FAO Yanpa

[matsuki]

1.7m and 700kilos? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah, that seems useful...

[Taro Toporific]

Japetella-prismatica-closeup.jpg

Japetella-prismatica.jpg

I was all jazzed that this Japetella prismatica from the "Report on the Cephalapoda" of H.M.S. Challenger (1873-76) was Japanese.
Sadly on page 108 of the Report, I learned it was named after “Japetus Steenstrup,” an early weeaboo wannabe.

[Mike Oxlong]

A Catalogue of Japanese Cephalopoda

[Taro Toporific]

[quote]A Catalogue of Japanese Cephalopoda[/quote]

Kool.
I love it!

[Mike Oxlong]

Everything You Need to Know About Octopus Wrestling

[yanpa]

He knew full well, many years ago, what today's octopus wrestlers are just beginning to learn—that it is impossible for a man with two arms to apply a full nelson on an octopus; he knew full well the futility of trying for a crotch hold on an opponent with eight crotches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_wrestling

[matsuki]

The Legend of the Octopus is a sports tradition during Detroit Red Wings home playoff games where octopuses are thrown onto the ice surface. The origins of the activity go back to the 1952 playoffs, when a National Hockey League team played two best-of-seven series to capture the Stanley Cup. The octopus, having eight arms, symbolized the number of playoff wins necessary for the Red Wings to win the Stanley Cup. The practice started April 15, 1952, when Pete and Jerry Cusimano, brothers and storeowners in Detroit's Eastern Market, hurled an octopus into the rink of The Old Red Barn.[1] The team swept the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens en route to winning the championship, as well as winning two of the next three championships.

Since 1952, the practice has persisted with each passing year. In one 1995 game, fans threw 36 octopuses, including a specimen weighing 38 pounds (17 kg).[2] The Red Wings' unofficial mascot is a purple octopus named Al, and during playoff runs, two of these mascots are also hung from the rafters of the Joe Louis Arena, symbolizing the 16 wins now needed to win the Stanley Cup. It has become such an accepted part of the team's lore, that fans have developed what is considered proper etiquette and technique for throwing an octopus onto the ice.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Octopus

[yanpa]

Looking at the condition of Detroit is in, the Octopus High Command has decided that no retaliation is necessary.

[Coligny]

Good...

The Army of the 12 kitteh now claim Detroit as his. We'll use the city as a giant litterbox tended by unworthy human slaves...

[matsuki]

Looking at the condition of Detroit is in, the Octopus High Command has decided that no retaliation is necessary.

This is not retro....classic but in the scheme of things, old n busted. (often fucks up too)



LA gots the new hotness...

[Samurai_Jerk]

Looking at the condition of Detroit is in, the Octopus High Command has decided that no retaliation is necessary.

Detroit is the latest frontier for hipster douchebags. Better to take it out now before they become too strong.

[Taro Toporific]

true love...yampa style

octopus_chikan.gif

[Samurai_Jerk]

[yanpa]

How dare they call an octopus a squid!!!

[Coligny]

How dare they call an octopus a squid!!!

You get that a lot at parties I guess...

[Taro Toporific]

squidmobile.gif

If Squids Ruled Earth, What Would Their Cars Be Like?
SQUIDLOPNIK (jalopnik.com) 5/08/15

[SovietSupreme]

................................................................In Soviet Russia...

...Tentacles have sex with you.

tentacle-sex.jpg

[wagyl]

The pedant emerges from The Deep (see what I did there?) to point out that although that is a Russian language poster, it is for a Polish movie made in 1917, when Poland was a Regency Kingdom puppet state of Germany and Russia was Imperial.

[Russell]

The pedant emerges from The Deep (see what I did there?) to point out that although that is a Russian language poster, it is for a Polish movie made in 1917, when Poland was a Regency Kingdom puppet state of Germany and Russia was Imperial.

Impressed!

How did you know that?

[wagyl]

I've got the hots for Elena Bozhevskaya/Helena Bozewska.

Just kidding. Searching Elena Bozhevskaya and Bezdna lead to a tumblr which listed the year 1917, and searching The Abyss and 1917 lead me eventually to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0949559/

Maybe a reproduction of the poster should grace the FG office. http://www.amazon.com/Abyss-Russian-Mov ... B00D4BCB4K

[yanpa]

Maybe a reproduction of the poster should grace the FG office. http://www.amazon.com/Abyss-Russian-Mov ... B00D4BCB4K

Love it! I originally bought this for my bathroom but after framing it felt it deserved a better spot, somewhere more people could see it, so I placed it in my entryway!

