Slashdot Mirror
Bizarre Deep Sea Fish Dredged Up By Tsunami
spankfish writes "The following page features numerous great pictures of bizarre and creepy deep-sea creatures which have been dredged up by the recent tsunami and presented by normal divers. Fascinating stuff! The page is in Russian, but it's all about the pictures." Update: 01/15 18:02 GMT by J : As those of you who read the comments have already realized, this is an urban legend.
They may be weird fish, but they sure didn't wash up on shore from the tsunami! This story just isn't true.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/tsunami/creature.asp
One day we WILL defeat the Goa'uld
http://www.sandstorming.com
Sweet! That one crab-like thing is awesome.
I hereby name it the Crabtacular spikeouchamus, or "Spiky Ubercrab"!
I never had a favorite animal before, but now I do. It's red, hard, and just plain intimidating. Almost like a Sauron of the seas. Sweeeeeeet!
Hey, it's Nemo! Boy did he let himself go...
Michael, take a day off, you apparently need it.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I imagine that any story which is comprised mainly of pictures that is linked to by slashdot is bound to be brought to its knees before it knew what hit it.
So I've decided to describe the oddities for the slashdotters with active imaginations! Plus I need to work off some caffiene before I hit the sack.
(1) A pallid creature of diminutive size which is characterized by a body shaped like the blade of a pocket knife. The edges of the body form a fin which bears remarkable similarity to a feather. The GI tract is visible as a dark tunnel connecting the throat area and leading halfway down its body to where what appears to be a tiny foot is attached! The foot may actually be an anus, but I'm no biologist and I don't read cyrillic.
(2) This photo shows two beasties in a half meter wide container. The first is a dark, eel-looking fellow with a beaty eye that is glazed over in a sort of post-mortem or thickly armored haze. It is shaped like a bottle rocket -- the back is long , cylindrical, and thin and it has a cylindrical gut of larger diameter attached to the back. His mouth is open a little but no teeth show.
The other fellow is a white squid which has red highlights on its body. The red is probably a result of its blood and viscera being partially drained into its container, but it is difficult to tell from the picture. It looks like a giant, man eating squid from the movies, except it is not giant.
(3) This picture shows a fish held in the hands of a proud seaman. The fish is probably 20 pounds heavy. It is dark like a bottom feeder and has a menacing look about it. The rear half of the animal has a fin on top that looks like an inch tall mohawk. An inch or two without a mohawk separates the rear fin from a threatening dorsal fin. The front of the dorsal fin is shaped like the fang of a snake. It is curved back from vertical, thin, and looks like it could inject a deadly poison (probably doesn't though). He has a large eye which glows an eerie yellow color, probably due to the camera's flash. The mouth is not very clear. To add to this fish's badass appearence, it looks like it has won several knife fights and thick scars crease its body.
(4) This one is ugly. It is in the same type of container as described in picture (2). I imagine that it was once just a very fat fish made of pancake mix, and one day it was dropped on the skillet that is the ocean floor. It is smooshed vertically and resembles "blinky" from the classic Simpson's episode. However, instead of the warm yellow tint of our favorite family, this fish has a mixture of red, brown, and white tints on its body and its face is white like a brie cheese. Come to think of it, its face looks like Marlon Brando. Creepy indeed.
(5) This critter is a sight to behold! It looks like an criptocletus dinosaur on a smaller scale. It has hand and feet fins that look oars. But the best thing about this animal is that it has a beak. It reminds me of an elongated duckbill platypus' beak, except that it is made of flesh instead of a hardened material. Its eye is black and big. I have relatives who eat fish eyes and I'm sure that it would be a wonderful treat for them.
OK, thats all I can handle for now. I hope this helps paint the picture.
Otherwise I have to say... PwN3D
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I thought I had seen these images before.
Sure enough, I had. From snopes we get the explanation:
they are genuine images of some rather strange deep-sea creatures, these photographs have nothing to do with the Indian Ocean tsunami. They date from mid-2003 and were taken as part of the NORFANZ voyage, a joint Australian-New Zealand research expedition conducted in May-June 2003 to explore deep sea habitats and biodiversity in the Tasman Sea. These photographs can be viewed on Australia's National Oceans Office web site.
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Pun intended. Agreed, it's a hoax. Just like with a wave in a pipe, what you push in on one side does not come out at the other side. A wave travels a long way but the material in the pipe just shifts a little bit. And the basic model of a tsunami is just water bungeeing to and fro a bit and ending up where it started. No body of water is displaced very far.
But if you think of general fluid dynamics, it is possible that a relatively small body of water travels a long way(many miles, not many thousands of miles). It's plausible that sea creatures surface after such an earthquake. They would surface in the middle of the ocean. And then there's sea currents.
Claim: Slashdot articles are written by an infinite number of monkeys.
Status: False
Example: This article, and many, many, many others.
Origins: It seems that many people consider that a popular source of information must, by its very nature, be reliable. "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is a common argument in support of this theory. But as can be seen with a cursory glance at the Slashdot "news" site, it just ain't so.
This dichotomy has led many people to assume that the so-called "editors" of Slashdot are nothing more than an infinite number of monkeys, but a little logic will demonstrate why this is also unlikely:
- An infinite number of monkeys can be expected to produce the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had talent, integrity and an instinctive grasp of narrative and logic. Whoever is writing Slashdot articles shows none of these skills. Advantage: Monkeys.
- Despite all this, Shakespeare's spelling was appalling. He even misspelled his own name! While the spelling abilities of Slashdot editors are certainly not up to the standard one would expect for one's household pets or pond algae, they're not as bad as ol' Will. Advantage: Slashdot.
However, the telling point is this: Monkeys are not aquatic. Thus, they have no interest in penguins. Slashdot editors, on the other hand, can think of little else. It seems far more likely that the Slashdot editors are an infinite number of penguins; the penguin's flippers are slightly more suited to keyboards than the monkeys hands which, despite having agile fingers, lack the opposable thumb essential to the operation of the space bar.It's certainly easy to see how this urban legend got started, but as usual, a little logic goes a long way.
Barbara "anyway monkeys are way too bright" Spoofelson
I have discovered a truly remarkable