Tell me, O Octopus, I begs,
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, Octopus;
If I were thou, I'd call me Us.
Ogden Nash
We moved on pretty quickly from whales once the Chipmunk discovered that sperm whale ate GIANT SQUID! The last two months have been pretty solidly spent in pursuit of cephalopods!
A cephalopod (head-feet!) is a marine animal. They have bilateral body symmetry, (mirror halves), a large head, and a set of arms and/or tentacles. In other words....squid, octopus, nautilus, and cuttlefish!
We always start with a trip to the library, lots of reading, and a look at anatomy.
The Chipmunk made his own version of the squid anatomy. Our favorite fact we learned was that the squid has a brain shaped like a doughnut. It's esophagus goes right through the middle!
Here is the Chipmunk's version:
The bagel is the brain, spaghetti is the esophagus, orange candies are smooshed together to make the THREE hearts (one systematic, two branchial), lettuce for the gills, and bread for the stomach. The tortilla is the funnel and the taco shell is it's beak!
It turns out that this week (Oct 8-12) is International Cephalopod Awareness Week! It's been an awesome couple of days of videos and beautiful photos. Here are a couple of our favorites:
We made an emergency trip to the aquarium today to check out the extra cephalopod activities they had planned this week. We went in with lots of questions and found the answers we wanted when we spoke to some of the biologists. They brought out a dissected squid for the kids to see and the octopus was really active. It was so much fun to watch him swim and crawl around!
The best part, though? One of the educators that we speak with regularly took us back behind the scenes to see the baby cuttlefish and sea horses! We saw some of the breeding tanks - cuttlefish, rays, some sharks, giant clams, sea horses, and jellyfish. Absolutely amazing and such a treat!
