Pacific squid flashes its attack 'headlights' | Hacker News Reader

Pacific squid flashes its attack 'headlights'

bbc.com

119 pointsonemoresoop46 comments

A Cosmopolitan species in fact that can be found from Naples to Florida, Alaska to Santiago de Chile, Sidney to Madagascar and from Norway to South-Africa. Conquered every single ocean except the poles and the Eastern part of the Mediterranean.

And yes, is a truly spectacular big predator. A little like the invertebrate version of a big cat, specially with that claws.

If pacific squid are humboldt squid, they are limited to the eastern pacific ocean.

They are talking about the cool spaceship disguised as cephalopod: Tanigia danae (2 meter long).

https://schmidtocean.org/wp-content/uploads/Taningia-danae.j...

All that their preys see is two big oblique glowing cat-eyes before to be snared by lines of sharp hooks and killed by a bite. "Night at the African Savannah" style, but without all the roaring.

A favoured snack for sperm whales! However the sharp squid beaks sometimes get lodged in the whale's intestines, which is suspected to lead to the production of ambergris.

I had found it in several species of pelagic dolphins and beaked whales. Is not uncommon in some cetaceans but the beaks are very plain, square. Lacking distinctive features aren't really easy to identify, except after discarding all the other species.

A curious fact of the species is that the lights are enclosed into skin folders shaped as eyelids, so the animal can hide it, show it partially, or blink at will. Those are among the biggest light producing organs evolved by a life-being (if not the biggest known).

I see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taningia_danae even though the title says "Pacific Squid".

I’m getting real strong Pennywise vibes here.

It’s Sydney mate.

>> The team works from a research vessel called Dagon

The perfect name for a ship searching for benthic beasts with luminous tentacles. I bet her dinghy is called "R'lyeh".

I like to think about what lived in the Oceans of Mars, or maybe even Europa if things were slightly different.

But the stuff in our own ocean is so alien already, and we share common ancestors!

They made a movie about that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report

Arthur C Clarke's 2061 (sequel to 2001 and 2010) was also about about a troubled mission that finds life in Europa's oceans. Europa Report sounds like it might have been a little inspired by that novel?

I just watched it. Good movie with an ending you don’t get too often in such movies.

I did kinda hate the talking heads kinda narrative that goes on. I get why they did it but I grew tired of it.

I thought I was the only person who watched that movie!

It was an enjoyable enough movie night! Think I watched it during COVID with some beer and Thai food, and it was satisfying enough to make me want to play some sci-fi games afterward :)

Nothing as thought-provoking as that other space squid movie, Arrival, but it wasn't trying to be. I had a good time.

Last common ancestor was 600m years ago [0], “nearly twice as long as the step … to find the common ancestor of birds and mammals.”

0. https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...

At that scale having common ancestors effectively does not matter anymore.

It matters! We still have so much in common that's not due to convergent evolution, especially at the cellular level.

All I know is there would be crabs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

Dont forget mercurius. Recent new studies show that the planet is probably from a different further orbit and used to be a much different place. It got promoted as an uninteresting dead planet to a top candidate for (former) life planet.

Similar to video adverts that humor you for a few seconds and end on a bedazzling white background behind their logo.

https://youtu.be/eO2wTmhUImE

I've played enough video games to know that you're supposed to hit those when they flash. Half a dozen hits or so destroys the arms and triggers Phase 2 of the boss battle.

Careful though, the monster only has three frames of vulnerability when you see the flash.

"I looked right into its deadlights... and I wanted to be there."

The exact thought I had reading this headline.

Utterly fascinating, like seeing a being from another planet.

In unrelated note, it's funny to be greeted with a 20 secs Ad video before seeing the 50 secs squid video you land on the site to watch! Ah.. Ads are ruining the entire web these days, and the experience keeps worsening.

I couple of days ago I clicked a video on youtube, it was 48 minutes long, the "ad" preceding the video was 58 minutes long... at least I could skip it.

uBlock origin in the browser.

PiHole at home.

NextDNS mobile.

I’ll concede it’s an infinite game of Whac-A-Mole, but a game I’m willing to play

https://sponsor.ajay.app/ also, can't believe I didn't discover it earlier.

Youtube Premium is the only subscription I pay for media wise, and it's fantastic.

Brave works great on both desktop and mobile. I have to add an exception to the ad blocker roughly once a month. I guess DNS blocking may be needed if you use spyware programs outside the browser, which I don't.

Doesn't work at all for the most dominant browsers -- mobile, unless you're one of those folks who never leaves the borders of home base and pups their own custom router (like opnsense, I do this but its a pain to set up and maintain, quite niche).

If only there were a popular browser that makes uBlock Origin brain dead simple.. it ain't Firefox, Safari, or Brave, of this you can be certain.

I didn't see any ads myself. Samsung Internet on my S21 Ultra (16gb) - a couple of their ad blockers installed.

Absolutely love it.

That's cool, what browser?

Samsung Internet :-) It's the default browser for Samsung phones.

What I've done in the past was to set up a wireguard VPN that also has pihole installed.

Great, except it will burn your battery on mobile.

I don't find that to be the case with wg - have actually tested this and found a ~1-2% difference in battery consumption over a full charge, all on lte (pixel 8, graphene). Openvpn, though - yeah.

Hmm, I wonder if graphene is different than stock Android. This doesn't jive with my experience, sadly (tailscale).

Definitely possible. Now I want to dig out a stock Android phone and retest. Aiui tailscale shouldn't introduce much if any load over wg, but I also wonder if you'd have different results with standalone wg.

uBlock Origin works on Firefox mobile.

Can confirm. No ads for me on this site either.

BlockBear on iOS works well enough.

I use Brave on mobile and didn’t get any ads in the video.

One minor benefit to living in the UK – no ads on the BBC website.

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