Loligo Pealeii

Hey look at this fucking bug

Oh! An African Woolly Chafer, I love how fluffy they are!

The Growlers at Beach Goth, Santa Ana, CA

10.22.16

Daily fish fact #519

Handfish!

They're anglerfish which have adapted to using their pectoral fins as legs, using them to walk on the seafloor instead of swimming!

Photographer Steven Kovacs captures rare marine life off the coast of Florida (2021). © BluePlanetArchive/Steven Kovacs

La Jolla

A scorpion and a crawfish.

Thought about making this a longer comic but for now it’s just me fooling around with ink + digital painting

(lyrics are from Half Life by the Symposium)

reblog to give your mutuals a BLÅHAJ

okay this a great post but they deserve more credit for their dumb lil brains!!!

They have short and long term memory, the ability to learn and solve complex problems! They even can switch tactics during said problem and work it out another way! Given multiple cognitive tasks they before pretty damn well!!!

They barely have a brain and can do all that!!! They deserve more credit for their hard work !!!!

Nautiluses. THIS goddamn animal.

The fundamentals of this design are HALF A BILLION YEARS OLD. Look at its weird eyes. It evolved back when eyes were still new. Those are literal pinhole cameras. Because nature invented photography the same way we did, apparently.

It doesn't have tentacles. Those are cirri, which lots of sea animals use to do all sorts of things. Fetal nautiluses have one giant slug foot that splits into these. They have noodle antennae made out of foot.

You can bring them up out of the ocean and they can survive the equivalent change of like 80 standard atmospheres. That shouldn't be possible. These things evolved a goddamn spacesuit...500 million years ago.

They also swim via jet propulsion. Their shells make them buoyant, which they can regulate, and they shoot water from a pump. So their 500 million year old spacesuit also has a goddamn rocket pack.

There have been 5 mass extinction events (we are causing a six one now). This thing has survived all of them. And it never got better eyes.

Or A BRAIN. That's right. This thing predates BRAINS. It has two separated lobes behind its top and bottom halves of beak that apparently work well enough that it can track smells with okay accuracy in total darkness, in 3 dimensions.

Here is one eating a dead fish.

Goddamn.