Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 6

76. Beasts and Reef

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about some of the giant cuttlefish who inhabited the Fairy Bower site (Cabbage Tree Bay, just north of Sydney) this year. The peak season for these wonderful beasts is around May and June, and this year was a good one. The first post had some photos from the early part of May, and this one will cover animals from later that month. The photo above is from May 30, but the same individual was around about a week earlier, on the 24th. Here he is then:

Thi...

75. Invisible

This is the second of a handful of posts about the animals of Lembeh Strait, in Indonesia. (The first was this one.) The animal above is a transparent anemone shrimp, Ancylomenes holthuisi (although it used to have the lovelier genus name Periclimenes, and some guides still use it). During my time at Lembeh I became increasingly entranced by these animals, in large part because of their near-invisibility, but also for their behavior. This post will feature a couple of short videos of these a...

74. The Bower

The animal that initiated my ongoing projects around marine life, a bit over a decade ago, was the Giant Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, especially those living in Cabbage Tree Bay, north of Sydney. More specifically, the part of the bay called “Fairy Bower” is where I’ve spent more time in the water than anywhere else. These months, April through July, are the peak time each year for giant cuttlefish at the Bower – it’s the mating season. Years vary, and this has been a good one.

The photos here a...

73. The Strait

Lembeh Strait is in Indonesia, a narrow straight between a tiny island (Lembeh) and the large elongated isle of Sulawesi. The strait has an unusual ecosystem. It has been fished-out almost completely, but not otherwise destroyed. With the absence of large fish along with tropical waters and good currents, the strait has become a haven for the small and strange, especially invertebrates but also frogfish, pipefish and others. It is the home of spectacular octopuses and nudibranchs. On the ter...

72. Skeletons Repulse Snail

The image above is from a video taken by Steve Winkworth at Nelson Bay. The animal is a marine snail called Bullina lineata, also known as a bubble shell.

Here is the first half of the video.

The bubble shell, wandering, finds itself in a field of skeleton shrimp. These tiny beasts, not really shrimp but amphipods, have two large talon-like claws. The skeleton shrimp strike at the snail, which flinches and recoils. What looks like an especially vigorous stab, at the 14 second mark, elicits...

71. Night of the Decorators

Decorator crabs such as Hyastenus elatus encourage sponges, soft corals, algae, and hydroids to grow on their shells, attaching samples of these additions to hooked hairs grown for that purpose. They become little gardens, walking ecologies.

They do this, I understand, to discourage predation, including by octopuses, which love crabs and often hunt by extending their arms in many directions and tasting surfaces with their suckers. I did once see an octopus eating a large decorator crab, but...

70. Scale

The animal is a nudibranch (a kind of sea slug): Diaphorodoris mitsuii. It’s tiny, just millimeters long. The photo was taken at the Sea Slug Census at Nelson Bay in September, a volunteer day of cataloguing nudis and related slugs.

I did not contribute particularly well at my first census, partly because I was distracted by a couple of octopuses. But I did find the relatively exotic species above. Below is another tiny nudibranch from that day, Goniodoridella savignyi.

In both cases, I too...

69. Food and Farming

The images in this post include some of my favorite octopus photos, in part because they remind me of this particular octopus, who I came across at Nelson Bay on an afternoon rampage through a soft coral garden, scattering crabs, seahorses, and other octopuses left and right. I’d planned to use one or two of these pictures in the book I am writing to follow up Other Minds, but I think they are a bit too chaotic to end up there. So I’ll use them to accompany this post, a long-planned discussi...

69. Food

The images in this post include some of my favorite octopus photos, in part because they remind me of this particular octopus, who I came across at Nelson Bay on an afternoon rampage through a soft coral garden, scattering crabs, seahorses, and other octopuses left and right. I’d planned to use one or two of these pictures in the book I am writing to follow up Other Minds, but I think they are a bit too chaotic to end up there. So I’ll use them to accompany this post, a long-planned discussi...

68. Octopuses on Ecstasy, and Dickinsonia’s Descent

Last week two scientific papers appeared about animals. Both were about particular kinds of creatures, but both bear also on our overall picture of animal evolution. One was an octopus study, where the animals were given the drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy, and the effects on behavior were observed. That paper also did cross-species analysis of a gene affecting the cellular mechanisms that transport serotonin, a brain chemical, into cells, and found that octopuses and humans share similar v...