I'll get the purchasing dept onto it the moment they emerge from beneath their desks.

[Coligny]

image.jpg

[Russell]

Nice company down there in the ocean...

[Samurai_Jerk]

Octoboobies

octoboobs.jpg

octocleavage.jpeg

[Samurai_Jerk]

This Octopus Is So Adorable That Scientists Might Name It ‘Adorabilis’

[Taro Toporific]

クレクレタコラ aka Gimme Gimme Octopus fun...

[Mike Oxlong]

Epic Octopus Fight

[yanpa]

There was a lot of money riding on that fight.

[wagyl]

[Russell]

Armed with 10,000 more genes than humans:
Scientists hail the intelligence of the octopus

With its eight tentacles, large eyes and intelligent demeanour, it has been likened to an alien form of life. Now scientists have decoded the genome of the octopus and have discovered just how different it is to other intelligent creatures both on land and sea.

The octopus may not have a backbone but when kept in captivity it is clever enough to devise ways of escaping from a fish tank. It is so intelligent that it is the only invertebrate to be given special protection under the UK law governing the licensing of animal experiments.

Yet the intelligence of the octopus evolved far earlier than that of the “higher” vertebrates and its genome holds the secrets of how this happened, according to the researchers who have sequenced the entire 2.7 billion “letters” of the octopus’s genetic code – the first genome within the cephalopod group of predatory molluscs, such as the squid, cuttlefish and nautilus.

“The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with its eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving capabilities,” said Clifton Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, one of the leaders of the international genome-sequencing project.

“The last British zoologist Martin Wells [grandson of H.G. Wells and renown cephalopod expert] said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our study describes the first sequenced genome from an alien,” Dr Ragsdale said.

“It is an incredible resource that opens up new questions that could not have been asked before about these remarkable animals,” he said.

The genome has already thrown up genes that are probably involved in the unique adaptive coloration of the octopus, which allows it to change its skin colour to match its background.

“We've found hundreds of novel genes that don't have counterparts in other animals and may be involved in this unique camouflage process,” Dr Rokhsar said.

The veteran Cambridge University Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, who initiated the octopus-genome project, said understanding the genes that are common to the cephalopods will help to define what it means to be one of them, and so shed light on how the primordial intelligence of the octopus evolved when they first emerged in the oceans more than 400 million years ago – some 230 million years before the mammals.

“They were the first intelligent beings on the planet. The reason for looking broadly at several different types of cephalopods is to see what is conserved among them. What is similar among all cephalopods is probably important to being a cephalopod,” said Dr Brenner, now the founding president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan.

The study, published in the journal Nature, revealed that despite having a genome slightly smaller than that of humans, the octopus has about 10,000 more genes – a total of 33,000 – an expansion that the scientists attribute to the widespread shuffling of the genome and the appearance of novel genes that helped the octopus to survive.

The most notable expansion was in a set of genes known as the protocadherins which are considered essential for developing nerve cells and the interactions between these neurons. The octopus genome contains 168 protocadherin genes, which is 10 times as many as other invertebrates and more than twice as many as mammals.

[...]

Stealthy hunter: Pacific striped octopus

A tap on the shoulder usually means your time is up, and this is certainly true of any shrimp in the vicinity of the Pacific striped octopus, which has devised an ingenious method of capturing its prey.

On spying a shrimp, the octopus approaches close enough to tap it on the opposite side of its body so that the startled creature jumps into the octopus’s eight arms.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

[...]

The Pacific striped octopus exhibits another novel behaviour, documented in a study published in the online journal PlosOne.

While most octopuses have sex at a distance, probably because the females of these solitary species are apt to start eating their male partners if they come too close, the Pacific striped octopus engages in full-frontal sex.

Each octopus of a copulating pair grasps the other’s arms sucker-to-sucker and then starts to mate eye-to-eye, beak-to-beak in a frenzy that the scientists have described as “rough sex”.

More

If I would have eight arms I would do the same.

It's all about the intimacy, ain't it?!?