It does seem vaguely odd to put this here on this site, because, well, this isn’t Octopus Overlords. But, this site was started by people that passed through those halls, and to a man we understand the threat that we face from the tentacled denizens of the watery deep. Our species has not been idle. Hopefully our nefarious plans won’t backfire…

According to the linked CNN Science Blog, we are finding that we’ve contaminated most of the ocean with our chemical wastes. Awesome.

Cephalopods include octopods, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses. The toxic chemicals that Vecchione and colleagues from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found are a rogues gallery of scary initials: PCBs, TBTs, BDEs, and DDT* among them. Scientists classify all of them as POPs, or persistent organic pollutants. It means they don’t break down, and stay in the environment… pretty much forever.

I’ll bet that the nautiluses think that we forgot about them. Wrong. We’ve cleverly infected you with fire retardant chemicals. Actually, wait a minute…

It’s not yet clear what level of these chemicals could harm or kill these deep sea creatures.

Forget that. It’s not clear to this concerned citizen that these creatures haven’t spent decades observing us and our methods of war, and are taking preemptive steps to neutralize us by integrating fire protection into their DNA. Hopefully someone is looking into this.

Even more disturbing…

“They’re weird. The environment is alien. It is so different from what we are used to, I find it personally fascinating,” said Vecchione.

Collaborator.

I offer the following, for no reason other than to upset Mike:

Last 5 posts by Brian

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