Sorry Again. Have You Seen This One?
You know you’ve had a good week when you can’t keep your eyes open at the end of it.
Though that does cut into your blogging time.
So, once again, I find myself making an apology post in lieu of a real one. So sorry. Should’ve done better. Please forgive me. I am the very picture of contrition. Yadda yadda yadda.
But, as part of my ongoing contract with the internet-going public, whenever I am unable to produce a real post on mondays, I must make up for it by alerting readers to something funny I found online.
This week, it’s True Facts.
The first of these that I ever saw was “True Facts About the Cuttlefish”.
It is a (somewhat) true documentary about “How cuttlefish do.” Needless to say, but all my cuttlefish questions were answered by the above video. And it served as a kind of gateway drug for other videos, such as “True Facts About The Octopus”.
Which in turn led to “True Facts: Ant Mutualism”.
And “True Facts About The Frog”.
Some of the videos are more palatable than others, but all are funny, especially if you’re on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion after a long week.
So there you have it, folks. Sorry that you didn’t get a full post this week, but now, I have to fall into bed.
Very amusing videos on cuttlefishes and octopuses. I just have one comment on how they are able to so carefully mimic background colors when they only have a single type of photoreceptor that, in theory, gives them monochromatic vision.
Notice that weirdly shaped eye pupil… the one that looks like a badly penned W or Q? This eye is designed to manipulate a special property of lenses called, chromatic aberration (where different wavelengths come to focus at different distances behind a lens). By using their pupil to change how the light hits their retina, cephalopods can extract spectral information, and ergo, see color.
For more information see: Stubbs & Stubbs (2016) Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1524578113
Also, contrary to what the video said, cuttlefish cannot, and do not, change their color to match their surroundings in total darkness. See:
Buresch et al. (2015) Cuttlefish adjust body pattern intensity with respect to substrate intensity to aid camouflage, but do not camouflage in extremely low light. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 462: 121-126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2014.10.017
YouTube should hire you as an expert fact-checker.
If by hire you mean, pay money, then yes. They should.