12 Days of Inkfish, Day 12: Cuddlefish

Sometimes a cuttlefish wants to cuddle, and sometimes it wants to attack you with its face and ingest you whole. Both sides of the cephalopod's personality are on display in this video from the BBC. Also on display: the giant cuttlefish's unbelievable full-body strobe light effect. This is an animal you want to stay on the good side of.

Thanks for celebrating the 12 Days of Inkfish with me! Next week, regularly scheduled programming will return. Stay tuned for new science and new marveling at nature's old—but spectacular—tricks.

Until then, did you miss any of these?

Day 1: What happens when inkfish receive gifts
Day 2: Life as an upside-down jelly
Day 3: Head explosions and a reverse sun
Day 4: The help desk answers "orangutan stop following me" and other reader questions
Day 5: A video of grebes running on water to prove their commitment
Day 6: How Zion Canyon is like the Princess and the Pea
Day 7: Which posts won Best Mustache and other superlatives in the 2012 yearbook
Day 8: This nebula is a square peg in a round universe, thank goodness
Day 9: These airport worms are hard at work eating your garbage
Day 10: Sending you all on an acoustic scavenger hunt (please report back!)
Day 11: The most charming breeds of purse animals

Image: Screenshot from "Animal mating rituals of giant cuttle fish in the blue Australian ocean waters" by BBC Worldwide

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 11: Purse Animals

Ordinarily, I would use "purse animal" to describe one of the low-weight-class dog breeds that city dwellers carry around in designer shoulder bags. In this case, though, the animals aren't inside Louis Vuitton purses—they're made of them.

For the opening of a new London store in 2010, Louis Vuitton commissioned British artist Billie Achilleos to create a series of animal sculptures. The creatures would be made entirely from leather purses and other accessories. With the fashion house's blessing, the artist began hacking up some pricey bags.

The first set of animals went into glass dome jars in a window display in the new store. Having been sufficiently charmed, Louis Vuitton commissioned even more purse creatures the next year for the launch of its bag-monogramming service.

Achilleos wrote on her blog about choosing the materials for each animal carefully. A noisy grasshopper was made from "products with zips and poppers that make satisfying noises." To build the pragmatic beaver, she used men's wallets and bags. 

Scroll through the complete set of purse animals at Louis Vuitton's Facebook album. There's also a making-of video on Billie Achilleos's blog. She created a zoo's worth of creatures, ranging from chameleon to puppy. This kind of purse dog, though, doesn't yap.

Images copyright Patrick Gries 2010, via Facebook.

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 10: Acoustic Scavenger Hunt

On the beach of a tiny Scottish island, a person kicked and jumped through unusual "singing sands" that made a squeaky barking sound in response. More than 3,600 miles away, I was able to eavesdrop on the weird phenomenon because that person had uploaded a recording to the website Sound Around You.

This crowdsourced sound map is a project by researchers at the University of Salford in Manchester. Volunteers around the world have shared ambient noises or noteworthy moments from their environments. The researchers hope to learn about how our soundscapes make us feel, and how they affect our lives.

Exploring the map they've built so far, you can hear street music in Chile, a quiet countryside in Thailand, and chatter on an Italian bus. From Israel, someone has uploaded the wail of an air-raid siren. Once you start cupping your ear toward people and streets on the other side of the world, it's hard to turn away.

The ambient noises of wind and elevated trains in Chicago seem to be pretty well covered already. But if you live someplace with more interesting background noise, you can use a free app called i-SAY to capture (and share) the sounds around you.

Image: Sound Around You

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 9: Airport Worms

While you were vacationing on New Year's Day, nearly two million worms were working hard at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The airport installed them in the fall of 2012 as part of its new recycling center. By munching through passengers' coffee grounds, used paper towels, and uneaten French fries, the worms are making garden fertilizer out of what used to be landfill fodder.

At the recycling center, employees first sort through the airport's 25 daily tons of trash. Recyclables such as cardboard, aluminum, and plastic are sold. (One airline, project director Bob Lucas said in November, discards entire sleeves of plastic cups even if only a few were used during a flight.) Clothing, which Lucas said panicked passengers dump in the trash when their bags are overweight, is collected by a "group of ladies" who clean and donate it.

As for the worm food itself, it gets heated and pre-composted before finally going to the red wigglers. The airport plans to use waste from the worms to fertilize its grounds. The slimy new employees are happy and—now that Lucas has figured out how to stop them fleeing during a thunderstorm—seem to plan on staying at their jobs.

