The Octopus: Blessing In Disguise

Here's an enjoyable collection of vids, pics, and tidbits on the mimicry of octopuses. Not original, but The Conservation Report did us all the favor of collecting them.

Already great at simply blending in, I wonder at what stage in the grand struggle for survival an animal begins to try to take on the appearance of another living creature.

It's one thing (conceptually speaking) to simply try to look like the blade of seagrass next to you or the substrate under you; it's something else entirely to try to imitate some form of life that (presumably) at some point you've seen swimming nearby. Does this mean that an animal is thinking -- in the abstract, since none's around -- of some fish/snake/echinoderm that it's seen in the past?

And since we're on the topic of octopuses, why is it always eight? Eight arms. There are no species of octopus with more or fewer, are there? Not like starfish, for instance, which have varying numbers of rays. Is there something about eight arms that is just eminently practical -- like the argument that two eyes is logical because it's the minimum number to provide depth perception?

I dunno, I used to love eating octopus but quit after I'd had a lengthy dive encounter with one. Just too smart (and playful) to eat, I concluded. It was so eerie when I looked back and saw that he/she looked just like me. (I made that last part up.)

Creature Costs

National Geographic has a typically beautiful photo gallery of some of the animals -- terns, turtles, tuna, and more -- at greatest risk from BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

What BP Hath Wrought

U.S. public broadcaster PBS has given us a grim ticker to follow the quantity of oil that's gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon drill site.

Hat tip: Dot Earth Blog.

One Cool Calamari

I'm a little fuzzy on the methodology, but scientists think the Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is more like Leatherface of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" than Freddy Kreuger of "Nightmare on Elm Street." It lies back and lets prey come to it (and doesn't eat so much) rather than stalking food sources.

Or so say these researchers.

BBC characterizes how they arrived at their conclusions about a cephalopod that's rarely seen by us humans:

(T)he team used a set of routine metabolic rates for other deep-sea squid species and extrapolated the data to match the colossal squid's size.

They also factored into their calculations the cold temperature of the Southern Ocean the squid inhabits.

It's slow, too:

"Our findings demonstrate that the colossal squid has a daily energy consumption 300-fold to 600-fold lower than those of other similar-sized top predators of the Southern Ocean, such as baleen and toothed whales," says (Dr. Rui Rosa from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, who undertook the study with Dr. Brad Seibel from the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, US.)

South America's 'Extreme' Right Whale Crisis

The last three years have seen lots of fatal beachings of endangered Southern Right Whales on the Argentine coast, according to this video report by Paul Byrne for globalpost. (Sorry, couldn't embed for some reason.) It says an uncanny 90 percent of the fatalities are calves.

A scientist working with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Andrea Chirife, calls it "the most extreme whale mortality event ever observed in the South Atlantic."

The culprit -- whether manmade or not -- is unclear. Right whales are notoriously slow-swimming and conspicuous, given their proclivity for the shallows and their acrobatics.

Fuels Rush In...

"Energy of electromagnetic radiation is stored in oil, a fossil fuel, retrieved by an oil rig."

That line, from Dorling Kindersley's "Visual Encyclopedia," makes an oil rig seem like such a benign and reliable tool.

It is difficult to reconcile with images and informed reports of the devastation as a torrent of BP crude oil engulfs a huge swath of the Gulf of Mexico (that's a NASA photo) in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. (Because area on the surface of the sea is a tough thing for most people to get their heads around, media keep comparing its size to things like Delaware, Jamaica, etc.)

Carl Safina, who in my view consistently strikes a constructive balance between the practical and the paramount, points out in his "Spill Baby Spill" post that anodyne descriptions of oil rigs are also misleadingly reassuring.

First he quotes someone questioning the use of the word "spill" when we're talking about a disaster of this scale. ("Milk spills. A can of oil spills.")

But then Safina gets to the nub of the problem, after quoting U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as calling it a "very, very rare event."

I say the spill’s a very, very inevitable event. Especially with 30,000 wells drilled. Thirty thousand. There are roughly 4,000 wells producing oil there.

In 2007 the federal Minerals Management Service examined 39 rig blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006 [http://bit.ly/a7FleE].

So, a blowout every four months.

It reminds me of an eye-opening statistic provided by Peter Apps of Reuters at the height of the air-travel crisis sparked by that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano!

Governments face a difficult decision. Between 20,000 and 22,000 flights a day fly in European airspace, so even if 99.9 percent suffered no serious ill effects, that would still see 20 planes a day suffering damage or engine failure.

It's mind-blowing, though, to see how dismissive societies can be of the oil-rig failures, presumably because they represent such an indirect threat to us humans. After all, it's not like passenger jets are falling out of the sky or anything.

Worst Of All Possible Times For BP Spill

This article in "The New York Times" piles more bad news on what we're seeing playing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico.

Spring is mating and spawning season for almost everything in the gulf: Fill a jar with plankton from the local waters in the spring and it will typically contain the larvae of 80 species. All the eggs and hatchlings are surface dwellers, with almost no ability to swim away from the slick.