Looking for resources and opinions- strange cephs

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May 5, 2008
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I'm writing a paper in which I discuss some of the more unusual adaptations of some cephalopods. I have two requests from TONMO:

Does anyone know of some good resources, ideally scientific papers, for Vampiroteuthis infernalis? I'm especially interested in movement methods and phosphorescence, and would really love to find someone discussing the ways in which the vampire squid alters the shape of its body.

Can you recommend an unusual ceph for my paper? It doesn't have to be a specific species. So far I've talked about blanket octopuses and vampire squids.

Thanks in advance for the help!
 
spirula is my favorite weird ceph... particularly from an evolutionary point of view. Firefly squids Watasenia scintillans are both colorful and the only cephs known to have color vision.

Phil's article on Vampyroteuthis and related fossils is a good reference... Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Living Fossil

good luck!
 
Not only were those good suggestions, cephaloholic's icon reminded me of the flamboyant cuttlefish. That one might be worth a mention, though, like my other two picks, it's already one of the popular kids in the cephalopodic world... At least I didn't talk about the giant and colossal squids.

I've never heard of firefly squids before. I think, now that I know they exist, that it is a very good thing I can refer to my search for more info on them as "research" and not "yet more procrastination".

By the way, I realize that I forgot to mention that I'm looking at living cephs. If I covered extinct ones too my paper would be roughly forty times the size it needs to be and would have an awful lot of ammonoids in it. Just FYI.
 
Although very little is available in the way of written references, I might suggest mentioning 'the mystery squid' (some kind of large magnapinnid) that has been filmed a couple of times (like here and here) in recent years. No specimen of this animal has been captured, so we still have no more info about it than what we can glean from the videos. But that's already pretty weird - 10 apparently identical appendages (unknown in any other ceph), that appear to have some kind of joint or at least a marked transition in physiology, allowing the proximal part of the arms (near the head) to be splayed out rigidly while the long, apparently very sticky remainder of the arms trails behind.

Another that springs to mind is the recently described species Amphorateuthis alveatus - see its original description here. Very, very strange arms - check out Fig. 26!
 

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