Image: Sparrows' Friend (via Flickr). Thanks to Leigh for the tip!

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 8: Square Peg in a Round Universe

We can all agree there's too much round stuff in space, right? All those planets and stars and orbital paths and moon craters and disks of debris get old. The most variation you can usually hope for is an astroid shaped like a potato.

Here, for some relief, is the aptly named Red Square nebula. Researchers Peter Tuthill of Sydney University and James Lloyd of Cornell University created this image of the cloud, which surrounds a star called MWC 922.

The researchers think its square shape might be due to a lucky viewing angle on our part. The nebula may really be two cones of gas pointing outward, as if the star at the center were a cheerleader holding a giant megaphone in either hand. From our angle, the nebula looks like a giant X or square. If it turned 90 degrees, we'd find ourselves facing—yet again—some round stuff in space.

Image: Peter Tuthill, Sydney University Physics Dept., Palomar and W.M. Keck observatories (via APOD)

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 7: Yearbook

With the year drawing to a close, Inkfish's class officers have chosen superlatives to bestow on the posts of 2012. Please note that a prom king and prom queen were not elected this year because everyone was too busy cheering on the mathletes. (Hey, wildfires in the Cretaceous won Most Popular. Anything's possible.)

Most Popular

Dinosaur Age Not Dramatic Enough? Add Fire

Cutest Couple

The Faithfulness of the Coyote (and Other Urban Animals)

Class Clown

The Shambulance: 5 Reasons Not to "Cleanse" Your Colon

Worst Hygiene

Belly Button Safari: Who's Living in There?

Most Talkative

You Have to Hear This Beluga Whale Mimicking a Person

Most Athletic

The Hazards of Being an Athletic Ape

Class Goth

Life Advice: Think More about Death

Most Likely to Attend Culinary School*

The Plus Side of Eating Placenta

*This post was also nominated for Most Disgusting Use of an Innocent French-Toast Photo.

Most Likely to Join AA

To Kill Parasites, Flies Self-Medicate with Booze

Best Mustache 

How to Decode a Monkey Face

Thanks for taking a minute to reflect on 2012 with me; I'll see you next year. Have a great summer!

Image credits can be found at their respective posts.

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 6: Zion Canyon

Stories about earth science have all the transformations and power struggles of a fairy tale. When I asked my friend Tyler Auer—a photography blogger who studied geoscience in college—to tell me the story behind a favorite photo, he sent me a tale that’s part Princess and the Pea and part Jurassic Park.

Tyler took this picture at Zion Canyon, one of the many national park areas (including the Grand Canyon) within the 130,000-square-mile formation known as the Colorado Plateau.

“Around the time the dinosaurs roamed the western US, the Colorado plateau was a giant sea of sand dunes,” Tyler says. Over millions of years, these sand dunes kept forming on top of one another and compressing into layered sandstone. You can see the outlines of the ancient dunes, like so many stacked mattresses, in the striations of the canyon walls.

While the sand dunes were turning to rock, they were also being pushed upward by tectonic activity. Cracks formed in the ground like the crust of a bread loaf in the oven. Zion Canyon began as one of these cracks. But “sandstone is really soft, as far as rocks go,” Tyler says, “and running water carves through it quickly.” Rainwater and the flow of the Virgin River gradually deepened this split into a half-mile chasm with almost vertical walls.

Since the Colorado Plateau may be the thickest sandstone layer that’s ever formed, it's provided nature with a deep toolkit. “The Colorado Plateau is magnificent example of the slow but beautiful work nature can do,” Tyler says. You can find more fairy-tale pictures at his blog.

Image: Virgin River Narrows north of Zion Canyon, by Tyler Auer

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 5: Running on Water

Human courtship rituals—if you believe television commercials, anyway—are lame. The guy who kneels down right at the jewelry store counter ("It fits perfectly!" "Well honey, that's because I already had it sized") has nothing on birds who walk on water for each other.

Grebes are diving waterbirds that live in the Americas and Eurasia. To pair off, they follow an elaborate courtship choreography that includes trading bits of food and mimicking each other's motions. In the ritual's conclusion, both birds suddenly haul their ungainly bodies out of the water and run together on its surface. The grace of the birds and the physics of the maneuver both seem impossible.

You can see a pair of Clark's grebes do their courtship dance in this incredible video from the BBC. Jewelry companies, take note: there's no prelude to romance quite like swallowing a live fish.

