LOVE the swimming sea cucumber (first critter). It’s a starfish relative in the Echinoderms — which despite starfish’s radial symmetry are vetebrates’ closest living relatives!

I was especially piqued by this video because it was taken in March in the exact same spot I’d be snorkeling a month later — Kealakekua Bay, the place Captain Cook first came ashore on the Big Island in 1779, and the same spot he was killed later that year. Supposedly you can still see a pock mark on the cliff walls from one of Cook’s cannon balls. Topside, the bay contains the only piece of foreign soil I know of owned outright by a foreign government — a tiny plot given to the UK in the 19th century by the Kingdom of Hawaii. There stands Captain Cook’s obelisk, supposedly repainted every year by the Australian Navy and theoretically providing a tiny no-arrest zone for every Commonwealth or UK citizen running from the cops.

The gorgeous reef there is punctuated with percolating (and cold!) freshwater springs that drops swiftly downward into Pacific Ocean blue. You really feel as if you’re swimming in the ocean. I recall seeing a white-mouthed moray eel, loads of raccoonfish who were not shy about sidling up next to me, a puffer fish, and many other delights. Apparently, it’s also not unknown for the local spinner dolpins to swim in and roust about. Captain Cook’s monument was right next to me, and apparently, several hundred feet down, so were all these critters (you can rewatch the video with the IDs to compare:

The video footage shows a pelagic sea cucumber (apodid holothurian), Venus flytrap sea anemone (actinoscyphiid sea anemone), tipod fish (chlorophthalmid tipod fish), flatfish (pleuronectiform flatfish), eel (bongrid conger eel), shrimp (benthic caridean likely nematocarcinid shrimp), actiniid Bolocera-like sea anemone with a galatheid crab, Glass sponge and demospongid with hermit crab, and hexactinellid (glass) sponge next to a primnoid coral. Video Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

Your tax dollars at work, my friends. Don’t say they’re never put to good use.

I also love the way natural patterns are repetitive*. Similar patterns pop up in the oddest places. Look at the Charter Oak on the Connecticut quarter

and you’re looking at the search pattern of a feeding plasmodial slime mold (a giant ameoboid eukaryote), Physarum polycephalum,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomtruth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

which sends out protoplasmic veins in all directions in search of its prey: bacteria, fungal spores, and other microbes.

Does math underlie that too?

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*I also love how this video was for his mom. : )

In other news, my car currently smells like the inside of a dive shop.

Two gigantic neon tanks of compressed air (properly braced)? Check.

Regulator? Check.

20 pounds of weights and weight belt? Check.

Buoyancy Control Device (aka scuba life vest)? Check.

Mask, fins, snorkel? Check, check, check.

7 mm wetsuit that adds the blubber equivalent (BE) of a pilot whale? Check. I’ve tried that puppy on, and all I can say is that there is clearly a reason sea creatures look doofy anytime they try to get around on land. This is about as thick as wet suits come, but in the Blue Hole (average temperature: 62-64F) where I’ll be diving, I’ll be glad to have it. 62F is trout country.

Spirit of Adventure? Check.

Remember when I discovered the Pelagic Magic blackwater dive? Well, I’m halfway to my dream. I finished the classroom and pool work for SCUBA certification in February, and this weekend I’m traveling to Santa Rosa, NM to complete my open water certification dives. My plane tickets are booked for Kona, Hawaii for April 17. I’m on my way.

As for the rest of you, I want reports on the first episode of “Life”! I won’t be around to post this weekend, so cozy up at home Sunday night for some Life on Earth goodness, and then report back here what you thought. See you next week!

Here’s a further taste of the delights that await us (with the correct Attenborough narration):

Life – Venus Flytraps: Jaws of Death – BBC One from Paulo Martins on Vimeo.

Is it just me or do those hairs remind you of the time-delayed booby traps laid for Indiana-Jones style adventurers in gold-laden caves? You know, the kind where you rest your arm on a stone projecting from the wall, and 10 seconds later it starts moving into the wall as the ceiling sprouts spikes and assumes skewering speed? Yeah. I really did feel bad for the little flies after they got trapped, though. Although their slurping of nectar with that repulsive labellum-tipped proboscis really was revolting (where has that been?) and I have no qualms about mercilessly swatting them around my home, they are living creatures too, and their little cries of despair were truly pitiful. Perhaps I’d make a good Jain after all.

Venus flytraps are in the Droseraceae, the Sundew Family, along with the sundews and a curious little package called the waterwheel plant, which is essentially an aquatic flytrap, but sadly does not occur in the western hemisphere. This family is in the Caryophyllales, a group of related plants that have evolved many ways of living in nutrient-poor and/or hot, dry soils. These include clever heat-beating photosynthetic adaptations (C4 and CAM for you biogeeks in the know), salt-secreting glands, and insect carnivory. See here for an idea of their place on the tree of life (click on the arrow to the left to back out and get a bigger picture).

In case you’re wondering, the title of this post is both a reference to the infamous “Uma, Oprah” David Letterman debacle at the 1995 Oscars and to the bird Upupa epops, the hoopoe (pronounced hupu), which happens to have the favorite scientific name of my friend and birdsong enthusiast Nathan Pieplow, who blogs over at earbirding.com.

Sigh. I’ll never forget the first time I saw leafy sea dragons (a relative of these weedy sea dragons) at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. My mom practically had to drag me out of the room.

Sea dragons are not true seahorses, belonging instead to the seahorse sister taxon (most closely related group), the pipefish. The proper name of the group is Syngnathinae, which means fused-jaw (syn-gnath), and if you look at their beaks, you can see that their jaws are indeed sealed shut. Here’s a short BBC article discussing the Life clip you just watched.

And with that, we conclude our programming for 2009. I look forward to sharing the tiny, slimy, tentacled and beautiful with you in the next decade too. Cheers, all, and stay safe this holiday season. : ) Jen

Wow! Amazing, huh? Though the bit halfway when the researchers listen to the seals under the ice does have somewhat of the feel of the final scene of a local 8th grade production of Hamlet when everyone “dies”.

In case you don’t know Werner Herzog, he is the director who gave us the documentary “Grizzly Man” about Timothy Treadwell. Remember him? He was the man who lived with bears in Alaska and ended by being consumed by one along with his girlfriend while his video camera recorded audio of the whole thing. I quite recommend the film, if for no other reason than to see a portrait of a man consumed by his passion, however misguided, and of the jaw-droppingly gorgeous beauty of the vast remote region of Alaska he lives in. Would that we all could spend a few months there each summer, simply watching the grass get tossed by the wind or the streams ripple over the rocks. Of course, not so much with the getting eaten by grizzlies part.

Herzog also famously hauled a 320-ton steamship over an isthmus in Peru for the filming of “Fitzcarraldo” (a feat so Cameron-esque someone else made a documentary about it) and has produced a slew of critically-acclaimed but otherwise little known art house feature films and documentaries. “Grizzly Man” did receive some measure of success and fame, and one of his next films — “Rescue Dawn” — was shown widely enough that even my parents saw it.

This clip is from “Encounters at the End of the World”, which apparently came out in 2007, though I was oblivious. As expected, it has sterling marks on Rotten Tomatoes. It has now been added to the Netflix queue.

You can find how seals fit into the mammals here; here’s more on Weddell Seals, the composers of this unearthly music.