OH MY GOD we’ve got the FIRST EVER actual live footage of a gulper eel!!!
All previous videos have been of dead specimens floating around in tanks.
Nobody ever knew until now that they might float around with their mouth inflated like a goofy balloon like this.
It starts to “billow” mid-way through the video because of the deep sea rover’s jet stream and it puts up with that for quite a while before it finally gets too annoyed.
I saw someone claim, “There’s no evidence that swim with dolphin programs and closed-system habitats are detrimental to the animals.”
This, of course, referring to the various “Dolphin Encounter” programs offered by marine parks, and the state of the enclosures that cetaceans are currently house in.
First, let’s briefly tackle how Dolphin Encounter programs work. You shell out a bit of extra money plus the cost of your day ticket to feed and/or swim* with the dolphins. The less expensive feeding option gives you a tray of fish to give to the dolphins.
*Depending on the facility, there is little to no actual swimming with the dolphins. You will get in the water with them in a wetsuit on an underwater platform and the trainer accompanying your group will go through a set routine and allow each of the guests to feed, touch, and possibly get towed by the dolphin. A photographer employed by the park is sometimes present to take pictures of the guests.
What are the risks? Aside from being stressful and dangerous for the dolphins, there are health and safety risks for the guests involved. Zoonotic diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia can be passed between people and dolphins, and the water that the dolphins live in also happens to be the same water that the dolphins excrete (eg. poop and pee) in. Ingesting any amount of the dolphin water could lead to infection, such as MRSA or bacillary dysentery.
Aside from the risks to your health, there are the risks of injury. One of the more well-known cases of a park guest experiencing dolphin-inflicted injury is the young girl that got bitten by a dolphin at SeaWorld’s Dolphin Cove.
The conclusion that most people came to in this case was that the dolphin got excited at the sight of the tray (which I believe you are supposed to keep out of the dolphin’s view, hence the angled border of the pool) and subsequently lunged for it and caught the girl’s arm in the process.
In this video, a dolphin lunges in frustration after being repeatedly teased by the guest holding the fish just out of reach, in order to pose for a picture.
This video shows Silvana Straccia, a swimming with dolphins at Bavaro Beach in Punta Cana. Starting around 2:20 in the video, one dolphin appears to strike Straccia in the face with it’s tail, and another rams her. She explains in the video description: “
while the first one throws me water in the eyes, the other one comes behind and hits my chest, and sank me under the water.
“ She was in the hospital for 8 weeks for broken cartilage, and claims that she was made to sign a form saying that any accidents to happen were not the fault of the park: “
They do the same routine every 20 mins surrounded by strangers, with
noise, and orders.. non stop!!.. I was told that if he had hitted me
with the nose I would not be alive.. so i was quite lucky in the end.
Poor them.. who is the silly one??.. Us.. I will never do it again, and
not for the hit. Nobody should and their business would be ended. THey
earn a fortune with no responsabilities, as they made me sign a paper
before entering, not being responsible for any ACCIDENTS! so you cant
claim…
“
A dolphin swim experience in Miami. A dolphin charges at the man shown in the video and bites his forearm. It stops underwater in front of him, then heads back to the direction it came from, and appears to strike him with it’s tail flukes. The man floats on his belly and says “He bit me.” From the video description: “Dolphin attacks my son while on summer holiday in Miami. South African
family. Just come across this video from our holiday in Miami, Florida,
and it made me feel sick as the day it happened and decided to post it
onto Youtube, so you can see the ugly side of swimming with dolphins,
don’t think it’s all fun. Be careful and remember, it’s a business
they’re running.
“
Another incident that I have to link because tumblr doesn’t want me to embed more than 5 videos: “Dolphins attack Josie” – 2 dolphins bite a woman during a “swim-with” session.
Captive cetaceans aside, wild cetaceans acting aggressively towards humans is not entirely unheard of.In fact, in many areas, entering the water with and/or touching wild cetaceans is illegaldue to the risks to both human and animal.
“Dusty” the dolphin was a local celebrity of sorts in Doolin, Ireland. Here he is displaying quite aggressive body language via tail-slapping several times before ramming the woman in the water. From the video description, “The dolphin is believed to have struck the woman in the kidney area with
its nose, leaving her winded and shouting to be rescued.”
“Pilot Whale Attack – original version” – A man and woman jump into the water with wild pilot whales, even touching one. One of the whales grabs the woman by the leg a drags her under. They were fined $10,000, but battled it for 3 years and the claim was dismissed.
You can point your finger at the people getting hurt by wild dolphins and say “Of course they got hurt, they shouldn’t have been in the water!” What does that say about marine park’s swim-with programs? “Of course the wild dolphins attacked, they aren’t used to people!” Then how do you explain the captive dolphins also lashing out at park guests? It’s well-documented that wild dolphins will harass swimmers, and yet marine parks continue to introduce the circumstances that allow these incidents to happen.
1. They are pretty colorful when you look closely.
2. They are filter feeders so they can like this to try to catch food particles flowing by.
3. (Kids hide your eyes) They have the longest penis to body ratio of any creature on the planet. Because they are sessile they have to be able to reach quite a distance to deliver sperm to a nearby female.
I’m so glad someone asked this – the cockeyed squid is one of my favourite molluscs for this exact reason. Here’s what they look like, for those who don’t know:
Cockeyed squid is actually a genus (Histioteuthis) that comprises quite a few species, including the one pictured above which is known by the adorable name, strawberry squid (Histioteuthis heteropsis), but they all have the famous odd-sized eyes – something that’s not seen in any other bilaterally symmetrical animal.
The reason for this is each of their eyes is adapted for a different type of vision. Cockeyed squid live in the mesoplegaic (or twilight) zone where sunlight is almost non-existent, and they generally float like in the picture above, with their large left eye facing slightly upwards, and their smaller right eye facing downwards.
The role of the fairly normal-looking right eye is to pick up up the bright bioluminescence of creatures in the dark below them. Their left eye, however, is specially adapted to break the counter-illumination of creatures swimming above them. Counter-illumination is a strategy adopted by many creatures in the deep sea, where they illuminate the underside of their bodies just enough to “counter” their silhouette made by the small amount sunlight coming from above. The squid’s large eye sees past this as it is very sensitive to light, and the greenish-yellow lens helps to filter out the sunlight, making the creatures stand out.
you’re telling me, if left unharmed, lobsters survive the ravages of time and gain progressively more fuck power as it goes on
Literally the only reason they are so small is overfishing and we are eating them essentially as toddlers. This is how big they are suppose to be.
Humans have bigger brains and the ability to walk upright; lobsters get to live forever.
Seems fair.
This is how Ebirah, Horror of the Deep came to be
He went uneaten for so long he grew large and powerful enough to battle Godzilla, which is the true goal of every lobster 😀
Immortal eldritch beasts. *considers starting a cult*
Ooooooooo
How does one go about joining your Lobster Cult
Sacrifice lots and lots of plaid things… The gay plaid lobster shall reign supreme!!
< CHANTS OMINOUSLY
They’re gonna be real mad when they realize we’ve been eating their toddlers
Lobsters do eventually die of natural causes, but only when they grow so big that their bodies can no longer support their own mass. They also grow at varying speeds depending on the amount of food available. You could keep a lobster alive and healthy for probably several hundred years if you carefully moderated its food intake for its whole life- enough to keep it fed and growing without it growing at maximum speed.
Maybe some of you have heard about that awesome sea slug that contains algae chloroplasts and can actually photosynthesize like a plant, right?
Well, it also seems that its ability to utilize chloroplasts was a mutation induced by a virus.
The virus continues to operate in the maintenance of this process.
100% of the species is infected.
……And after they lay their eggs, 100% of them are killed by that virus. Not by “aging” or some other natural life cycle trigger. They just stop being necessary now that they’ve made a new generation and the virus re-activates what were probably its original deadly symptoms when the two first met millions of years ago.
hi what the FUCK
I’ve only read the abstract but
a) this makes it the second animal clade I know of to have a symbiotic relationship with a virus, Ichneumons and their ilk being the first
b) Synchronized mass die-offs, what the hell, why isn’t that selected against AF
It’s not selected against because the virus-induced mutation provides such a big advantage that the infected slugs produced more successful offspring in greater numbers than the uninfected ones. Now there aren’t any uninfected ones to select against the infected ones. I’d suspect the virus kills the adults in order to ensure the new generation has enough food, but I don’t have anything to confirm that.
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