Either way, it is quite conceivable that you’d go mad looking at it. (Some Japanese Dude via Japanator via I09)

It is, of course, Gadzookie’s cock some kind of anemone, all gnarled up after being pulled out of the water. The locals call it a “dickswim”…’nuff said.

By the way, you can read “The Whisperer in Darkness” here.

Oh, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (ye who made that excellent Call of Cthulhu silent film) are adapting this one too.

(link in case embed doesn’t work…)

Like Call of Cthulhu, it seems to shows its amateur roots, but I don’t expect to mind much. Whereas CoC went with a classic silent film look, here they’re trying for a little noir. Nifty. Lovecraft has been tough to adapt, at least for Hollywood. These low-budget efforts know their audience. I hope they do “Shadow Over Innsmouth” next.

The baby teeth are still nothing to sneeze at

But this isn’t that story. No, this is a story about how these gigantic predatory, be-toothed demon creatures loved their babies.

Yes, gentle reader, scientists publishing in the Public Library of Science describe the discovery of Megalodon nurseries (awww!) where hatchling sharks were protected by their enormous mothers until they themselves were big enough to swallow an entire Grateful Dead cover band in one go (including their van, most likely). How sweet.

(via Everyone PLoS ONE’s community blog)

In Sweden, even the sea life is flat pack.

The Regalecus glesne, known as the King of Herrings or Giant Oarfish, was found dead in the small fishing village of Bovallstrand on Sweden’s west coast, about 140 miles from the Norwegian border.

In less sensational terms, this is an oarfish, which normally makes its home in the Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean. While rare for Sweden, I gather, this isn’t a very large specimen, as they seem to grow to 50 feet. So, for the King of Herrings, this one’s a bit of a pike(r). Here’s an entry from SeaSky, for the wikipedia-averse:

The most noticeable feature of the oarfish is its extremely long, ribbon-like body. These fish can reach a length of over 50 feet (15 meters) and weigh as much as 600 pounds (272 kilograms). Its scaleless body is covered with a silver to silvery blue skin and is topped with an ornate, red dorsal fin that resembles a decorative headdress. This dorsal fin runs the entire length of the fish, with a tiny spine projecting above each of over 400 individual fin rays. The pelvic fins of this fish are elongated and similarly colored. The oarfish has a small mouth with no visible teeth. Their diet consists mainly of plankton, small crustaceans, and small squid that they strain from the water using specially formed gill rakes in their mouth. In turn, the oarfish may be a food source for larger ocean carnivores such as sharks.

Oh, and SeaSky, green and yellow text on black? Really?

So, to sum up. Not really a herring. Not really that big (as far as these things go). And, while it is a plankton eater, I would not be terribly happy to see one swim past. (I’d get bored after the first 30 feet, for one thing.)

(via Museum of the Weird, one of my favorite places in Austin.)

It was a thing of beauty, a rare titan of the sea, so of course we had to kill it.

Not the biggest shark ever, certainly, but another reason to stay out of the water.
Full story.

This isn’t funny, of course, and I don’t intend to make light of a tragedy. However, this is a good time to question the captivity of orcas. Tilikum, the orca in question, has killed twice before, and such deaths aren’t uncommon, according to Discovery News:

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that captive Orcas are regularly involved in the deaths of trainers. Tilikum himself, a 12,000 pound bull, killed his trainer at Sealand of the Pacific in 1991. The body of a homeless man was found draped across his back at SeaWorld in 1999.

I’m not going to footnote everything here, but personally, I believe well-run zoos are crucial for animal conservation and education. Yes, many animals live shorter, less healthy lives in captivity and, of course, zoos should do their best to ease the burden of a sedentary lifestyle. (Although, I wonder about lions, males in particular are nature’s primo loafers.) It appears to me that any well-run zoo would find ways to create challenging situations for their animals to alleviate boredom, whether it is wrapping a rat for the vultures to puzzle over before dinner or teaching primates pinochle (kidding, they cheat).

Animal rights activists may disagree, but zoos are an important part of animal conservation and not just a source of cheap entertainment. Certainly, as parents, Aly and I would have gone mad long ago without the Philly Zoo and the (much smaller scale) Elmwood Park Zoo nearby. They are entertaining, but also educational, and I know the money I spend there goes to caring for animals there and protecting them in the wild. Not every zoo can be expansive as San Diego’s, but well-run smaller zoos can manage healthy creatures. Without captive breeding, we would have lost many species (of course, those species saved are just a fraction of the extinction rate, but that’s part of what makes humans remarkable).

Caging aquatic creatures — much like caging birds — seems particularly cruel, given the nearly unlimited nature of the sea or sky. Truth is, most of the critters you see at the local aquarium aren’t great roamers, with exceptions, of course. I think you can make good arguments for the need of both aquariums and avaries.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think orcas, I think, are different, even more so than dolphins (which aren’t as cute and cuddly as we’d like to believe). They are apex predators accustomed to roaming large distances. Sure, you say, so are lions, which are often fond of eating people. And elephants, while not predatory, are often bigger, weight-wise and have been known to kill handlers too.

True, but lions and elephants aren’t expected to perform (in a legit zoo setting, of course). And caged orcas are a hot commodity.

The bottom line is that these animals are very lucrative, as are the relationships trainers establish with them for shows. A 2004 investigative report by Sally Kestin of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel revealed that SeaWorld paid $875,000 for an Orca in the mid-1990s. Though WDCS hasn’t been able to find any current numbers, Vail speculated that the whales likely now sell for “millions of dollars.”

Being a campaigns director for WDCS, Vail’s stance is that no whales should be kept in captivity. Of the 41 Orcas currently alive in captivity around the world, only 13 are wild. Still, captive breeding programs need new blood from wild populations to maintain genetic viability. Animals will continue to be harvested from the wild, simply because they are money makers.

And for the same reason, the position of SeaWorld trainer to a killer whale isn’t llikely to disappear any time soon, no matter how dangerous a job it is.

I dunno, even if you can say that they are not cruel, trained orca acts just seem…well…unnecessary…and I think we’ll look back on them like we do the old Atlantic City diving horse acts.

Paleontologists have just identified the remains of a gigantic, 88.7-million-year-old shark nicknamed the “shell crusher.” The Cretaceous species could pulverize large, shelled animals with its 1,000 teeth, suggests a new study.

A handful of other fossils for the shark, Ptychodus mortoni, had been previously found and hinted that the species was extremely big. The new discoveries support that contention and reveal the shark likely grew to at least 33 feet in length and chomped on its prey with its 3-foot-long jaw.

One seal brought a penguin over to me. I didn’t touch it; I just sat there and photographed. The penguin took off, and the seal grabbed it, brought it back to me, and put it on my camera dome again.

Eventually the seal got upset and started blowing bubbles at me. It was the most fascinating interaction I’ve ever had.

Watch the full video here. And another version here:

Part of me is amazed that an enormous leopard seal could be so kind to another creature…and the other part is annoyed on behalf of the leopard seal. All of me would have been paralyzed with fear.

Still…if someone offers you a penguin, eat it. We are talking common manners here.

I’d be afraid of a 10-foot Great White…even behind a foot-thick wall of aquarium glass. Sure, I’d put a brave front up for the kids, but I’d also shudder the chill of the damned, as if a mariachi band — at that very moment — were collectively walking over my grave playing Besame Mucho Tiburon.

So, I’m fairly certain I would become paralyzed instantly if I saw a 20-foot Great White bite the first one in half.

“That cannibal thing is what great whites do; they’ll eat anything, including their own kind,” Hugh Edwards, a local shark expert, told Australia’s 7 News. “It would be sensible not to swim in that area for a little while.”

Dya think?

Not for the faint of heart…hit the read more button (or the link above) if you weren’t planning to sleep tonight anyway.

I’m going to be ill.

You see, when the carcass lands on the bottom of the sea, a whole host of unpleasant critters come out to eat it in a process that can take months — or even years if the whale lands in deep, deep water. Among those critters are members of the genus Osedax, bone-eating worms related to tubeworms or those guys you see hanging out by thermal vents…if you happen to go past a lot of thermal vents, that is.

Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute first discovered these little red bone-munching guys while out in the ROV Tiburon, which is a vehicle with just an awesome name. Their press release provides a great read. (And, doesn’t he look like something out of central casting for ocean explorer?)

Sure, unless your diet has really slipped and you’ve reached blue whale proportions, you don’t have much to worry about from these critters (aside from the fact that you’d be dead and lacking cares, in general). But the fact that these guys are down there waiting…just waiting…gives me the creeps.

Even creepier is that all those little red wigglers you see in the picture above are all females. They’re not hermaphrodites. Oh no, that would be normal in comparison. All of these worms are actually giant masters over their microscopic male concubines. That’s right, mini sex slaves. Invertebrates with a dwarf fetish.

But, according to Vrijenhoek, “That was not the end of the weirdness. In looking at the worms under a microscope, we discovered that every one of them was a female. We didn’t find any males until I got another call from Greg Rouse. He said, ‘Bob, it’s worse than you think.’ I said, ‘What now, Greg?’ He said ‘There really are males, but they are microscopic. They are dwarfs!’”

Sure enough, living within the tube that enclosed each female were 30 to 100 microscopic male worms, each only about a millimeter long. Not only that, but the male worms were still in a larval stage of development. They were making sperm in one part of their bodies, while other parts of the bodies still contained the yolk droplets. As Vrijenhoek put it, “These males don’t feed. A male lives its entire life off the yolk that was provisioned by the egg from which it hatched. This is one of the few cases in the animal world where sexually reproducing individuals are barely more developed than eggs. It’s weird.”

Among its many features, aside from looking like Satan’s own translucent centipede, it is sightless and poisonous, complete with nasty fangs.

The divers were searching for specimens of a closely related crustacean species that they’d discovered 25 years ago in the same cave. But after capturing several of the sea creatures, the researchers noticed something peculiar.

“Some animals were much more active in swimming around than others in the small sample bottles,” said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University at Galveston, who was part of the team that discovered the new species. “On closer examination, and subsequently with DNA testing, we confirmed that they were actually two different species.”

So, just so we’re straight on this, its a blind and poisonous creature that’s much more active and, therefore, liable to thrash around blindly poisoning things. Lovely.

Sure, judging by the fact it can be bottled, it’s tiny and it isn’t poisonous enough to kill a human. But why take the chance? Don’t go in the water. Things in there want you to die.