Misc.

The King of Herrings (the oarfish) is truly unbelievable. It is amazingly beautiful and also the most photogenic creature I came across this week.

Here he is in an Ariel-inspired “part of that world” moment. He’s working on his thing-a-ma-bob collection.

But she’s still got more….

Unfortunately, the King of Herrings most often comes to the surface when it’s already dead or dying in shallow waters. They have been known to get up to 661 lbs! What is also surprising is that this fish is not actually a true herring. It gets it’s name because it’s been spotted guiding groups of herring…like only a King would be capable of doing. When I was looking up the K.O.H I could not believe how many group photos this fish gets into. Here are some of my favorites….

What I found interesting about these group shots was that were were no pictures of the K.O.H with women, there were a lot of hard hats and lots of random kids in the shots. PERPLEXING!

I will leave you to ponder the women/hard hat/random kid mystery and say farewell.  I hope you have enjoyed Ocean Week and the Intensity under the sea. A big thanks to the awesome guest bloggers Saskia van Gendt and Conor Lastowka and all of you for reading. Long live the King!

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Guineafowl puffer fish are totally intense. When they are trying to protect themselves they puff up.

Can you imagine if humans had this ability!?!
You know he’d like it…

On that note….

Happy Saturday everyone!

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I’m excited to share a post by another Guest Blogger for Ocean Week….The world of the Leafy Seadragon brought to you by Mr. Conor Lastowka. Conor is a great friend of mine and loves bacon more than anyone I know. He’s a comedy writer at Rifftrax, has a tumblr called Bacon, a blog called Citation Needed (which is now also a podcast and a book) where he documents The Best of Wikipedia’s Worst Writing, and is one of the co-founders of National High Five Day. I was talking to him the other night at dinner about Ocean Week and it was clear the man had a passion for something else other than bacon…the Leafy Seadragon. So I asked him to kindly share his knowledge on the little guy. Enjoy!

Just so you’re aware, you’re living in a world where these exist:

That’s a Leafy Seadragon, also known as a “Thank god they are not nine feet tall.” They are also called Glauert’s seadragon, mainly by Glauert, and by anyone at a party where Glauert is in earshot that wants to spare themselves a fifteen minute lecture.

So you take the seahorse, a sea creature that already has off the charts intensity due to its prehensile tail, color changing ability, eyes that rotate independently of each other and the whole “males carrying the eggs for nine weeks and then giving birth” thing (that we pray never gains any traction on dry land.)  Then you put it and a big stalk of seaweed in some sort of matter transporter, and ignoring all safety warnings, beam it somewhere causing the two to become A) eternally fused and B) hopefully not hellbent on mankind’s destruction.

They are found only in Australian waters, which means that could they communicate verbally, they would likely indicate that they feel our American knives do not measure up to their knives. Leafy seadragon’s are such an important part of the culture that the state of South Australia put them on their Official Marine Emblem, an honor so great that there is not a single picture of this emblem anywhere on the internet.  I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to provide what I imagine the South Australian Marine Emblem looks like:

A creature this intense is of course endangered as hell. It’s not up to me to speculate, but I’m pretty sure this is due to bitter discrimination by the seahorse community.

And frankly, this makes sense. If there were two types of people, the perfectly normal people like you, me and this guy, and then people who looked just like us except for the enormous seaweed-resembling protrusions all over their body, we would hunt the freaks down and eradicate them.  That is, if we weren’t already holed up in our fallout shelters trying to ride out whatever nuclear catastrophe had created the freaks in the first place. In fact, someday, all we may have to remind us of these majestic creatures of the deep is this lady’s neck tattoo:
What is my point? The Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, where we took some of these pictures, really should stop using Comic Sans in their Leafy Seadragon exhibit.

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Meet the Rosy Lipped Batfish, the disgruntled Mary Kay saleswoman of the sea who hasn’t sold a product since 1986.

Can we say chip on the shoulder? I promise there was no photoshop work done on those lips…they are 100% all hers. Scarlett Johansson, you’ve got competition girl. If they were to make an animated fish version of the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas the R.L.B would be the perfect choice for the role.
If you’d like to get a look at her up close and personal, plunge into the waters of Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica. Or keep your eye out for the human version of her, cause she’s obviously out there…

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