Creepy Crawlies

You know what the world needs more of? Music videos of mutant insects. Thankfully I found one:



I mean look at that, I can't even tell what half of those things are. It's all photo-manipulation of course, but I would love to see creatures like that in real life. Honestly I don't know what I like more: the crazy cubist looking arthropods or that I have no idea how this was made. I mean, if I had to guess I'd say they layered multiple videos over one another, so what we're seeing are actually multiple shots of the same bug at once, turning them into the monstrosities in the video. But that's really just a guess. I especially like the praying mantis with the headdress, or how the millipede is the only normal one in the bunch.

Now that I think about it, it reminds me of this video by Simian Mobile Disco:



I like this one almost as much, chiefly because it's so colorful. But it could definitely use some help in the kaleidoscope insect monster department.

Point Insertion

They're waiting for you Gordon...

I guess this means I'm devoted to updating everyday before the release, doesn't it? Well that's perfectly fine because I just realized that in all the time I've maintained this blog I haven't told you about our good friends from the sea: the Nautiluses.



The cephalopod family Nautilidae has survived in one form or another for the past million years. Today, this family of mollusks are the only living members of the superfamily Nautilaceae, belonging to the subclass Nautiloidea of the class Cephalopoda which of course includes octopuses, squids and cuttlefish. Because the Nautiluses have been around for so long they're considered living fossils.

Compared to their glory days, there's not many of them around anymore. They're found only in the Indo-Pacific on the slopes of coral reefs, usually at a depth of a couple hundred meters. It used to be a very different story back in the early Paleozoic Era when the oceans were completely dominated by hard-shelled cephalopods of all sizes and shapes. In those ancient times the Nautiloids were the undisputed masters of the seas, making up the bulk of the whole predatory population of the entire planet.



Compared to their shell-less relatives, the Nautiluses are fairly simple animals, especially when it comes to eyesight. Unlike the cuttlefishes who try to rival the mantis shrimps for sheer visual power, the Nautiluses make do with a highly developed, but lensless structure that acts like a simple pinhole camera. They usually rely on olfaction when foraging, sniffing out prey like a tentacled bloodhound.

They don't swim like other mollusks either. Their shells are chambered like a submarine ballast. When water is in the chamber salt is extracted and diffuses into the Nautilus's blood, making them more buoyant. If they want to sink they remove liquid from their shell chambers.



Speaking of which, Nautilus shells form pretty close approximations of logarithmic spirals. Vortexes like these can be found throughout nature; such as in the growth of broccoli, sunflowers, hurricane clouds and even the spiral arms of galaxies.

The turnings of logarithmic spirals increase in distance according to a geometric progression, meaning the further out they spiral, the wider it will get and the greater the distance will be between each successive "layer" of the spiral. This is different from Archimedean spirals where the distance remains constant.

Nautilus shells are sometimes used as examples of Golden Spirals in nature, even when they're obviously not. The confusion probably stems from the fact that golden spirals are logarithmic spirals just like Nautilus shells. But the growth factor of a golden spiral is the golden ratio, about 1.61803... which would be way too wide for any real Nautilus. I have no idea what the geometric progression is for most real Nautiluses but if I ever meet one I'll be sure to ask.

In any case, it doesn't matter if they're proportional to the Greek Parthenon or not. Because at the end of the day they're still primordial, hard-shelled, submarines with tentacles. If that's not cash, I don't know what is.

...

Oh, and before I forget...



...It's Bunday.

Smother's Day

Yes, yes. Mothers are great, buy them cards and flowers and things. Everybody loves them, they're the best members of the species blah blah Hallmark Channel blah blah pro-choice blah blah men are horrible.

Right. Now that that's out of the way, let me show you some species who consider Mother's Day a time of despair and terror because I'm a jerk like that.

