Seriously? How is this so cute?

[biomedicalephemera]

Histioteuthis ruppelli (now Histioteuthis bonelli) - The Umbrella Squid

The umbrella squid is a member of the genus Histioteuthis, or the cock-eyed squid. This genus is characterized by a right eye similar in size to other squids of the same mass, but a left eye that’s at least twice as large as the right.

The head of the Histeoteuthidae has no tentacle pockets, its club arms often have sharp hooks, and it has no corneal coverings over its eyes. In contrast, the largest family of squid (Loligo) have club tentacles without hooks, and have corneal coverings that allow a sort of “blinking” to take place.

Images:

Die Cephalopoden. Carl Chun, 1910.

Kunstformen der Natur. Ernst Haeckel, 1900.