Yeah, the coral reef is pretty small and it's dying out. This is the place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilat.

To be honest I'm just really fascinated by marine life. It's amazing how alien everything is, especially when you look at the deep sea. I'm really into cephalopods like octopuses. The shit that they can do is INSANE, and they're really smart too. There's actually a special set of animal rights laws for the octopus because it's so much smarter than all other invertibrates. They are able to climb out of aquariums and move across land to get to other ones for food. It's not uncommon at all for a poorly contained octopus to be found in another, now empty, fish tank looking extremely full up. They can fit through any gap which is wider than their beak, too. They're proper little Houdinis.

Also, check this out.

Another reason I want to do Marine Biology is that I want a career that lets me travel and see the world. I figure this way I'll get at least as far as the coast. =p

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One question: can octopi recognize themselves in a mirror? I have read before about them escaping from a tank, eating all the fish in another tank, and sneaking back to their original. Freaky.

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

As far as I know, they can't.

The problem with the mirror test on cephalopods is that their brain is so utterly different from humans, it's difficult to use the same measures of intelligence. Most mammals have very similar brain layouts, and being able to recognise your own reflection seems to be indicative of a higher level of cognizance.. but the cephalopod's evolution is so far removed from ours that it is hard to compare them on the same terms.

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Ah, good analysis. Thanks.

I am working on my rules of eating:
1. no organs
2. nothing with thumbs
3. nothing that can recognize itself in the mirror

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

That might be the most interesting post so far on this forum.

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I think you're going to have a hard time staying alive, unfortunately. From a biology textbook (Biological Science, 4th ed, by Scott Freeman):



and



If you avoid eating things with organs, you're pretty much left with eating sponges and bacteria and other such gross things, and not yummy things like broccoli (a flower, or reproductive organ), fruits (more reproductive organs), celery (we generally eat only the petiole, but that's just part of the leaf, which is an organ), not to mention the fact that a nice, juicy, ribeye steak is a slice of beef organ (muscle is an organ). The tongue is good, too. Chicken skin and pork rinds are good, and skin is a great big organ.

Rather than just trying to get you on technicalities that yes, plants have organs and yes, a muscle is an organ; as someone with one biology degree working on a second, I can assure you that plants and animals are not all that different when you get down to it. Refer, for example, to this simple phylogenetic tree, which shows how both plants and animals are but tiny branches on the larger tree of eukaryotes, which is itself but a branch of a larger tree of living things.

Basically, if you want to only eat plants for health reasons, that's cool, but it feels very arbitrary to seek out plants because they're somehow less like us. Someone following this logic may also decide not to eat mushrooms, since they're much more similar to animals than to plants (both in terms of the obvious fact that mushrooms digest their food, and in terms of molecular phylogeny).

Anyway, you didn't say you were a vegetarian or anything (the fact that you will consider eating things that can look in a mirror and not recognize themselves kind of clinches that you're not), I was just inspired to go on a tangential rant.

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I welcome all tangential ranting.

Obviously I mean no eyeballs and no livers and whatnot. How might I most properly differentiate that statement so as not to be busted by bio nerds in future?

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

He means he won't EAT organs, not that he won't eat things with organs.

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Do not bore me with such trite cliches. For I have you in my clutches, and should I choose, I could snuff out your insignificant lives in an instant.

I love me some semantics!

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This was the world that I had created. I know what I have to do to fix it...to make things right. There's no problem that can't be solved.

Whats that line from Leathal Weapon 2. "semantics, we are always for for some antics."

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