Octopus with transparent head caught by blackwater photographer | Hacker News Reader

Octopus with transparent head caught by blackwater photographer

mymodernmet.com

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that we often forget how amazing life really is, and how we take something for granted just because we constantly see it even though we don’t understand anything about it. How there’s this mechanism right before our eyes creating these amazingly and incomprehensibly complex structures, these organisms, that somehow end up with what we can only name “instincts” or “consciousness” because we lack better words.

We have no idea how any of this is happening and all we can do is cut it up and maybe look at the pieces through some sharpened glass, like a bunch of chimpanzees smashing apart a thousand dollar wrist watch.

The more you think about it, the more captivating, and maybe a little bit sad, it becomes.

I can heartily recommend joining iNaturalist @ http://inaturalist.org/ ... great way to learn about biology, including marine biology.

Thanks for the recommendation

Will look what others discovered around my place

>maybe look at the pieces through some sharpened glass, like a bunch of chimpanzees smashing apart a thousand dollar wrist watch.

Or worse yet, find a way to exploit that destruction for profit.

>maybe a little bit sad

Personally I find it devastating. Taking a 20,000 foot view of our species and the impact of its presence on this planet is bleak at best.

TIL: "black water diving" is night diving, especially over a very deep zone. It sounds like you don't really go any deeper than ordinary open-water diving, but you get to see creatures migrating from much deeper than you would ordinarily get to see.

Including, apparently, a lot of transparent juveniles. (I'm not exactly clear on why juveniles in particular can be transparent.)

Could be that not being transparent affords an advantage in finding a mate and reproduction. Juveniles might not need to find a mate yet so only need to hide and survive.

This is correct. They go through stages for functional reasons (features to help them float along and catch planktonic food while they are devoting all their energy to growing) as well as reasons we don't much understand related to how they end up in their environments.

So law enforcement doesn't catch them painting graffiti.

Article says 50m. But they are tethered to the boat. It’s not recreational diving.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. That makes sense. PADI sets some very stiff requirements to go to 50 meters.

You can dive as an recreational activity at any depth your could dive 'professionally'.

In fact 40-50 meters is a pretty normal depth for experienced recreational divers.

I’m not sure where you’ve been diving or if youre intentionally being pedantic.

Your typical open water course qualifies you for depths to 30m. I’ve been past 40m, but on air you’re not staying there very long (let alone 50m). And if I remember my nitrox training correctly, on EAN 35 you want to stay at 30ish meters or shallower.

My insurance through DAN also only covers me for up to 30m. Most of the colourful corals and fish that you see on TV, typically at shallower depths anyway.

Past 30m you definitely need further qualifications and more gear if you want to hang out at those depths.

First off, I'm not diving in the US and I'm not well-versed in how insurance/rules are there.

Secondly, yes. You should have proper training and experience. And that's why I said 'experienced' divers. I wouldn't count myself among them with my less than 50 dives and lack of qualifications.

However I personally know quite a few experienced divers (most of them have >1k dives total) who do this kind of thing a few times a year. Usually to spend a few minutes looking at wrecks.

Granted, I am positively surrounded by people with way more experience than myself so I may have a skewed image of what is normal.

I’m not in the US either. I’ve clocked at least 100 dives. I stopped counting at 70. I assume you’re somewhat familiar with the conditions of your insurance. If you’re diving regularly without insurance, I’d suggest you go get some.

Doing wreck dives at 60m is not like recreational diving. Different air mix to get those depths and stay for any significant period. The guys I’ve talked to, leave extra tanks at the half way point for deco. Otherwise you won’t have enough air.

Compared to ‘recreational’ diving: call up your buddy, check conditions, get tanks, walk off the beach. And you are supposed to stay within your no-decompression limits. If something goes wrong, in theory you can surface immediately. The deco stop is a precaution only.

PADI does 40m IIRC, with its deep diving components. Other certification organizations are different.

Mauritius had fantastic diving, but the sites tend to start at 25m. I think I saw 60m sites listed among the well know locales, although the deepest my divemasters went the week I was there was 46m (deeper would need more complex decompression stops and multiple tanks for more than a minute or so at the bottom). I think NAUI was the predominant body on the island at the time.

I went down a rabbit hole on this yesterday, and PADI does 40, 45, and 50 meter certifications. Each has the previous one as a prerequisite, plus nitrox and others. Perhaps that's the reason I was told that PADI stands for "Put Another Dollar In".

