Octopus up-skirts. For science.
The provenance of this picture is a little hard to sum up easily:
* I found it on a blog…
* that reposted it from a Smithsonian Institute Flickr account…
* which copied it from the 1975 translation by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations…
* of a German multi-volume atlas apparently done in the early 1900s (someone took over from Carl Chun in 1914)…
* which was recording the discoveries of the “German deepsea expedition aboard the Steamship Valdivia, 1898-1899.
The octopi are beautiful, though. Opisthoteuthis medusoides up top and Opisthoteuthis extensa below.
Their common name does no justice to them at all. Opisthoteuthis are known as flapjack or pancake devilfish. You won’t believe how cute they are from the top.
[via Scientific Illustration, from BioDivLibrary (Flickr), from The Cephalopoda (BioDiversity Library)]