Stegodyphus lineatus



It's not easy being a parent in this species. If you're a male then you might not even see a female before a bird swoops down to eat you. But even then the females don't have any scruples against killing or eating you before you have a chance to woo her with your bongo drum playing or whatever it is you spiders do. But if you're a female, congratulations because now you have to defend your precious eggs against the aforementioned desperate males who won't have second thoughts about eating them only to replace them with a new clutch he's sure he's responsible for. It's like those paternity tests on Maury in reverse. Of course that's assuming ants don't steal the eggs first and bring them back to their queen as a food offering.

But that's not the worst of it; assuming male spiders, birds, ants or even other females don't sabotage your eggs then you have something much worse to contend with once they hatch: the babies themselves.

Yes, the offspring are matriphagous which is a polite way of saying they eat their mothers.

Parasitoid Wasps



Sometimes, motherhood isn't frightening because of the pain the mother has to endure; sometimes the pain she's willing to put others through is much much worse.

Enter the parasitoid wasp: a huge family of insects that have made it their goal to get free child support by any means necessary. First of all, there's a difference between your garden variety parasites and parasitoids. Regular parasites are content to spend their entire natural life inside your body, feeding on your precious bodily fluids. While they're generally freeloading dead weight, it's not in their best interest to kill you so at least you have that going for you.

Not so with the parasitoid.

Parasitoids spend a comparatively short portion of their life inside other animals. You know, like after they've been forcefully injected into your body by their mother. Yes, there's an entire superfamily of wasps who forgo the raising of their children, leaving the responsibility to some other arthropod. They do this by sneaking up on their victim, injecting them with their eggs and flying away. Over the next couple days the aphid, caterpillar or what have you becomes the unwilling incubator of a new generation of parasitoid wasps. They grow inside it's body and hatch. Then they eat the host from the inside out.

If this sounds familiar maybe you've heard of a certain movie monster with a similar reproductive strategy.



No points for guessing which one.

Surinam Toads



Bogleech has something of a love affair with these particularly morbid amphibians. Not me though. I have to draw the line somewhere, even if it's at tiny baby frogs embedded in an adult's skin.

Allow me to explain. See, when a female Surinam releases her eggs, they stick to the skin on her back with help from the male. The skin grows over the eggs, trapping them in a nutrient layer of toad-matter. When the eggs hatch the newborns have only one option: burrow through their mother's back and swim away.

In a way I guess it's kind of cute in how dedicated these toad-mothers are to the well being of their children, protecting them in their own misshapen hunchbacks, it's just that it looks so so gross.

Naked Mole Rats

Quick, think of a small mammal that spends most of it's time in burrows. Are you thinking of rabbits?



Sorry to disappoint, but you're in Mole Rat Town now. But it's okay, because Mole Rats have plenty going for them. For example, they have an uncanny resistance to cancer and they live abnormally long for a rodent of their size, sometimes up to 28 years old. It sounds like they have a lot to discuss with the lobsters.

But naturally, their eternal youth comes at a terrible price. Mole rats are eusocial, meaning they live in hives like ants, bees and termites. This is completely unprecedented for mammals, there are only two species that have ever been recorded with such insect-like behavior, one of them being the Naked Mole Rats. They even have different castes like workers and warriors. And queens.

Yes, most females are sterile workers. Reproductive privileges belongs solely to the queen Mole Rat. She produces hormones to signal the beginning or her reign, summoning the males to her side. Then, she starts to undergo a horrible transformation to prepare her for her matronly duties. Her spine actually extends several inches to make room for all new Mole Rats she'll gestate.

So if you want to get an idea for what a queen looks like, imagine the above. The same pale, wrinkled troglodyte but longer, more worm-like in appearance. Constantly stewing in it's own filth, spewing hundred, thousands of offspring, attended to by the flabby mitts of it's minions. It's never seen the sun. All it can think of is eating, sleeping, producing more of it's hideous offspring. And it's out there right now. And it wants your blood.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Ultimate Predator

Make no mistake, I'm still furious about this update, I loath it. But my precious blog still looks normal enough for the time being. I'm just having a hard time articulating to you that if they change the editor it would be tantamount to taking one of the few things I love in life away from me.

But for now, lets just pretend I'm not having a meltdown and focus on the real reason why we all came here: to choose the next master race. Yes, if you remember the post about lobsters I mentioned another crustacean who could make world domination work like a cashmere sweater. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Mantis Shrimp:



"Anyone else feeling fabulous?" -Mantis Shrimp

That psychedelic fiend up there is the Peacock Mantis Shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) and it is a proven scientific fact that it is one of the most bedazzled invertebrates in the ocean today. Mantis shrimps are neither real shrimps nor mantids, but belong to an unrelated order called Stomatopoda. In general, stomatopods are known for three things; their incredible eyesight, their powerful claws and being too disco for words.



First of all, the claws. Mantis shrimps are very active hunters and spend most of their time strutting around coral reefs like they own the place, wantonly putting an end to gastropods, bivalves and other crustaceans with their deadly claws which are tiny doomsday devices for all intents and purposes.

See, there are about four hundred species of stomatopods and they all fall into two groups depending on what kind of claws they have: spearers and smashers. Spearers have thin, spiny claws that end in barbed tips. They use these like harpoons to mercilessly skewer their opponents, harpoons wrapped in barbed wire and glitter.



(An uncharacteristically bland specimen displaying the spears of his people.)

Smashers on the other hand have huge claws like brightly colored maces or maybe disco balls. They use these to bludgeon other sea-beasts to a bloody pulp with. There's even been reports of aquarium owners being injured by the cruel morning stars of mantis shrimps who've snuck into their tanks during the transfer of fish from one into another, earning them the nickname thumb splitters. So yes, you can add espionage to the list of things stomatopods are experts at, along with crushing their foes and color coordination.



(A female peacock mantis shrimp with smasher appendages. Neon red is in season obviously.)

A final word on their weapons: they unfold and swing their raptorial claws to land a lethal blow. Essentially the shrimps punch their prey. They punch right through the hard shells of mollusks, disintegrating them into a fine powder and they do it with blinding speed. As far as I know, they strike with an acceleration of about 10,400 gees. That's 2080 times more force then an average drag racing car accelerates with. To put that in perspective their claws accelerate at a rate of 23 meters per second, the acceleration of a .22 caliber bullet. They have the fastest punch of any animal on Earth.

If that's not enough to kill you, your fancy fish and everyone else in the aquarium, don't worry, because they punch with so much force so fast that they create tiny bubbles between their weapons and the surface they're striking against. These bubbles collapse, producing a shockwave that can stun or outright kill their prey. Y'know, assuming they weren't already pulverized into a fine paste.

But that's not all, when these bubbles collapse, they do so with so much force that it creates a phenomenon called sonoluminescence, releasing small bursts of light at extremely high temperatures, somewhere on the magnitude of several thousand kelvins. They punch with so much force they make the water radioactive.



Finally, their eyes. Mantis shrimps have some of the most complex eyes on Earth; not only are they both mounted on mobile stalks that can move independently of each other, but they can see the entire spectrum from red to ultraviolet. It's not currently believed that they can see infrared light but you know they can. They so can.

They have compound eyes like flies, giving them higher resolution vision in high light environments like shallow coral reefs. Each eye is composed of about 10,000 ommatidia, each one specialized for things like color sensitivity, hyperspectral vision and even the detection of polarized light, something puny Humans are all but incapable of.

While we need two eyes to perceive depth, mantis shrimps have no such handicap. While we have binocular vision, the shrimps have trinocular vision. This means that each eye can perceive depth all on it's lonesome. Using both in concert? Suddenly they're open to a whole dimension of vision we cannot begin to comprehend.

As if that wasn't enough to make them some kind of eyesight wizards, at least two species (including the aforementioned peacock mantis shrimps) can see circularly polarized light. While certain species of beetles reflect left-handed circularly polarized light off their carapaces, only the mantis shrimps seem to visually interpret it. Apparently, the shrimps fluoresce (glow) during mating rituals, but at frequencies only other mantis shrimps can see.



Honestly, it's like they're the perfect animal. They have the fastest weapons and most advanced eyes of any animals on Earth. And that's no hyperbole, that is an objective statement of fact. It's a crime that there's so many people who don't know about these amazing beasts. Plus they're so bombastically colorful! People on acid could only wish they could see hallucinations as psychedelic as these real life killing machines. Plus they're very inquisitive, as if there's the glimmer of a fabulous, primordial intellect behind all the flash and sparkle. Now imagine what it would be like if could get them to replicate their telomere like lobsters. Then they would become like gods.

And to think, there's people who still like pandas. They're not even in color.

Rock Lobster

In my continuing search for the elusive Übermensch my thoughts often return to the sea. In those briny depths live a great many creatures that could be the progenitors of some bold new master race; the honorable Mantis Shrimp, the wise Octopus, the steadfast Barnacle even the Comb Jelly, who spends it's solitary existence contemplating the cold, inky darkness of the Challenger Deep. These are all organisms that, with some bio-engineering, could rise up and conquer the Earth, maybe even the stars themselves.

Except for dolphins, they're all douche bags.

Granted, the title of "Supreme Race and Masters Over All The Earth" are some serious shoes to fill. We can't let any old starfish claim this privilege and abdicate the throne when things heat up. What we need is a wise creature with years of experience. Nay, decades. Centuries.

We need Homarus americanus, the American Lobster.



At first glance the common lobster doesn't look like it's up to the task of world domination. It has a crippling disadvantage when faced with it's two greatest enemies: rubber bands and hot water. Surely such weakness brings dishonor to it's name and disqualifies it for a chance at being the Übermensch. Right?

Wrong. What the lobster lacks in fortitude and general intelligence it makes up for in sheer longevity.

First, we need to understand why animals die of old age. Every time an animal's cell replicates it must copy it's DNA. Strands of DNA are "capped" with nucleotides called Telomere. Essentially, Telomere keeps the DNA strand from "unraveling" and losing it's precious genetic information during the act of replication (called mitosis). Therein lies the fatal flaw called the Hayflick Limit, with every replication the region of telomere gets shorter and shorter, like a roll of bubble tape slowly getting chewed to nonexistence. When the telomere runs out, the cell stops replicating, entering a period of senescence where it will eventually die off, never to share it's genetic material with a younger generation ever again.

A sorry state of affairs to be sure. But some cells manage to resist this biological death sentence and keep replicating ad infinitum to their tiny heart's content. Unfortunately these cells are more often then not cancer and this will not do.

We need a creature that can replicate it's cells forever, but we can't let it's cells conspire to kill it from the inside out. Again, we need the lobster. Only the lobster offers an elegant solution to the problem of the Hayflick limit: the enzyme telomerase. The enzyme's function is deceptively simple: it restores the telomere at the end of it's chromosomes, in turn allowing it's cells to replicate without limit, in turn allowing the lobster to essentially live forever.

Some lobsters have been captured and held in captivity who's age has been estimated to be over a hundred years old, such as George the lobster who lived in the City Crab and Seafood Restaurant in New York from December 2008 to January 2009. When was he estimated to have been born? 1869. This makes him well over one hundred and fifty years old, probably more since it's 2012 and we assume George is still alive down there in the murky depths (and I am most certainly going to assume that).

Plus, lobsters don't get decrepit with age. Research suggests that lobsters don't slow down, weaken or lose fertility as they get older. In fact, they become more fertile the longer they live. Lobsters are in essence, crunchy little dragons of the sea in this regard. Or Highlanders. Barring accident, injury or disease Lobsters are effectively immortal, able to pass their wisdom down their ever expanding family tree and grow to truly immense proportions, able to crush entire cities with their enormous claws. Now that's an Übermensch.



Plus, in a little quirk of genetics, one out of every two million lobsters produce an excessive amount of a certain protien which interacts with a red carotenoid in their shells to form a molecular complex called crustacyanin, giving them a festive blue color.