Image: screen grab from BBC Life: Birds: Partners for Life

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 4: Help Desk

When you use website analytics, you quickly learn that there are a lot of people out there Googling things like "how do i make robot" and "which is best medicine for make baby." This year I've seen many visitors whose search queries were probably not answered here. To make things up to them, I'll try to address a few of those questions now.

orangutan stop following me

Unless you live in Borneo or Sumatra and spend a lot of time in rainforest trees, it's very unlikely that you're being followed by an orangutan. Are you sure it isn't a very hairy human or a large orange dog? If an orangutan is, in fact, following you, don't worry—they mostly eat plants.

can you use ab toning belt on butt for bigger muscles

Ab toning belts will not make your muscles stronger (they only stimulate the surface of the muscle) or more toned (because the contractions are involuntary). But if you're really attached to the idea, don't bother strapping the belt around your rear: they sell toning shorts too.

what pills can make a man's hair fall out in clumps

I don't know the answer to that but it sounds like you're working on a super hilarious prank.

toilet training pigeon
Here's a website with some advice on potty-training pet birds. Consistency is key! But if I had a pigeon I'd skip the toilet training and teach it to carry messages, or to find its home from hundreds of miles away. Or to take pictures, like those cool pigeons in World War I.

is science harmful or useful

Did you not just see that pigeon with a camera strapped its chest?

giant barbies on the loose
Please send a picture so I can better assess the problem. Maybe you and the person with the orangutan problem should coordinate.

that story about the monkeys in the room

Your faith in organic search is touching. I don't know what you're looking for, but here's a story about rhesus macaques raised by water bottles instead of mothers.

if you swap brains will you still have the knowledge inside?
Even if this question is only research for a science-fiction story, I really think you should reconsider.

unnecessary otter

No such thing. 

sex robot sperm go?

Since you clearly know search terms don't have to be in the form of a coherent sentence, I'm confused about why you think they still need a question mark at the end. On the off-chance you're wondering what the similarities are between a sperm cell and a Roomba, here are some.

why is sperm brown

Wow, please see a doctor. Why are all the sperm people coming here?

i have to pee

No one is stopping you. 

what company makes placebo

Okay, I quit.

Images: Help desk by Aryc Ogre; war pigeon via Wikimedia Commons 

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 3: Reverse Sun

"Astronomy! People go crazy studying that!" a Christmas tree farmer said this week after asking my younger sister her college major. He made a head-exploding gesture to illustrate his point.

That farmer might have been distressed by this image. Despite its similarity to sperm tackling an egg, it's really a color-inverted picture of our sun. The background is a field of stars, also with its colors reversed.

Turning the colors around lets us see features on the sun's surface we might not otherwise. The little bumps and crinkles are called granules; they're where hot gas is rising to the outside of the sun before cooling and sinking again. According to a textbook of my sister's, these bumps are "typically the size of Texas."

The image comes from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which provides new head-explosions every 24 hours.

Image: Jim Lafferty

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 2: Upside-Down Jelly

Cassiopea jellyfish spend much of their adult lives lying on their backs. Or maybe their heads. However you look at it, they're upside-down: they rest in warm, shallow waters, holding their branching arms up toward the sun. Inside those tentacles are single-celled algae, which photosynthesize and provide food for their jelly farmers.

Cassiopeia, the jellyfish's differently spelled namesake, was a queen in Greek mythology. After bragging that she was even more beautiful than sea nymphs called the Nereiads, the queen was punished by having her constellation placed where it sometimes appears upside-down as it rotates in the sky.

The jellyfish are passive but have a mild sting. Some crabs hoist Cassiopea jellyfish onto their backs for self-protection, carrying them around gardens and all.

Image: Cassiopea jellyfish at Shedd Aquarium, taken by me. If you like seeing bizarre animals up close (or adults with their faces pressed up to glass like kids), go see this exhibit.

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 1: Gifts

Consider this a big, many-tentacled squeeze from me to you.

This year, I've expanded into new habitats, learned new tricks (like driving the Shambulance), and seen lots of new readers swimming by. I'm grateful to every person who visits and shares these pages. You've given me a reason to learn about wine-making wasps and anti-placebos, to taste no-calorie noodles and verbally abuse sheep. Say hello in the comments!

For each of the 12 days of Christmas I'll be leaving a little something here to unwrap. The first is a video of an octopus receiving a live crab in a jar. After menacing the crustacean briefly, it unscrews the jar's lid and squeezes its whole body inside to devour its prey. Talk about a stocking stuffer.



Video from CBCtv.