The OctoPost: Whale Ink and Giant Eggs
Cephalopod News
June brought another fabulous Cephalopod Week, this year with extra ink! Science Friday interviewed an ink expert, and I gave a talk about cephalopod ink at the California Academy of Science’s NightLife: Inked. I drew an Escher-inspired temporary tattoo on my arm to celebrate:
I thought I knew a lot about ink. Turns out I also had a lot to learn! For example:
Ink evolved as a digestive system spinoff. Ancient cephalopods probably squirted poop at predators.
Melanin, the pigment in ink, is great at binding heavy metals. Ejecting it from the body doubles as detox!
I used to think that molluscs (cephalopods and their distant cousins sea hares) were the only inking animals. Apparently dwarf & pygmy sperm whales also ink!? This is very funny to me, because sperm whales eat cephalopods. It’s almost like they learned how to ink from their prey. (That is not actually how evolution works.)
In other news, scientists found a new species of deep-sea squid, based on footage of a mama squid cradling eggs the size of blueberries. That’s more than twice as big as typical squid eggs!
Most of the world’s squid lay small eggs and leave them to fend for themselves. The fact that some deep-sea squid brood their eggs at all is a recent discovery, first observed in 2005, and the “monster” size of this new species’ offspring further expands our expectations of what’s possible.
My News
Monday, August 26, 3:45 PT/6:45 ET: I'm delighted to return to Smithsonian Associates with a talk on Understanding Cephalopod Behavior! (Unofficial title: From Greedy Trickster to Kindly Teacher: Octopuses Have the Range.) This is a fully online talk; tickets available here.
The book discovery website Shepherd invites authors to write “top five” lists on a subject of their choosing; I really enjoyed composing The best books about babies and parenthood—throughout the animal kingdom.
Funny Pages
Summer comic double feature picture show!
First, my daughter had a brilliant idea based on the internet cat meme “if I fits, I sits” and the fact that an octopus can fit its whole body through an opening the size of its beak. So I illustrated it.
Second, I heard neuroscientist Wen-Sung Chung of the University of Queensland, Australia, refer to blue-ringed octopuses as "venomous Blueys," and the phrase lodged itself in my brain. I had to draw one of these deadly cuties in the style of the Australian children’s show Bluey!
