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The “cereal before milk or milk before cereal” debate ends now.

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a series of friends’ moodboards 

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By FDASuarez

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she missed

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NAUTICAL NONSENSE

WHOOOOOOOO

LIVES IN A SPIRAL SHELL UNDER THE SEA?

BACKWARDS AND STRIPEY AND BUOYANT IS HE!

okay, I’d better stop before Nick L. O’deon tells me to cut it out. so here we go! 

the Chambered Nautilus is an ancient deep-sea-dwelling mollusk, distant kin to both octopuses and those clams you had for lunch. they’re one of the oldest kinds of cephalopod on the planet, going all the way back to the Triassic. which, you know, 251 million years ago. (plus or minus a few million years.) they survived the extinction event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, which also terminated their close cousin the Ammonites. these little shell dudes are true survivors.

since then, the Chambered Nautilus has bobbed its way into our collective consciousness. it inspired the very first fictional submarine, as well as an even more badass and actually-real-this-time submarine. its gorgeous shell can be found in nautical-themed restaurants worldwide. the Chambered Nautilus is a pretty big deal.

for a shellfish, anyway.

Chambered Nautilus grow to be about ten inches across the shell, which may not sound impressive but is actually an incredible feat of engineering. you’ve probably seen it before, but the Chambered Nautilus has a really trippy segmented spiral thing going on in their shell that a: makes for a great album cover, and b: creates a neutrally buoyant home that can stand the pressure of the deep sea! which is lucky, because that’s where the Chambered Nautilus lives.

these shelled little weirdos are found in the waters of the Indo-Pacific, where they live on the deep edges of coral reefs and sea canyon walls. but not below 2,600 feet, as their shells dramatically implode at that point! ha ha!

see, the nice thing about human houses? they don’t usually implode.

the Chambered Nautilus is sort of like a snail, except more complex and more backwards. (yes, I’m serious.) the soft gooey body of the Chambered Nautilus only fits in the first compartment of their shell, including their hearts, eyeballs, probable souls, various gross buoyancy organs and their roughly 90 tentacles and jet propulsion system.

yes, those last two things are totally real, I swear. let’s get into it!

I hope you like tentacles!

I’ll address the jet thing first. the Chambered Nautilus is similar to squid, in that they experience the world mostly backwards. they have a water intake valve called a hyponome which is basically a fancy tube that they keep somewhere in their tentacle zone. they use this weird pipe to draw water into an inner chamber inside their shell, and then violently squirt it right back out. this causes the Chambered Nautilus to lurch backwards at high speed like a startled raccoon.

but I didn’t even get to the best part! see, the Chambered Nautilus has very simple eyes and terrible vision. and they can’t even really see around that honkydonk badonkadonk shell anyway, so they lurch violently backwards and then bump comically into things. ALL THE TIME.

like, often enough for it to be a documented species trait. ADORABLE.

but you’ve been waiting patiently, and it’s time to get into the best part: those tentacles! and boy I sure hope you’re a fan, because the Chambered Nautilus has around 90 simple retractable tentacles called cirri. (make sure you write these down, as there will be a short quiz following this program.)

these cirri are covered in tiny ridges, like gross wet velcro spaghetti. this gives them a really absurd amount of grip, like REALLY absurd. apparently it’s easier to accidentally rip them right off the Nautilus than it is to get them off a scientist’s glove. 

I’m sure that researcher felt REALLY bad afterwards.

this insane grip comes in handy (pun!) though, when the Chambered Nautilus is on the hunt. these voracious shellboys mostly eat fish, crabs and shrimp, but they aren’t above scavenging and will eat whatever is available. 

once the Chambered Nautilus has spotted a likely meal, it splats itself onto it face-first like a goddam Looney Tunes character and grabs on. once they prey is snagged, it’s curtains for that particular shrimp. because like all cephalopods, the Chambered Nautilus has a razor-sharp nightmare beak hidden somewhere in all those tentacles. yum!

I mean, I’m not going to poke around in there and look so you’ll just have to trust me on this.

but the Chambered Nautilus isn’t doing so hot these days, and it’s all because of that lovely steampunk shell. its pearly luster and geometric intricacy make them prized by humans, who slaughter the Chambered Nautilus by the thousands to get them. fuck!

this shell-focused hunting has greatly decreased the Chambered Nautilus’s numbers in the past decade, and they’re almost certainly endangered now. efforts are underway to protect them, but in the meantime: DON’T BUY ANY NAUTILUS SHELLS. just get an Ammonite fossil, it’s basically the same thing but without the moral baggage or angry cephalopod ghosts.

the Chambered Nautilus survived the extinction that killed off the Ammonites and Dinosaurs, hopefully it will survive this one too.

ANGRY. CEPHALOPOD. GHOSTS.

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee and support Weird Biology!

and if you’d like to see exclusive Weird Biology content, check out my Patreon today!

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Monterey Bay Aquarium img2- Monterey Bay Aquarium img3- National Aquarium img4- Monterey Bay Aquarium img5- NOAA Fisheries img6- Monterey Bay Aquarium img7- Among the Reef img8- California Academy of Sciences

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Mood

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Bonus

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you are my peach, you are my plum

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— not yet | wt.

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Shout out to:

The people who don’t have a best friend because their friends already have best friends

The people who want to make friends and don’t know how

The people who have lots of friends but always feel lonely

The people who get left behind in a group

The people who are alone and nobody notices

The people who put their soul into a friendship and watched it fall apart

The people who are introverted and mistaken for being anti social

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Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

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