Many sources use "recreational" to describe diving with ordinary air (or maybe nitrox), and "technical" any diving with more complicated requirements. Both are distinguished from "professional" diving, so you can be doing "technical" diving recreationally without doing "recreational diving".

Wikipedia says that the exact definition of "technical" varies between certifying agencies, but 50 meters is definitely well below it. You can certainly do it without being certified, but the training classes make it clear that you're taking a massive risk (oxygen toxicity, nitrogen narcosis, decompression sickness).

I've got only the most basic certification myself, and only a short list of dives, so I can't speak to how realistic that is.

The idea of treading water, 50 meters down, in the middle of the ocean, in pitch black, makes me so anxious just sitting on my couch thinking about it...I couldn’t imagine just...sitting there, knowing that in every direction it effectively goes to infinity but I can’t see much beyond my hand in front of me.

Scuba diving is very much not a pursuit for some folks.

I've done a dive like this once, it is quite a trippy experience, you really do feel like you are just floating in empty space. You lose all sense of perspective. Even when you're swimming forward, it doesn't seem like you're moving at all.

Wondering if divers can determine up from down in the absence of surface light?

I’m guessing they could use the direction bubbles from their air supply are travelling...

Apart from the benefits to the individual juvenile - to be harder to spot by predators - I wonder if there's some benefit to being able to see what's coming up behind (looking through) one of your siblings.

Somewhat aside, I note TFA uses the word octopi, whereas I thought we'd agreed that octopuses was the correct plural?

It's very weird and spooky to dive at night like this. Ordinary night diving in relatively shallow water (say 10m) is challenging enough. It is easy to get very disoriented. The reward is seeing an entirely different world. I've seen the strangest inhabitants of coral reefs while diving at night. The article is about photos taken while doing something else, diving in very deep open water at night.

What's in the space between the brain and the skin? Is it just transparent fluid - csf? The space between the eyes seems to have something else going on, as in less transparent.

The space between the eyes is the brain.

Although brain is a fluid concept in these creatures, pressure right there will instantly kill the octopus, not because it is another organ but because it is the control center.

The article says the reddish mass(es) is the distributed brain, but was referring to the separate white band between the eyes.

Interesting point about pressure.

Oh this is so cool! The area between the eyes is the brain, a ring through which the stomach (the sack above the eyes) passes.

It remains interesting to me that space exploration yields so much excitement when we have an essentially unexplored alien world with alien creatures right here. I have little idea why reaching a dead, likely lifeless, planet is more exciting than the ocean. Additionally, better understanding the ocean would better prep us to be able to properly explore planets and moons.

It might be as primitive as people naturally preferring to sit on a high place and looking down.

Calling ocean creatures alien is wrong. They aren't alien. The interest in space travel is simple to me. We can possibly learn about real aliens. We can also ensure humanities survival even in the event that the Earth is completely gone. Studying the ocean is just mostly about learning some semi interesting biology and mostly boring geology.

Other humans are aliens. It is all a matter of degree. Octopods are about as alien an intelligence as we have on Earth. It is easy to imagine less-alien outsider aliens

"X is just mostly..." is a reliable way to begin a falsehood.

They are alien in that they are adapted to a totally different environment to us. But not alien in that they are a branch off the same tree of life as we are.

If you are interested in finding out more about octopus evolution and intelligence I recommend: " Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

"My octopus teacher" on Netflix is also well worth a watch.

I concur - the thing is that Mars is often spoken of as a "lifeboat" for humanity. It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Similarly it will take centuries of hard and determined work to ever make Mars as good as the worst possible Earth. Short of a full on nuclear war (small, but nevertheless non-zero probability) we're better off improving what we've got.

Note, I'm only addressing the "lifeboat" justification, I still think sending folks to Mars would be cool as hell.

An awful lot of hard and determined work for humans to make Earth less hospitable; a brief moment of whimsy for a large asteroid

Not really; a large asteroid is fundamentally incapable of making Earth less hospitable than Mars. For example, it would need to be so large that the impact blew away the entire atmosphere.

It doesn't need to make it just like Mars, to be as inhospitable. An asteroid big enough to crater to the mantle, sending out massive waves of lava and darkening the sky for years would do. It might wipe out all humans on Earth. Of course, unlike Mars, Earth would recover. Not that humanity would care.

