The Argonaut Octopus Has Mastered the Free Ride
defector.com
defector.com
> The tiny males never develop a shell, but instead develop a modified arm that he can detach onto a female's mantle to pass along his sperm. This arm can move on its own, wriggling toward the very center of the spiraling shell. This led certain researchers to mistake these lone male arms for "some form of a parasite or worm living inside the female," Villanueva said. A female argonaut can store a handful of these male arms until she is ready to spawn.
Well done.
But Guinness won't come knocking:
> Males [of the blanket octopus] are the size of a walnut, can be up to 40,000 times lighter than the female -- https://octonation.com/fun-facts-about-the-female-blanket-oc...
Plastic has enclosures in it's shape, contrary to other material found floating, like branches and wood. Enclosures are great for not getting detected and eaten, and there are octopi which use coconuts for hiding themselves.
I don't know if plastic pollution has proven to be detrimental to aquatic organisms though. Talking about everyday plastic items, like bags, bottles and stuff. Plastic pollution in beaches is definitely an ugly view to the eyes, but i don't know if animals actually die from plastic pollution.
In my mind, fishing lines thrown out in the sea, are a lot more dangerous because they are designed to be very strong, invisible and they stretch for hundreds of meters. These are proven to trap by accident turtles and dolphins.
But plastics are also ingested by animals - both filter feeders that just don’t discriminate their food and predators that mistake the colours for that of prey. Plastics do not break down in digestive systems, instead plastics can leech toxins, displace nutritional intake causing starvation, cause internal bleeding, or in some cases tangles up inside and forms a blockage leading to sepsis and death.
Recent peer-reviewed research focussing on marine birds: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38900-z
And one for corals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06113-5
Here’s one example in the news: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/11/health/sperm-whale-plasti...
We don’t know the full extent. Most animals that die at see are never seen let alone autopsied.
I think my favorite part about the impact of the "micro plastics everywhere" debate is, just like with climate change, you have a massive number of people who will deny any harm is being done simply because they can't immediately see any effect from where they are standing. Soon we will be calling them Plastic Deniers or whatever.
It's wild to me that half the global population is so remarkably good at reflexively, and without any critical thinking, reject the idea that we may have made a bit of a mistake with our consumer cultures that is going to have long term ecological fallout, leaving the rest of us to wait until it's too late to reverse or even fix the problem. It's like arguing with a real life philosophical zombie.
> It's like arguing with a real life philosophical zombie.
It is equally unpleasant to hear you argue with opinions not stated in the comments. Almost as if you are picking a fight nobody as of yet is provoking you to pick. And the phrase "philosophical zombies" don't mean what you seem to think it means.
> It's wild to me that half the global population is so remarkably good at reflexively, and without any critical thinking, reject the idea...
I don't see much critical thinking in this sentence of the article either: "Plastic has already become a new substrate used by argonauts in the Anthropocene era to navigate in surface ocean waters, illustrating the urgent need to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean," Why does that illustrate the urgent need?
Maybe to article is trying to prop up the coconut husk real estate bubble. As soon as plastic cover for octopi starts to disappear, then all octopi will have one choice: Get a coconut husk or stay with no cover!
Then the coconut husk market will start booming among octopi.
It could be a comedy story of some kind.
However, there was a famous picture of a bird which has supposedly eaten a lot of plastic and died, and Patrick Moore has repeatedly stated that this was a fake picture. He also said that plastic doesn't kill birds at all.
The paper about birds, also doesn't state anywhere that plastic has killed any bird. Plastic may be poisoning some species, upsetting their breeding cycle, but the same could be true for humans. If we use plastic and it is poisoning us, but in addition to that it's poisoning some animals, then poisoning animals doesn't sound like a good reason to stop using it.
The young sperm whale which died is also pretty strange. It is not a filter feeder and we haven't heard since, new dead whales with tens of kilograms of plastic in their belly. Whales which were closely related to wolves before they became aquatic mammals, should have a sense of smell and figure out what stuff in the sea is edible. They are also pretty smart, even more so than birds.
I cannot open the paper about coral reefs, but i also haven't seen a coral reef in my life. I haven't seen whales either, but i have seen and swam around dolphins and seals.
>We don’t know the full extent. Most animals that die at see are never seen let alone autopsied.
There is a way to find out. Captive dolphins exist. Throw some plastics around and see if dolphins eat it. Take some captive seagulls for some weeks, feed them some fish, and throw around their food, plastic bottle caps etc. See if the seagulls will eat it. Do they eat as much plastic as they can and die afterwards?
It's literally in the introduction, with citations to the papers that have the documentation of the occurrences:
> Many seabird species are sensitive to plastic pollution; they frequently ingest plastic, which can have lethal and sublethal impacts caused by chemical contamination and physical damage or blockages.
And
> There is a way to find out. Captive dolphins exist. Throw some plastics around and see if dolphins eat it. Take some captive seagulls for some weeks, feed them some fish, and throw around their food, plastic bottle caps etc. See if the seagulls will eat it. Do they eat as much plastic as they can and die afterwards?
This is probably the most disgusting and awful suggestion I've seen for a long time. "I don't want to consider that my actions may be harmful, so I'd rather you subject some animals to cruel and needless deaths".