• 2 days ago
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Tom "Blowfish" Hird, host of EarthxTV's "Ocean Wonders," discusses all things weird, bright, and beautiful living in the world's oceans.

About Ocean Wonders:
Heavy-metal marine biologist, Tom “the Blowfish” Hird, comes face to face with incredible sea creatures and conducts mind-blowing experiments to reveal the secrets and mysteries of our oceans.
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Transcript
00:00So these are my weird and wonderful creatures from the deep and here we have the humble barnacle
00:06It's one that people know they'll see quite often. But you know, what is it? What is the barnacle?
00:10Okay, cuz it looks well, it looks kind of like a snail like a mollusk, right?
00:15Well, actually that thing in there is a crustacean so it's related to shrimp
00:20Lobsters crabs all that kind of thing
00:22In fact, the barnacle is best described as a shrimp lying on its back with its head glued to the rock
00:28That uses its super hairy arms like there to kick food into its mouth as you can see there
00:35Those are the hairy arms coming out filter feeding getting all that delicious plankton the soup of the sea
00:40Chucking it into its mouth. That's not a barnacle. That was a shiny. Sorry. I'm gonna be using this one. Sorry Randy. Sorry
00:46back on this one now
00:49Fabulous creatures very very successful. You see them all over the rocks, which is good. But um
00:55How how do they get that they're fixed in one place, how do you get more barnacles?
00:59Well, this barnacle here is showing us how because the barnacle happens to have the longest penis to body size in the world
01:08This massive schlong. That's a technical term
01:11Can be used to reach between individual barnacles for a bit of the old house your father and that's a British term
01:18But it's very very useful because of course they can't move to mate
01:22So they have to have that very long prehensile
01:26Member to go and see all its different friends
01:30It's kind of like a swingers party, but nobody moves. It's very good. So
01:37They've given me a TV show, I don't know what they were thinking
01:41They pay me for this nonsense, right?
01:43I'm gonna skip on to another one. That's a barnacle arm. At least I hope it is
01:48No
01:50It's no idea what that is, right? Let's make another one happen
01:54There we go. Okay, the jellyfish. This is a good one. I like jellyfish. So
01:59Probably one of the first organized sort of life on earth before jellyfish
02:04It was just kind of slimes and like single cells
02:07But jellyfish and potentially sponges were the first things that you could recognize as creatures now
02:13Jellyfish may seem very very simple. You know, they certainly are very basic body plan, but it's those
02:19Tentacles that make them so very very cool. So we all know jellyfish can sting right some jellyfish things
02:26Like getting stung by some nettles or a wasp or something
02:31There are other jellyfish that can sting you and kill you in six minutes
02:35All right, don't mess with the jellyfish unless you're a sea turtle unless you're a sea turtle in which case you can buff it
02:42I don't know what this giant murder. Panda is doing orca of their own creatures
02:46They're just like the thugs of the sea
02:48But it that sting is very very cool and it works in a very very simple but effective way
02:54So all across their tentacles, they have thousands of these things called nematocytes
03:00Those are the actual stinging parts of the cells and if I am timing this, right? I
03:07Think I am brilliant. Here we go
03:10Here's a living representation of what happens when something gets stung by a jellyfish. So here I have a van
03:18And this thing here. This is my nematocyst
03:22Okay
03:22So it's a harpoon hidden inside a cell that can fire out in two milliseconds
03:29In fact the pressure inside an individual nematocyst
03:33Here's an individual nematocyst
03:34The pressure in there is the same as a diving cylinder and when they fire you can see they pop out in their
03:41Thousands like that very very cool. So let's see what it looks like
03:45They sent me I had c4. They gave me c4. I mean, I wouldn't have given me this laser pointer
03:52but anyway, so you can see there that's the the cell representation of the nematocyst firing into its prey and
03:59The first thing it does is obviously jellyfish you get stung they're sticky it latches on to you
04:04So it's got that barbed end hooks into its prey, but that's not the end of it. Okay, because okay stuck to something
04:10What do you do then? Well, if you're a jellyfish, you don't have teeth
04:13You need to start digesting your prey and that's when this comes in
04:17So that isn't a silly string that is actually highly venomous
04:21Toxin and the jellyfish starts pumping the toxin into the cell that digests the cell and then
04:28boom
04:29The cell will explode
04:31Okay, how cool is that? Just this is just an excuse for me to show you blowing up a van
04:35We just watch that in slow-mo for the next 10 minutes. I'll be fine
04:39But that's how jellyfish works
04:41You've got to imagine you've got thousands of nematocysts sticking on to thousands of cells and blowing them all up
04:46That is why there are some jellyfish that can kill you in six minutes
04:51boom cop all of that
04:53Guys he's a handsome chap any if you kind of like going for Shrek's or like Lord of the Rings extras, right play
05:02Play you
05:03Molecular beast. Here we go. What have we got now the lobster? I'm big fan of the lobster
05:08Okay, and not by eating them about not seeing them in the ocean
05:11So there they are now
05:13Obviously the first thing we know about lobsters is they've got those big claws and I would like to point out they are blue
05:18Don't believe those lying cartoons. All right, you see the red lobster. No, no. No, that's a restaurant
05:23Lobsters are blue
05:25Now of those two claws, you've got one big massive crushing claw
05:28You can see it there and then one slicing and dicing claw and that means that this bad boy can eat pretty much whatever he wants
05:35He can crack open shells crack open bone with one and he can tear and rend flesh with the other
05:41They're serious job one of these guys easy take your finger off. No problems with that
05:46But of course lobsters like like the rest of us they have the trials and tribulations of life and
05:51Lobsters occasionally have to settle their differences. Maybe they've got particularly nice hole. Maybe they're arguing over who's gonna win the Premier League
05:58I don't know. This is lobster sort of community stuff
06:01I'm not I'm not involved with that. But what I can tell you is that lobsters do fight fair
06:06All right, they don't use their claws when lobsters fight
06:10They know that they're all packing and no one wants to get the face ripped off with one of those big meat cleavers
06:16So when lobsters fight they hold their claws out of the way and proceed to we in each other's faces
06:23Because lobsters excrete they pee from their nose
06:28This is the world's greatest pissing contest
06:32They get their claws out the way and they start jetting urine at each other and it's in that urine that contains a lot of
06:38Chemicals that allow lobsters to figure out who's the strongest who is the toughest?
