Kodos, Kang, & Cephalopod Evolution

What has tentacles, can change color, has large eyes, greenish-blue blood, three hearts, glows in the dark, and no spine -- and is not a Quantum Presbyterian from Rigel IV?

Why Cephalopods of course! Octopi and Squid, as well as the lessor known cuttlefish, ammonites, and nautiloids: Those delightfully creepy denizens of the sea and occasional inhabitant of cartoonish UFOs. They come in neon colors or drab gray and green. These creatures can often change from gold to blue to pure white in one triple beat of their hearts. They're among the most successful predators of all time, and their ancestors were grabbing our forefathers with suckers and snapping them into bite sized bits with a beak-shaped maw before our forebears had legs! But where did these alien-looking critters come from?

Foolish HU-MAN! Tell us NOW with Lots of Graphics or suffer the consequences!

Well Kodos, around 600 million years ago here on earth, in a time called the Ediacaran Period, primitive worms were first beginning to evolve from polyps or some similar precursor. As best we can tell the only other largish animals that existed at that time were sponges, corals, possibly anemones, jellyfish, and a few now extinct organisms too weird to classify. Getting caught and eaten back then was probably nothing like the dramatic event we think of today. It would involve something along the lines of being ensnared in a mass of gelatinous tentacles, or being caught in a funnel shaped opening and gently sucked in, followed by slow absorption in the gut of a more or less passive predator.

The soft-bodied proto-worms had a problem, they were easy meat ... or easy protein or whatever you want to call worm flesh. They were soft, easily snared by barbs, they packed a lot of nutrition and were thus highly prized as prey, and their delicate bodies were easy to break down and absorb. An entire industry of predators sprung up around them. What the worms needed was a tougher body plan to keep from being lunch. So the worm-like critters evolved a number of different strategies to cope with the pressure of being popular prey.

One group stayed pretty much the same and tried to hide out quietly in the mud, investing in better eyes, ears, and sense of smell to detect food and avoid predators, along with a knot of nerve tissue to process all the data.

A few took the easy way out by surviving in or attaching to the bodies of other creatures, as parasites.

Some developed a tough, flexible, exoskeletal coating called Chitin and went on to become the most successful phylum on earth today; the Arthropoda. That's bugs in human speak. Spiders, scorpions, crustaceans like crabs and lobsters, and millipedes, along with millions of species of insect. In fact beetles alone make up an estimated 25% of all modern animal species!

But another group of worms opted for super armor. And by 530 million years ago they had became invincible oceanic battle-tanks using a hardened mineral matrix which surrounded the soft-bodied worm. That phylum is called Mollusca or Mollusks, and it includes clams, oysters, snails, and the subject of this article, cephalopods.

The basic shield limpet. These creatures exhibit a primary pseudopod (Foot) and two small tentacles making them a possible ancestor of both snails and cephalopods

The first candidate ancestor for cephalopods -- after the evolution of mollusks as a whole -- were what are called limpets. First appearing around 500 million years ago, these clam like creatures with a cone like shell lived mostly sedentary lives usually stuck to rocks, underneath is a soft body that is already showing ancestral traits of both snails and cephalopods. By the early Ordovician Period, about 470 million years ago, shield limpets had lengthened their shells and developed more tentacles giving rise to the first true cephalopods called Nautiloids, below. The race was on between the arthropods and the cephalopod/mollusks; the bugs and the snails.

Both Nautiloids and arthropods were highly successful and quickly grew to nightmarish sizes over the next fifty-million years. Some eurypterids, a sort of early sea scorpion, reached two meters in length! But during this time cephalopods refined their predatory weaponry. What emerged from the evolutionary arms race were creatures right out of a sci-fi horror show, with shells reaching five meters in length, housing gas chambers that could be used to move up and down like a helicopter, crowned in a tangle of shorter pseudolimbs, and trailing long, muscular arms. Each tentacle was riddled with powerful suckers, each sucker was lined with dozens of serrated teeth and ended in razor sharp hooks. And as if tentacles lined with barbs, teeth, and suckers wasn't enough, many species could probably envenom their victims to boot. The race with the giant bugs was quickly over, and the cephalopods won.

