Friday, July 30, 2010

Cephalopod Photography: Klaus Stiefel

Next on my (long and growing) list of cephalopod photographers to feature here is Klaus M. Stiefel, a neurobiologist who currently works in Okinawa.  All of the photos in this post were taken by him.  He was cool enough to release them under a creative commons license, so feel free to use them, just don't use them for anything commercial and make sure to give him credit (lots and lots of it.)  You can click through on all of the photos to access them on Flickr, including larger versions (which I always recommend - they make great desktop wallpapers.)  Let's dive right in, shall we?

To start off, a portrait of an adorable cuttlefish of unknown species (if anybody can tell, please post it in the comments - I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I'm very bad at identifying species):

Cuttlefish face

Moving right along, we have these two lovely photos of the flamboyant cuttlefish, Metasepia pfefferi.  Klaus calls this posture a "threat display", although I'm pretty sure it is used both as a defensive behavior and during hunting, especially for shrimp and prawns.  My favorite thing about pictures of M. pfefferi is that they always look so relaxed, just because of the shape of their pupils.

Flamboyant Cuttlefish IV

Flamboyant Cuttlefish III

Last in our illustrious lineup of cuttlefish is an unidentified individual who is expressing its papillae beautifully and showing off its ability to use binocular vision by looking at the camera with (count 'em) two eyes.

Sepia in the Keramas I

You want squid?  We've got squid!  Well, a squid.  This is a juvenile squid (species unknown, though one of the commenters on Flickr suggests that it's a bigfin reef squid, Sepioteuthis lessoniana) floating among the fronds of a sea lily.

Bobtail Squid

Here is an octopus (again, species unknown) expressing a very striking white ring around its eye.  This looks to me like it might be related to the eye-bar body pattern component, which is used during defensive behavior by adult octopuses to obscure the shape of the eye or make it appear larger than it really is.

Octopus

Here's a great shot of some octopus arm suckers, showing various degrees of flexion of the suckers themselves.  I wish I knew the species of octopus that these belonged to.

Octopus arm's suckers

I just love pictures of octopuses peeking out of things!  Here is the obligatory inquisitive-octopus-eyes shot:

Octopus

In this series of photos, Klaus captured a dramatic color change in an octopus.  It looks to me like the octopus tried to camouflage itself, then decided that wasn't going to work and began to hide under the rocks.

Octopus color change 1
Octopus color change 2
Octopus color change 3
Octopus color change 4
Octopus color change 5
Octopus color change 6
Octopus color change 6

 Finally, we'll close with a gorgeous photo of a cephalopod that is too often ignored: the Nautilus.

 Nautilus

 Thanks for reading!

11 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed the photos! Thanks for sharing.

    Jim Winter

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  2. I wrote a paper for my English class on the intelligence of octopus. After reading some articles (including your's), I am so intrigued by the ocutpus and their capabilities. I also watched some video's and it is just breath taking what they can do with their color and texture to blend in. I love to read about the research that is going on, please keep up the research and I will continue reading!
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  3. Amazing shots, it is one of the most amazing an interesting species of the oceans.

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  4. Beautiful marine life. Thanks for sharing such lovely pictures. The cuttlefish looks the cutest. I really enjoyed the pictures! Keep up the good work.

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  7. You know your projects stand out of the herd. There is something special about them. It seems to me all of them are really brilliant! annabel singapore

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  8. I'm the admin of Creature Teacher on Facebook. A group dedicated to animal knowledge and rare species awareness. I'm going to be making a post on there shortly about a specific species of cuttlefish. And Mr. Stiefel had photographed the one picture I am using for the post. He is a great photographer and thanks so much for showcasing these images.

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