> It doesn't need to make it just like Mars, to be as inhospitable. An asteroid big enough to crater to the mantle, sending out massive waves of lava and darkening the sky for years would do.

No, it wouldn't. That would make the Earth much less hospitable than it is now, but still much more hospitable than Mars.

> It might wipe out all humans on Earth.

This is not evidence of being less hospitable than Mars, since humans cannot survive on Mars. Even at the worst point of this disaster, human life would be easier on Earth than on Mars under normal Martian conditions.

> Earth would recover

This concept always feels slightly strange to me. Earth does not "recover" from anything, nor does anything that we or an asteroid could do "damage" Earth. Make it less hospitable for us, sure!

But Earth itself has always been constantly changing due to external and internal forces, sometimes at a rapid rate and always at a slow rate, and none of that change is fundamentally positive or negative to Earth itself.

Even after a full-on-nuclear war, or run-away-global-warming, or a Chicxulub asteroid impact, the overwhelming majority of the Earth will remain infinitely more habitable than anywhere on Mars.

>It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars

... but we're doing the best we can!

Agree, except earth after full on nuclear war is still likely better than best possible Mars.

Especially considering timeframes needed to improve Mars, vs timeframe to get past initial post nuclear war issues, which are likely not as bad as the worst case scenarios we've been taught about.

Also, I always found it interesting that the people that are so scared of us changing/destroying the world with nuclear war, are the same ones that don't think twice about basically doing the same thing (drastic manmade change) to another planet.

Or that they think it would somehow be easier than a similar feat of geo engineering to repair earth, either post climate change or nuclear war.

It makes no sense to colonize Mars or any other planet other than a pure show or an escapist mentality.

Human beings as a species have shown the inability to even cohabit a 5 square mile space peacefully let alone colonize other worlds.

Better to stay here and explore and study the wonders of nature. We have yet to even understand how a simple protein evolves to produce all this wonderful life and consciousness and brains....

Don’t you realise the entire point of leaving is because we can’t cohabitat here?

If we wait until life is perfect on Earth, then we will never leave.

It is literally the entire universe out there that is waiting to be explored :)

The Expanse is pretty fun look at how humans will manage to fuck shit up even after we have a 100 different worlds to live on.

You don't even have to go to the ocean. We still don't know how humans work.

yeah, we should probably never research anything but our own noses, until we know exactly everything about them

That's a hilarious description of my meditation practice.

The more I learn about the healthcare system through my wife (a nurse), the more I marvel at how much we don't know about our own bodies.

You can study each other's bodies.

Every time I go on vacation I visit a local brewery.

There are over 10 massive breweries local to where I live, and I have never even considered visiting a single one of them.

Same typically goes for the using/living near a beach and using/owning a pool.

The biggest problem with these types of issues is that they make it a false dichotomy. We don't need to decide between space exploration and ocean exploration. We can do both. Space exploration is a paltry fraction of a percentage of our total spending as a species.

Not to mention that innovations derived from space exploration do end up in applications here on earth.

My sentiment or lament is not a false dichotomy. I didn’t present it as only two options. It’s more that most act like there’s only one option. Of course we can do both, but we don’t. In fact, we are actively harming the ocean.

> Not to mention that innovations derived from space exploration do end up in applications here on earth.

That’s part of the bias towards space. Plenty of innovations derived from other large technological developments and projects end up in unanticipated applications. This effect is not unique to space technology development and is not necessarily a strong argument for its funding. A huge swath of modern technology comes from defense spending. Should we increase the defense budget?

Again, my comment was more of a lament in the way treat and view the ocean.

False dichotomy; but anyway, the deep sea is just about as inhospitable as Mars. Nobody living there long-term, not without a huge investment.

It remains interesting to me that space exploration is always seen as an "either-or" for some people.

"Why go to the moon when people are starving in Africa??"

"Why go to Mars when there are weird creatures in the sea??"

What the heck.

>I have little idea why reaching a dead, likely lifeless, planet is more exciting than the ocean.

I agree with your sentiment but as best I understand, the race to get to Mars is

i) to provide redundancy for the species should things turn further to shit here, by our own hand or not

ii) we are in somewhat of a race against time to escape our own solar system before our sun burns out, and Mars is a milestone in that venture

I would welcome our Octopi overlords. People in 2020 were a huge disappointment

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