If you could go back 450 million years and take a nice scuba dive off the coast of India, odds are it wouldn't take long for a giant nautiloid to zero in on you. It would come jetting at you out of the ocean blue, arms outstretched for a full ten meters or more, at a healthy 10 miles per hour. The last thing you'd see, before it wrapped you up in a deadly embrace, would be the beak snapping reflexively in anticipation. It would snuggle you up tightly to the central maw with hundreds of hooks and tiny sucker teeth ripping into your flesh so that you couldn't move a muscle, and start lopping off softball sized pieces of you while you were still alive, with a beak that can chop through steel wire. It's no wonder they owned the seas; everything else just lived there.

Things would change in the Devonian Period for the ruthless killer nautiloids, however. The primitive worms from so long ago that had hidden in the mud had been up to their own evolutionary tricks. And while limpets grew into nautiloids, and nautiloids grew into enormous nightmares, those shy worms had developed a stiff sliver of tissue that ran the length of their backs; the first chordates. By 400 million years ago they had evolved into many types of primitive fish, and soon after those fish had put the finishing touches on a brand new weapon called The Jaw. Armed with their new hinged jaws, sharp teeth, agile bodies, large brains, and powerful muscles to operate the system, the first sharks arose and flourished. Some of these sharks got big and mean, mean enough to take on the nautiloids; and they acquired a taste for cephalopod meat.

The nautiloids responded by developing a more tightly coiled shell rather than relying exclusively on a linear one. The reason seems pretty obvious: If you have to carry around a shelter you could squeeze your body volume into, and you had to be maneuverable to avoid being shark bait, would you rather have 30 feet of cast iron stove pipe on your back or a more compact barrel? The coiled shell cephalopods proliferated, their longer, old fashioned cousins declined. These newer cephalopods are called Ammonites and some of them were huge.

Ammonite drawing and a giant ammonite fossil from the Late Devonian ~360 MYA; how'd you like to meet up with the monster that owned that shell? These spiral nautiloids/ammonites left behind numerous, iridescent fossils, some of which have been collected since the days of the Pharaohs

The ammonites were also highly successful. Judging by the fossil evidence they were so numerous at times and places they probably hung suspended in the ocean by the millions. But alas, the K-T Impactor did not care much about ammonites. At the fiery end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, the ammonites along with the dinosaurs disappeared forever. The only living representative of those ancient rulers on the half-shell to survive into our time is a distant relative called simply the nautilus, below.

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Fortunately for the cephalopods a new type of tentacled monster had evolved well before the Jurassic Period. This critter internalized the shell as a bone-like strut, called a rostrum, rather than lugging it around externally. These animals closely resembled Belemnites but were not descended directly from them. These were the first modern squid and cuttlefish. They relied not on a shell, but on speed, agility, power, brains, and an amazing adaptation called chromatophores; pigmented cells throughout their skin which change color. Chromotaphores were probably present to some extent in squid ancestors, but it was the squid who have perfected it to a dazzling degree. In addition to chromatophores, some squid also feature bioluminescent cells as well, endowing them with both color changing ability and rows of pulsating neon light!

In addition to the change in the shell, squid also improved the primitive pinhole eyes of the earlier nautiloids by enclosing the retina in a capsule and placing a lens over it. Not only are squid eyes better designed than nautiloid eyes, they're better designed than ours! In vertebrate/human eyes the optic nerve and retina are wired backwards giving rise to a blind spot and other problems. Not so in the squid eye, they're wired like a camera, with the nerve and blood vessels behind the light sensing retina. And the squid focuses the image by changing the distance between the retina and the lens just like a telescope, giving it a sort of 'zoom' feature!

Some species discarded the shell and the internal bony rostrum altogether and went on to become the first octopi. Octopi today are hands down the most intelligent invertebrate creature to ever roam our planet. It is of course terribly difficult to judge the intellectual capacity of animals so alien to us. Cephalopods communicate with one another using rapid changes in skin color and even in some cases pulses of light! But it seems in some respects at least, the intellect of large octopi may rival the intelligence of rats and dogs.

  Enough of your medieval 'science' you hideous, hairy, mammal! You loathsome humans can't even accept EVOLUTION and you are telling your Interstellar Overlords about 'science'? HAHAHAHA! Now show us some pictures of our kind on your primitive 'computing' device and we may spare your worthless life: IF YOU DARE!

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A bioluminescent squid pulsates with light     Cuttlefish

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Two Serpia squid size eye each other    The deadly Blue-ringed octupus

The incredible Mimic Octopus can change both it's color and body shape to imitate more intimidating creatures. This one here is doing her best to make you think she's a deadly banded sea snake. When that doesn't work she mimics a big flounder and casually swims away.

                           
Giant Squid: These monsters have yet to be photographed alive and are only known from dead specimens brought up by deep sea nets or washed up on beaches. This gal had fresh sperm packets encapsulated within and lots of recent sucker marks indicating she must have had one hell of a torrid sexual escapade prior to dying. She weighed in at 250 kilos (550 lb)! Recent finds indicate that there may be two species of large cephalopod in the deep ocean, the Giant Squid Architeuthis, and the Colossal Squid or Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. Both have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom

Today of course another descendant of those primitive chordate worms now rule the planet as top predator, with our ancient marine enemies serving mostly as sushi. We vertebrates vaulted past the cephalopods, first in intellect and then technology, and now humans stare in morbid fascination at squid and octopi in the large tanks of seafood restaurants, before dining on their cousins. Given the incredible repertoire of cephalopod skills and the size of octopi brains, I'd say we vertebrates are pretty lucky it's not the other way around.

                                        Silence Earthling! Enough bragging about your own miserable species! Now explain why our terrestrial cephalopod sisters have not yet conquered you pitiful furry creatures as is their destiny?!?

Well Kang, unlike you Spacefaring Super Squid from Rigel IV, cephalopods here on earth never hit on two key tricks that might have helped them become technological beings:

1. They didn't colonize land

2. They never developed tool use or tool making

In both cases perhaps they were limited by their own success. They dominated the oceans long before dinosaurs and had no need to explore new eco-niches outside of that medium. And they never had much use for tools, because they've so far evolved whatever technology was needed.

Octopi in particular have big brains, good vision, and needless to say excellent limbs with which to potentially make tools. Can you imagine having a sense of taste in your finger tips and a brain big enough to run ten arms simultaneously? They can change colors, glow in the dark, and employ a variety of unique chemical defenses. So they probably do have the capacity to do very well, and for all we know could have been the top predator of both land and sea, if they could've figure out how to survive and thrive on dry land and/or use and make tools. But the cephalopod drama is not over on earth by any means.

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           Squibbon                                       Megasquid

Maybe one day, after a global catastrophe or two, they'll get that chance. That's what some folks decided anyway in a series on hypothetical future evolution. In that vision, 200 million years in the future, there are no mammals or birds. The sky is populated with air breathing flying-fish and the forests are dominated by tree-dwelling octopi called Squibbon. Their most formidable enemy is the walking Megasquid. A giant monster of the futuristic jungles who preys on the Squibbon. But the megasquid's days are numbered. The Squibbon have developed intelligence and are well on the way to creating a tool making culture. So who knows? Hey, that Megasquid looks kind of like Kodos, eh?

The cephalopods have been here for almost five-hundred million years. They lived through the Permian Extinction, the K-T Impact, ice ages galore, greenhouse catastrophes, and super volcanos which poisoned the air and sea. They're geographically distributed in every ocean and bay, they come in every size from smaller than a marble to the giants of past and present. They breed fast, can eat damn near anything in a pinch, and they're highly mobile. So odds are they're not going to disappear anytime soon, and the future for the cephalopod is probably more wild than we can imagine ... And I for one would welcome my new Cephalopod Overlords.

Good answer HU-MAN! Your mind is superior to the Fat One they call HO-MER-SIMP-SAWM! I will spare your worthless mammalian life; for the time being. Now, disrobe and assume rectal probing position before I change my mind! Buahaha, BUAHAHAHAHAHA!