Little is known about the details . . .
(yeah, right), but for the past week I have been enraptured with your Octopoteuthis deletron.
These squid just don’t care about the sex of other squid they bump into.
Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them.
I was up late one night last week looking for video. I was over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute site. Because who wouldn’t want to see “a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh”? Sperm in a packet that turns inside out! That’s like something out of a Cronenberg film.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for this and for indirectly keeping me up all night.)
Flocking Robots
From an article in Wired, a group in Switzerland has developed small flying robots that are able to communicate with one another, and depending on the constraints, adopt various flocking patterns. Watch out for “incoherent flocking”. You know who you are.
headline of the day, II
Brooklyn’s Famed Vagina Tree Felled by Irene
headline of the day
Watch a Weather Man Get Covered in What’s Probably Raw Sewage
Irene
Our New York and East Coast friends, keep us posted.
tweet of the day
from the comments
Cindy, my little friends the birds were really quiet before the quake hit. I was out in the garden and wondered where they were. They’ve been hiding all week. I look for them everyday as I go around picking up the pots of Angel’s Trumpet that keep getting knocked over by aftershocks. Now the birds are up in the trees, invisible, but causing a ruckus. Hurricane Irene?
We are living in interesting times.
from the comments
We’re in harmony with all of nature, except for plants. Fuck plants.
quote out of context
Swan says she didn’t smell anything odd when she dipped her hand into the substance.
from the comments
Today is my birthday and we are in Marfa! As it has every birthday of my life, it rained this morning. No matter where I am, it rains. Marfa is parched (recovering from 10 rainless months), so it is lovely to see everything getting a drink. I will refrain from taking the credit, but of course, we all know better. To quote Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, “I make the weather!”
It was a little scary in the Driftless Region last night.
This is more than you’d possibly care to hear about an area where you don’t live, but I tell you last night was something. And most of this morning.
Unofficial reports suggest that we got even more rain in Galena than the folks did in Dubuque.
put a squirrel trap on it and you have yourself a customer
Alexander Trevi muses on treebots:
When a more advanced version is developed, one that has greater maneuverability, adaptability and durability (plus the ability to harness the metabolic energy of trees), drop thousands of them to the Amazon, each one with the instructions to recreate Notre-Dame out of the rainforest.
Once deployed, they’ll link up together to form a chain: one treebot gripping another. This chain will in turn knit itself with other chains to create a lattice binding trunks, branches, vines and canopies together with each other. It is also anchored to the forest floor. Simultaneously, the treebots will attach themselves to theses future columns and buttresses like a full-body orthopedic brace of facehuggers.
‘Leopards are protected in India, though more are straying into villages for food’
Eleven people were injured in an attempt to drive a male leopard back into a wildlife sanctuary in India. The report is skimpy on details, but the incident didn’t end well. I make the post primarily out of respect for the animal.
it’s good to be the guy behind the guy
Laurence R. Gesquiere, a research associate in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and colleagues report in the journal Science that in five troops of wild baboons in Kenya studied over nine years, alpha males showed very high stress levels, as high as those of the lowest-ranking males.
The stress, they suggested, was probably because of the demands of fighting off challengers and guarding access to fertile females. Beta males, who fought less and had considerably less mate guarding to do, had much lower stress levels. They had fewer mating opportunities than the alphas, but they did get some mating in, more than any lower-ranking males. After all, when the alpha gets in another baboon bar fight, who’s going to take the girl home?
(via the browser)
Achillea millefolium
“Common yarrow [Achillea millefolium] is frequently found in the mildly disturbed soil of grasslands and open forests.”
I snipped my yarrow at midnight by the light of the moon, standing in grasses up to my chin.
Other names for yarrow are devil’s nettle, sanguinary, milfoil, and soldier’s woundwort.
I especially like sanguinary, as one traditional use of yarrow is the stanching of wounds. When I got my yarrow indoors under lamplight, I noticed that one of the blossom clusters was tinged with something that looked like a blood clot.
Which makes the odd splotch on my chin in this mobile phone photo all the more interesting to me.
‘Cluster Flocking’ Is No Energy Saver
When birds take to the air in a large group, they typically either fly in a V-formation or in a swarmlike cluster. Both have their benefits: the V-shape is aerodynamically efficient, saving geese and other birds energy during flight, while cluster flocking can help birds like pigeons guard against predators. But the cluster has one big disadvantage, according to a study published online today in Nature. When researchers followed 18 pigeons with GPS, they found that the birds gained neither an aerodynamic advantage nor added energy efficiency when flying in a cluster. In fact, the team believes that it takes pigeons more energy to fly in a flock than to fly solo. So why do they do it? In addition to predator protection, the researchers speculate that cluster flocking may help the birds navigate; a follow-the-crowd mentality.
(Thanks to @StanCarey.)
headline of the day
Bald eagles attack post office customers
headline of the day, II
Germany Opens New Nude-Friendly Nature Trails
Update: More naked Germans:
“A German passenger took all his clothes off on the plane,” on Thursday night, an Iberia spokeswoman said.
“Staff on board tried to dissuade him but he became aggressive and finally locked himself in the toilet. The pilot then decided to turn around and land in Madrid.”
slow motion landslide in New York
It’s oozing slowly, Kozlowski says, no faster than three feet per day. But it’s so big that scientists have been arriving from all over the country to study it.
“it’s like a nutshell towing a mountain”
Since he was hired in the ’70s by Saudi prince Mohammad al-Faisal, French engineer Georges Mougin has tried to figure out a way to tow freshwater icebergs across the Arctic. Now, with 3-D tech, declassified satellite data, and tugboats, he might have cracked the way to quench the world’s thirst.
Dallas
Carrollton man crashes, undresses, dies in second of two accidents in Far North Dallas
Man found dead in South Dallas pond after using drugs, talking about walking on water
(thanks, Patrick)
Lundbreck Falls
Check out the video of a kayaker going over a serious waterfall at the bottom of this post.
quote out of context
Great snipes are so fat and heavy in autumn that their skin sometimes ruptures when the shot bird hits the ground.
tweet of the day
from the comments
I’m now picturing the rumble and split of the earth’s crust making its way around the planet like a spray tan circling an alcoholic’s belly.
