The OctoPost: A "Golden Age of Octopus Research" and a Quest
I love finding out I was wrong.
Cephalopod News
Last year in Nautilus I wrote: "Octopuses seem to be missing sex chromosomes in any form as we know them. In humans and many other animals, two X chromosomes make an egg-producing female, while one X and one Y make a sperm-producing male. Octopuses possess no such familiar, tidy determinants."
Wrong!
New research on the two-spotted octopus has revealed sex chromosomes--but instead of XY, they're ZW. This type of sex determination, in which ZZ makes male and ZW makes female, occurs in birds, snakes, roly-polies, and many other animals. However, octopus sex chromosomes turn out to be way older than others we know of, possibly the oldest on the planet!
I couldn't agree more with Sy Montgomery, who said, "We are really enjoying right now the golden age of octopus research." Her new book Secrets of the Octopus, co-authored with OctoNation founder Warren Carlyle, comes out this month as a companion to a new octopus documentary by the same title.
Joyous as it is, this "golden age of octopus research" has led to at least one highly controversial outcome: we now know enough about octopuses to start farming them as food. Strong opinions both against and in favor of octopus farming can be found all around the world, including within the community of cephalopod researchers. Currently no commercial farms exist, although a company called Nueva Pescanova plans to build one in the Canary Islands. With such possibilities on the horizon, a bill to preemptively ban octopus farming has already passed the Washington State Senate, and similar bills are under consideration in California and Hawaii. In any case, I hope we can all agree that assaulting each other over the ethics of eating octopus isn't going to solve anything (as allegedly happened in Ahmedabad, India).
My News
I'm working on a new cephalopod project that I'm not allowed to announce yet, but I am super excited to share the details as soon as I can. In the meantime...
Nursery Earth comes out in paperback on May 7th, and pre-orders are always deeply appreciated. Look at this adorable new cover!
Funny Pages
I just got back from a two-week trip to New Zealand for a family reunion celebrating an eightieth birthday, a fiftieth birthday, a fiftieth anniversary, and a surprise wedding. I myself happened to have a birthday of an unremarkable number during the visit, and, since we were already road tripping around the South Island, I insisted on a stop at the Ward Beach Boulders. Here, earthquake uplift has revealed the very rocks that were created before, during, and after the asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous Period and the reign of ammonites (and, incidentally, dinosaurs). I wanted to see the evidence of this catastrophic event. I wanted to touch it.
This is what happened.
