In Which I Achieve A Lifelong Dream, Of Sitting On The Seafloor With A Bunch Of Giant Australian Cuttlefish

In which I achieve a lifelong dream, of sitting on the seafloor with a bunch of giant Australian cuttlefish

This morning I checked a major bucket list item off the list: hanging out w/Giant Australian Cuttlefish. They're super focused on mating, and are shockingly chill about people hanging around. I'd heard this was true, but whew, it was wild to experience firsthand.

It's a rare thing for an animal to reliably be found at a certain place & certain time. So often "lifer" animals depend on luck to seen. With these cuttlefish, so far it's been like clockwork. Late May-August, go to Whyalla in winter, and there they are, resplendent and numerous.

Good news:they're reliable + stunning. Bad news: Whyalla is a friggen hike from Philly & the water is a bit chilly (58 degrees F today). If you want to swim with them, you better get a thick wetsuit on and maybe be a bit cold (I was honestly too excited to be cold).

Seeing mating behavior up close was so completely amazing. The males perform dominance displays where they roll black bars across their body directly at another male. It's mind-blowing to see in person. They generally do it with the half of their body facing the other male.

[ Argentinosaurus, a giant sauropod, illustrated by Chase Stone. ]

"Of all the animals ever to have roamed the planet, the iconic long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods stand unrivaled. No other terrestrial creatures have come close to attaining their colossal sizes. They overshadowed all other dinosaurs, from the duck-billed hadrosaurs and the horned ceratopsians to the armored ankylosaurs and predatory tyrannosaurs. Even the mightiest land mammals—mammoths and rhinoceroslike beasts that were up to twice as heavy as the largest elephants alive today—were featherweights compared with the biggest sauropods. From an evolutionary perspective, this singularity makes sauropods an intriguing anomaly. Evolution is rampant with examples of convergence, in which the same feature evolves more than once independently in different groups of organisms. A classic example of convergence is powered flight—flapping wings evolved in birds, bats, pterosaurs and insects, but the particular bones or other structures making up the wings differ among the groups, attesting to their independent evolutionary origins. Convergence in evolution is very common even when it comes to complicated features: warm-bloodedness, eyes that can move and focus, bipedal locomotion, the loss of limbs, the use of tools, and live birth all evolved multiple times in different animal groups. Convergence is widespread in the plant kingdom as well: carnivorous plants evolved at least a dozen times, roots evolved more than once, and even arborescence—plants taking the form of trees—evolved more than once. With convergence so common in nature, sauropods' uniqueness in size is special in itself. No other land animal has approached even a third of the largest sauropods' weight. What makes sauropods stand out from the crowd, both literally and figuratively?"

Read more: "How Sauropod Dinosaurs Became the Biggest Land Animals Again and Again" by Michael D. D'Emic.

Happy Pride!

A new pterosaur from the Solnhofen area dropped two days ago, immediately went into my portrait gallery :3

It's a really nice and completely specimen too

And I love the name, here the paper

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