The OctoPost: Babies, Baroque, and Kidney Worms
Cephalopod News
Here’s the cephalopod video everyone is talking about: Colossal Squid, 1st Live Observation. It’s a beautiful baby of one of the largest squid species (colossal squid are the heaviest; giant squid are the longest). I highly recommend watching the whole thing—it's only a minute and a half, with an excellent pun at 1:02 which I have confirmed with the narrator was intentional.
Here’s the other cephalopod video everyone should also be talking about: More Oncocerida from Gotland. Oncocerids are a group of long-extinct shelled cephalopods, and although their shells were cute round blorps, the real mind-boggler was the shape of their shell openings. Please, please, watch the video to see how talented paleoartist Kiabugboy reconstructed them.
Baroque, four million years before Bernini.
My News
Tomorrow! May 7, 3:45pm PT/6:45pm ET: I’ll be talking about "The Hidden World of Baby Animals" with Smithsonian Associates (online, tickets here). Come celebrate babies of all kinds—the cute, the creepy, and the crucial!
Interview: I enjoyed sharing behind-the-scenes research from my book The Lady and the Octopus for an interview in the blog From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors.
Shop: With Mother’s Day around the corner, I’ll note that my store offers a variety of thematic cards that convey truly unique sentiments.
Funny Pages
Did you know there’s an entire phylum of worms that live in cephalopod kidneys and nowhere else? These animals, called dicyemids, have fascinated me since I first learned about them in college. At one point I thought I might even study them for my PhD. I didn’t, but I did co-author a chapter about them in the Light and Smith Manual. And now, thanks to a nudge from magnificent crab scientist Jo Wolfe, I’ve begun drawing an informational comic about them! So far I’ve only finished the title art, but future panels will feature many nigh-unbelievable details of these worms’ lives…
Not sure how interested you are in fantasy cephalopods but I just became aware of the Nu Udra from the video game Monster Hunter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KabLL9DB-9g). While I'm not a fan of the premise of the game which seems to be "go into an animal's territory and kill it", I am a fan of the design of this creature and its life-like tentacle animations, and thought maybe you'd get a kick out of it too! Though, be prepared for the narrator to repeatedly refer to it as a "squid" when clearly it's more octopus in design :eyeroll:
Ooh, that's neat! I love fantasy cephs, in fact, so thanks very much for sharing. (And sorry I didn't see your comment earlier. I'm going to check my settings to make sure I'm getting notifs.) The arms, and the squishiness of the mantle too, are really neat! Seeing it has only 6 arms reminds me of the animators of Finding Dory saying that they gave Hank only 7 arms because 8 would be too hard to animate. Octopuses are out there laughing at the poor human animators I bet!