Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Cape Evans cont.


I got interrupted last night by a group going out to celebrate Mario's last night. He has to get back to Italy to compete for a promotion to associate professor. Apparently all of the assistant professors there compete for a certain number of promotions, regardless of the university, which is different from our system.

Anyway, so while we were helping the divers out of the water after their first dive, this Adelie walked right past me up onto the ice and hung out with us.


The divers did another dive, and meanwhile the ice had blown offshore so we watched little pieces of ice float by.










Shawn found a huge dead octopus on the second dive that he brought up. We brought it back to the lab to show people (who doesn't want to see a huge dead octopus?!?!).

We put the octopus in one of the tanks so people could come by and look at it. One of the nemerteans started eating the arm of the octopus, which was really cool. Here's Dennis, looking delighted while putting more nemerteans and seastars on top of the octopus. Nemerteans are predators/scavengers and here, as for many other invertebrates, the nemerteans are huge. We've put them (smaller ones) in jell-o in Friday Harbor and they can change their body shape a lot and make pretty dramatic peristaltic movements. Apparently this comes in handy if you want to ingest an octopus arm that is several times your diameter. Dennis is pointing at the nemertean that's trying to ingest the octopus arm and there's another (darker colored) nemertean in the lower left of that picture.

3 comments:

  1. Whaaaaa?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??! Do they burrow? Do they have the crazy stylet?

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  2. I don't know... they're really big and in the pictures I've seen, they're crawling around on the surface. I assume they have a stylet and are venomous but don't know... I've been careful handling them though!

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