June 2012
Wacky Wednesday
Welcome to Wacky Wednesday!…or Weird Wednesday..or hang-in-there-the-week-is-almost-over Wednesday.
The post today is going to be on the Turritopsis nutricula. This tiny jellyfish-like hydrozoa, like other jellies goes through life staged via metamorphosis: the adults produce larvae who settle into polyps. The polyps bud off into new jellies who then grow into the sexually mature adults. The wacky Wednesday feature? The Turritopsis nutricula has the ability to grow into an adult, mate, then revert back into the immature polyp stage if conditions become unfavorable. When conditions improve, the jelly is able to mature again. The process between metamorphosis and reverse metamorphosis appears to have the ability to continue indefinitely making the Turritopsis nutricula immortal!
For more info you can read these articles:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/01/29/the-curious-case-of-the-immortal-jellyfish/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-jellyfish-swarming-across-the-world.html
Edit: Sooooo… two of us were looking up Immortal Jellyfish pictures and stumbled across this wonderful thing:
Check out that signature. Hosler. Might not mean much to some of you folks out there, but two a number of us that run this blog, the name Hosler makes us really excited. You see, he’s a professor at the college we attended (or attend) and he does wonderfully awesome comics. You should check out his blog. In fact, he’ll definitely be featured at some point on Art Feature Fridays.
More Jay Hosler. His comics keep cropping up in my Google searches and I occasionally stumble across them on Tumblr. I cannot explain how excited I get…
amywhoisawesome replied to your post: amywhoisawesome replied to your post: Sometimes I…
like seriously tumblr this is such a basic idea and we want it. OH WAIT THEY CAN’T DO ANYTHING IF IT’S A BASIC IDEA THAT MAKES SENSE
Works better than Facebook though.
amywhoisawesome replied to your post: Sometimes I forget things like looking under the…
hence why tumblr needs a way to search multiple tags at the same time
Agreed. It drives me nuts when I try to search things…
Sometimes I forget things like looking under the “ship” tag will not get me a bunch of really cool boats, but a bunch of fangirls.
Everyone likes sex right?
More shameless plugging, but really, Monday’s are going to be pretty cool in Marine Scribbles. It’s all about the wacky and weird mating habits of the ocean’s inhabitants.
It has been said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we understand about our oceans. I bring up this cliché factoid because what I find so fascinating and maybe ironic about sea life is just how “alien” it is from how the land-bound critters do their day-to-day business. And I do mean business…
Welcome to Mating Mondays! Basically from an internet search that turned into a full-blown evening lost wiki-bouncing I figured out that there are a lot of sea critters that do “it” differently. Today’s profile is of the Angler Fish because quite frankly it might not get much weirder than this. A quick breakdown goes something like this.
- Male Angler is born, only a tenth the size of the female
- Male comes to maturity and BAM his digestive system stops working!
- Now he searches out a female as quickly as possible
- Upon finding the female he bites, yes BITES, into her and latches on.
- An enzyme is release that melts their skin fusing his mouth to where he bit the female
- That same enzyme goes to work breaking down his internal organs until really all that’s life is a…
- Set of new gonads for the female which she can then use to reproduce.
- Yes more than one male can attach to a female, about up to six.
So, that’s the strange bizarre mating habits of the Angler fish wrapped up in a quick late-night summary. I promise I’ll be more prepared and wittier sooner but until then- you have to admit the Angler fish truly is king of the Clingy Relationship. Unless one of our female readers has her male counterpart chemically fused to her, because I would not mind going off topic and hearing about that.
Up next week: Flat Worm Penis Fencing! (No, seriously…)
In the meantime here is the ever-witty Oatmeal’s take on the Angler fish: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler
My main source material with some awesome Angler pics! http://deepseacreatures.org/anglerfish
