Showing posts with label octopi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label octopi. Show all posts

October 11 – Kraken Day

Posted October 11, 2018


Zeus, in Clash of the Titans, gave this order to unleash the gigantic sea monster known as the Kraken. The Kraken also appeared in the movie The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead 
Man's Chest, and it swallowed Captain Jack Sparrow and his entire ship whole!


For as long as there have been humans living near oceans, probably, there has been fear of gigantic tentacled monsters. That's probably because every once in a while a giant squid washes ashore...



By the way, if you ever see a photo like the one below, it's likely fake (this one is definitely fake):


You see, people will take a real photo of a giant squid, like the first one below, of a gigantic 30-foot squid, and they will drop it into a crowd scene (the second one below), maybe from a sand castle building event, and they then proudly proclaim that a 160-foot squid washed up!




The longest giant squid ever measured is 43 feet long, but of course humans can imagine bigger. And scarier: a giant cephalopod that hunts us, that wants revenge or that loves to attack anything from ships and people to buildings and bridges.



Today we celebrate the tentacled creatures or cephalopods of myth and legend, of story and movie. It's all a part of Cephalopod Awareness Week, which is celebrated every October 8 to 12. 

The Kraken is joined by other mythical cephalopods: There's the enormous octopus Akkorokamui, from Ainu (Japanese) folklore. There's Kanaloa, an enormous squid (or octopus) in Hawaiian stories. And there's the Cecaelia, the octopus woman from Native American peoples such as the Tligit and the Nootka, who live in the Pacific Northwest, what is now Alaska or Western Canada.




Also on this date:

October 8, 2012 - International Cephalopod Awareness Days Begin!

ICAD is the annual five-day-long celebration of the most intelligent invertebrates (animals without backbones) in the world. Tomorrow night is Nautilus Night, Wednesday is Squid Day, Thursday is “Release the Kraken!” Day (a day to celebrate the fantastic cephalopods of myth and legend), and Friday finishes off with Cephalophossil Day (coordinating with National Fossil Day, this day celebrates cephalopod fossils).


And today is Octopus Day!

What do we do on Octopus Day?

We celebrate all the eight-armed-and-no-tentacles cephalopods! (Squid and cuttlefish have eight arms but also two tentacles, so they have ten long, flexible appendages.)

Wait...what's the difference between an arm and a tentacle?

Cephalopod tentacles only have suckers at the end, and cephalopod arms have suckers along their entire length.

But a lot of sources I am finding use arms and tentacles in the same way. So you'll read in some places that octopi have eight tentacles and squid have ten tentacles, for example.

 Wait, wait, wait...what's a cephalopod?

The Greek word part “cephalo-” means “head,” and “-pod” means “foot.” So the name of this group of animals means “head-footed.” That is because these mollusks have larger, more important heads and larger brains than other mollusks such as clams and snails. And that's why these creatures are smarter.

Most cephalopods are hunters, and you have to be smart to be a successful hunter. (A few cephalopods are scavengers rather than hunters. In other words, they eat scraps of dead bodies.)

Celebrate!


  • Eat special Octopus Day foods, like octopops and “octopus” soup (don't worryit's not made with octopus!heck, it's not even soup!). 




Also on this date: