Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Trawling the blobosphere

The New York Times looks at sea blobs, especially the blob in Chile last summer. The article goes back over the same territory, that the blobs are most likely the bodies of dead whales (although it doesn't include the description of whale deaths that previous articles had), but it encompasses a lot of different blob sightings, so it's pretty cool.

The blobs were made of almost pure collagen, the fibrous protein found in connective tissue, bone and cartilage. The scientists concluded that it had come not from giant squids or octopuses or any other kind of mysterious invertebrates. Rather, the Bermuda blob arose from a fish or a shark, and the St. Augustine one from a whale.
The Florida sensation, they said, had probably consisted of a huge whale's entire skin.
"With profound sadness at ruining a favorite legend," they wrote in the April 1995 issue of The Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., a distinguished research institution, "we find no basis for the existence of Octopus giganteus."

Link found at Professor Hex, who coins blobologist and, best of all, blobosphere.

1 comment:

Prof. Hex said...

Actually, Blobologist is in the article, but I will humbly take credit for Blobosphere.