Sea Monster

Category: Ocean Critters

  • Crabes et crevettes (1929) – Part I

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP16_fgkePE&feature=related[/youtube] It seems we only have room in our hearts for one pioneering French underwater filmmaker because few people remember the life and works of Jean Painleve. He began making underwater movies in the 1920’s – some on location and some in aquarium tanks – and was renowned (in France at least) for his offbeat blend…

  • Stellers Sea Cow

    I am in the Galapagos Islands reading The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts. I often buy ocean gloom-n-doom non-fiction, read a chapter, then put it on my shelf. This one is different. Dr. Roberts is an academic marine ecologist based at the University of York in England.  He is highly respected as a…

  • Zen garden with squid: A photo essay

    I love fish markets — I always feel like a kid in a candy store, looking for the strange and interesting creatures and parts thereof  hidden on a back shelf or down a back aisle. So I seek them out where’er I go. I’ve not been to the famed Tokyo fish market I’m afraid, where…

  • Meet the Scariest seamonster that ever lived

    When it comes to scary seamonsters there’s no beating pliosaurs. OK, sure, they’ve not roamed the oceans for 65 million years, but in their heyday these enormous reptiles would have been truly terrifying to anything that got in their way. Check out this BBC video unveiling the largest, most complete pliosaur skull in the world…

  • Thousands of baby octopus caught on camera

    I’ll be honest with you. When I first clicked on this 7+ minute video at the Huffington Post, I didn’t expect to sit through the whole thing without skipping forwards to the action (around 3:24 we’re told). But I was completely sucked in by this moving footage of a female giant pacific octopus, nurturing her…

  • Shark tagging – the low down

      I wrote already about some of the latest technologies that are letting scientists get useful data out of a shark without killing it (including shark ultra-sound and DNA fingerprinting their partially digested puke), and of course there’s a whole lot we can find out by sneaking up on a shark and sticking a tag…

  • Hollywood Amphipod

    ALIEN IS ALIVE! …but this real-life version of Alien from the half-billion-dollar movie franchise isn’t even an inch long and lives in the ocean. Phronima, a hyperiid amphipod related to shrimps, crabs, barnacles, krill, and other crustaceans, is found just about everywhere in the oceans. Though their offspring are not about to burst through anyone’s…

  • Shark spotting – a global perspective

    I still remember the first time I saw a shark. It was in Belize, on Turneffe Atoll. I’d been waiting for it for weeks, keeping my eyes peeled for fins, until finally there it was – a great big nurse shark, snoozing peacefully on the seabed, 10 meters below me. It was every bit as…

  • Octopus Houdini

    Octopuses have a gift for squeezing themselves through any hole larger than their beaks. Is this what childbirth is like? [cincopa AUCAPoKGL9ML] This video was filmed by Chance Miller of Miller’s Landing in Seward, Alaska

  • Why pufferfish puff

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkXhC7yzISI&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] Okay, so I admit this is a river story but I can only imagine similar things go on in the sea. And it just goes to show how blowing up like a beach ball is a really effective way of seeing off predators. HT to Practical Fishkeeping for the link.