![]() ![]() Whereas cephalopod brains have evolved from a ring of nerves around the esophagus. are vertebrates, so their brains are built on the same basic structure. Almost everything that we think of as being intelligent - parrots, dolphins, etc. One reason they’re so interesting is they are intelligent invertebrates. What do you find most interesting or important about these animals? You focus on cephalopods for your research. Mike Vecchione pulling in a net on a research vessel. Almost every time we look, we find something new. I study the ocean because it's so poorly known. So studying deep marine organisms is really important for understanding life on our planet. People walking around on land is a very small part of it, in spite of our large impact. We chatted with Vecchione to learn more about the wonderfully weird world of cephalopods on World Octopus Day.ĭepending on how you do the calculations, somewhere between 95 and 99% of the living space on the planet is in the deep sea. “I looked at it and said, ‘That’s what I want to work on right there.’”įour decades later, he studies squids and octopuses as a curator of cephalopods - the class of marine invertebrates that includes squids, octopods, cuttlefishes and nautiluses - and pteropods - free-swimming sea snails - as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist stationed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “So his revenge was to accept me as a student and give me an assistantship sorting plankton under a microscope.” But when Vecchione poured his first jar to sort, out plopped a squid that had gotten caught in the sample of small animals. “It turned out he was in charge of the plankton department,” Vecchione laughed. When a Virginia Institute of Marine Science professor interviewed Mike Vecchione for graduate school admissions and asked him what he wanted to do, he replied that the only thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t want to use a microscope. Young used to describe the deepest-known species of squid. The Pacific bigfin squid ( Magnapinna pacifica) in the Smithsonian collections that Mike Vecchione and Richard E.
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