Whoah! That's Deep

Awhile ago, the NYTimes online had a piece about all the crazy critters we're discovering in the middle and deep ocean. It prompted me to get The Deep by Claire Nouvian which is a total mindbender of a coffee table book full of pictures you'd swear were aliens.

I just watched this TED talk with some cool video footage of octopus camouflage. If you watch nothing else, check out the final 30 seconds...

This has all got me wondering how much the web has come to approximate the known ocean. There's a ton of churn in the surface web. Things are always turning over and getting kicked/digged to the surface. But there's so much more that exists well below in the far and unknown reaches of the land.


WebScout of LA Times points out that nobody can possibly be watching all the shit getting posted on YouTube. It's fun as hell to watch the videos nobody else has seen.

For example, as an amateur Jacques Cousteau, I choose a character at random in an alphabet I don't know, for example: を Then I sort the resulting videos by date and I get to see something nobody else has seen. In this case, I was the very first person to view a video of a guy flying a parachute with a snowblower engine...



I just feel so special for being the first person to see something, ya know? It's like the solitary and special feeling of seeing a weird and wonderful creature in The Deep. You don't know at all what to expect and you're kind of prepared for anything... that appears as a streaming video in a 3"x5" box.

Penis Fencing

Cracked.com has an absolutely hilarious article on The 15 Most Bizarre Animal Mating Rituals. Among them, is the flatworm's. This hermaphrodite runs into a potential mate, and like two cellmates on Oz, they battle it out to determine who gets to be the male.

Leslie Newman has caught them on film. And I don't mean to spoil it, but here's an excerpt from the dramatic narration. Imagine this being read nature narrator style:

It's known as penis fencing, and the worms are the swordsmen. From the midsection of each flatworm, double daggers protrude. Each dagger is actually a penis. The first one who can make a successful jab can deliver its sperm.

Flatworms Penis Fencing

Catfish Noodling - With Gator

I said I like Internet Superstar and now there's Lil' Interet Superstar, which I'm guessing is a more daily dose or something. Gator hosted one alone on one of my all-time favorite topics... catfish noodling! Basically, noodling is when you wiggle your fingers in a muddy hole so they look like a worm and entice a catfish to swallow them. Then you stick your hand in it's throat and haul it out. So, the catfish bites your hand... and that's the objective! This first-finger account is the one that hooked me about a year ago. I gotta confess that Gator's clips are tight, but here's a decent look at some guys flexing their skills...



These catfish they're hauling out of the water can be up to 50 or 60 pounds. Imagine jamming your hand down a first-grader's throat and trying to haul him away from the telivision. Now imagine that kid is a badass swimmer and you're battling underwater. That's a rough wrassle. But imagine if you picked the wrong hole and got a truly giant catfish. How big could that be?

A pretty big man could be two hundred pounds. A big fatty lineman could be 300. Now double that and you've got the giant catfish. That's right, in the Mekong river, National Geographic reported that fishermen caught one that was nine feet long and 650 pound in May, 2005. If you tried to noodle that, you'd have to play Jonah and have a partner hold your ankles as that monster swallows you whole.

When Animals Attack

There was a really well written article in GQ this month about animal attacks. I would paraphrase it for you, but Stevereads has basically synop-sized it for you. Totally worth checking out.

The animals are changing. We used to learn that the ability to use tools was the unique dominion of humans. Then we learned that chimps go fishing for ants. In David Attenborough's 'Life of Mammals' you can also see semi-domesticated chimps using manufactured tools - like a saw to cut wood.

As it turns out the definition was revised to allow that while certain animals can use tools, no other animal uses tools to hunt. Over the past 20 years, that too has slipped away. Chimps are now hunting using spears - and it seems that a younger generation is picking the skills up from one individual. This was the same deal with the nut-cracking technique in "Life of Mammals." If you don't learn it young, you can never master it. Kind of like a French accent.

One of the scariest things that's started happening according to this GQ article is the bird attacks. I find it seriously frightening. I guess I've always been a little scared of birds, but seriously - pigeons are everywhere in NYC. If this doesn't scare you...