A Tentacle for Someone Special

In need of a special gift for that Tentacle lover in your life? May we recommend the $185 sterling silver Tentacle pendant? Hint, hint.

Made with love and for sale with the same over at Shopaganda.ca

Lovely Tentacles

Yes, via Boing Boing, via Decona.de, via JWZ.

Gratuitous Tentacle Photo Included

Everything's in Season for Squid Along the Pacific Coast
Tom Stinstra
Sunday, December 7, 2008
SFGate.com

Out of Half Moon Bay, 100 miles out to sea, the ocean surface erupted for a half mile in a froth of white water and tentacles.

"The squid were eating a school of fish," said commercial fisherman Bob Longstreth. "I've seen them out there. Serious predators."

In another episode, a gang of Humboldt squid had circled the boat New Salmon Queen from Emeryville. The squid were in full attack, with the anglers aboard hooking up on every drop. Capt. Craig Shimukuzu got out his video camera to film the action and as he pressed the record button, the ocean "blew up" - a pod of 10 killer whales came to the surface in a feeding frenzy of their own, slashing the squid to bits with their teeth.

On Thursday morning out of Bodega Bay, 20 fishermen aboard the New Sea Angler caught an estimated 15,000 pounds of Humboldt squid in 90 minutes; 400 squid that averaged 30 pounds and topped out at 70, with 90 percent of them hooked near the surface. Capt. Rick Powers said he found the squid on the northwest edge of Cordell Bank.

The arrival of the giant schools of Humboldt squid means two things, good and bad:

-- Good: They are providing the most exciting new fishing (and good eating) on the Pacific Coast.

-- Bad: These squid are predators that could alter the basic food chain in the ocean.

Humboldt squid were first seen off California in 1930, then not again until the El Niño year of 1997. They disappeared again for five years, but since 2002, they have been here to stay, according to the Monterey Bay Research Institute, taking over new territory. They are best known off the coast of South America, and in recent years, Baja California, but have expanded their range north along the Pacific Coast.

They are one of the fastest growing creatures in the world, transforming from a single cell to as much as 100 pounds during an average life span of about one year. They average 15 to 60 pounds and measure up to 6 feet long.

"They're an eating machine," Powers said. "They eat their body weight daily."

Humboldt squid are built for the job. They have 10 tentacles that are filled with teeth-lined sucker cups, including two extended tentacles that pull victims into razor-sharp beaks. "We've seen them eat each other," said Craig Stone at Emeryville Sportfishing.

Field scout Pence MacKimmie, a commercial fisherman out Half Moon Bay, said he and others have seen squid marks on deep-water black rockfish. Stanley Carpenter, a sport angler, said he saw squid marks on salmon out of Fort Bragg. Longstreth has seen them mow down huge schools of sardines and anchovies. Off of Chile, Humboldt squid are blamed for the collapse of hake.

"We don't know the impact," Power said. "That's the scary thing."

It's possible that squid have ravaged schools of salmon and rockfish, contributing to their low numbers, but this has not been verified. Capt. Tom Mattusch of the Huli Cat in Half Moon Bay has donated the stomach of every Humboldt squid caught on his boat the past few years for a federal study that is analyzing the contents.

The chain of amazing episodes reported by those on the sea tells you this: They eat everything in their paths.

One night, for instance, when the lights were left on aboard the commercial boat Promise, the glow on the night sea attracted needlefish, anchovies and sardines around the boat. That's when the Humboldt squid showed up and attacked, Longstreth said. By morning, 800 pounds of squid were stuck to the side of the boat and the skipper had to gaff them one-by-one to get them off.

On the Huli Cat, in the middle of a similar frenzy, Mattusch found what he thought was a two-headed squid. On close inspection, however, he saw "one had actually eaten the body of another, and only the head was sticking out."

Originally local news at SFGate.com

Tentacle-free Tentacles

I introduce you to the INCREDIBLE MIMIC OCTOPUS.

This fascinating creature was discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia on the bottom of a muddy river mouth. For the next 2 years, scientists filmed nine different mimic octopuses, Thaumoctopus mimicus (Norman & Hochberg, 2005), impersonating sea snakes, lionfish, and flatfish—a strategy used to avoid predators. The mimic octopus reaches about 60 cm long, and is typically brown and white striped.

The mimic octopus has been observed shifting between impersonations as it crosses the ocean floor to return to its burrow.



Read more, watch more at MarineBio.org

Originally via Dark Roast Blend.

Off Topic Tentacles

It has come to my attention that many people come to this blog, this one-stop source for your up-to-the-minute tentacle news - and expect something different. After considering many responses ("I don't care," and "It's nice when people use their imaginations," ranking high among them), I can only tell you, tentacle fans, that Today in Tentacles seeks to bring you news about real, hard hitting tentacles - and not "fantasy" tentacles. I am confident that the internet is in no short supply of that kind of thing. Really.

The internet is also full of blogs with tentacles in their name that have absolutely nothing to do with tentacles at all!

Observe:

www.thetentacle.com

www.tententacles.com

(and if that's not enough for you, try the next one - )

tenthousandtentacles.blogspot.com

nicolelang.blogspot.com (the blog is called "TENTACLES")

Mysteriously, tentacle.com is available.

Many Tentacles, Many Surprises!

That's the *real* headline, folks.

Census of world's sea life tallies up tentacles of surprises

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

A shark playground, a mountain of sea stars, and octopi revealing an unsuspected Antarctic ancestry are among the mysteries unveiled in the latest worldwide efforts, released Monday, to draft a census of all sea life.

At the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity in Valencia, Spain, which begins Tuesday, researchers will discuss the "Census of Marine Life" update report. It details efforts by more than 2,000 scientists from more than 80 nations to account for all the species in the world's oceans by 2010.

"We're in the home stretch," says project senior scientist Ronald O'Dor. "Not to say someone won't pull up a giant squid from somewhere unexpected, but we think we are going to have a very good census."

Since 2000, the initiative — executed by boat, tags, nets and submarine — has uncovered more than 5,300 new species, as diverse as blind lobsters and sulfur-eating bacteria. Among the highlights:

• The deepest hydrothermal vents, 21/2 miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean, are thronging with species of shrimp and mussels.

• Great white and other sharks head to a previously unknown offseason Pacific region, perhaps to mate.

• Tens of millions of brittle sea stars were discovered tip-to-tip on an undersea mountain in the Antarctic Ocean.

• Combined genetic evidence from deep-sea octopi shows that many newer species evolved from a predecessor living in shallow Antarctic waters about 30 million years ago.

The researchers say changes in the ocean driven by a warming climate, overfishing and environmental damage add urgency to their effort. Moreover, the oceans remain by some estimates 95% unexplored, which makes them rich with discoveries.

"The more we look, the more we find," says molecular biologist Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., who heads census efforts to profile marine microbes. Microbes total perhaps 90% of ocean life, he says, and they help keep the Earth habitable by cycling oxygen and carbon into the atmosphere.

"I would say we are in a second Golden Age of marine biology," says project scientist Patricia Miloslavich of Venezuela's Universidad Simón Bolívar, comparing today's efforts with those of earlier naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus, who first set out to catalog species. "I hope it doesn't end."

From USA Today Technology

Your Source for Up-To-The Minute Tentacle News

So you know that time we told you about how we were going to bring you up-to-the minute, breaking tentacle news? You know, right there in the header? Well, we weren't lying.

But we also realized that there was a good deal of UNDOCUMENTED tentacle news floating around on the net that had to be recapped. While we're not going to tell you about the giant squid siting of 2005, we will potentially go back a few months in tentacle time.