06:43Very very clever because the claw really is damaging
06:46Now what I've got here is just an example of how the claw actually works
06:50Because yes, there's a lot of power coming down to crush it as you can see here crushing a very soft piece of fruit
06:57Very underwhelming after watching that van explode, but never mind
07:00But you might also have seen in restaurants and stuff if you see the lobsters in there if these claws are so strong
07:06How come they're a little elastic band holds them shut because and you sit here
07:11Most of the muscle in that big meaty claw is designed to close it
07:15It's not designed to open it and that's represented by we've got this red banding here
07:19That's the muscle closing the claw and then the blue banding there is the muscle opening it. So it's all
07:25Involved in doing this and not in doing that hence why you can keep them closed with just a tiny elastic band
07:34Seeing what's next. I've no idea. What's next play?
07:38Way there we go. What is next? Oh the mantis shrimp. This is a good one. I like this. So this
07:45Technicolored murder machine fabulous animal not very big on the about sort of so kind of size tiny little creature. Very very clever. So
07:53Let's talk about those eyes those eyes right each individual. Eye has
07:59Trinocular vision, right both our eyes combined give us binocular vision, but just one of their eyes has
08:07Trinocular vision. All right, they can see colors. We can't even imagine
08:11We have three color sensitive cells in our eyes. They have upwards of 30
08:17All right, so they can see things we can't even imagine
08:19They can also see UV light infrared light and all these kind of polarized lights
08:25In fact, they have a very special secret way of communicating you might notice that on the front of them
08:31They've got these wonderful flappy paddles again another technical term. They are you can see in there
08:36They will actually use those panels to send signals to each other by reflecting polarized light
08:41The only other mantis shrimp can see but this this is the real deal here
08:45Well, this is why the mantis shrimps on my real that punching power. Boom. Look at that
08:52That's not just knocked his claw off look at that amazing they can punch
08:56So very hard that they will kill most animals outright
09:01Okay, they have the same punching force as a 0.22 caliber bullet
09:07They can punch so hard that they split water when they punch and you can't split water
09:14Physics doesn't like that. So as the water tears apart and then forms back together
09:19It actually pumps out a tiny little lightning bolt so these guys can punch lightning which is amazing
09:26The way they do it is very very simple. They don't have a huge massive muscle like the lobster
09:30They just use a bit of physics. So you see here
09:33This is a representation of the claw and we've got this area up here known as the saddle and it's like a bow and arrow
09:39You've got all the tension which is held weirdly in the shell. Okay, so the shell
09:45Compresses and by compressing the shell it holds a lot of power and then when it lets go it fires that claw forwards
09:52I don't know why that's footage of me playing a guitar. That was really random
09:56Okay, but back to reality. Apparently, here we go
09:59So when it fires forwards it fires forwards with a huge amount of power allowing it to punch through many a thing and this was an
10:06excuse apparently for me to fire a cannon
10:09They pay me to do this. They actually pay me to do this
10:13So here we see a cannon punching its way through some
10:16hardened blocks of old oak timber that stuff was as hard as steel and this is just trying to give you a
10:23Representation of what happens if we scaled up the mantis shrimp, so it wasn't this big punching crabs, but it was this big punching us
10:31Now I wish you could actually sort of you know
10:33Get the sound effects and this and all that jazz but you can see huge amount of power going on here
10:37And even then this doesn't cover just how powerful the mantis shrimp is put it this way if you had the same
10:45Acceleration in your arm to throw that punch. You'd be able to throw a tennis ball to the moon. All right
10:51Seriously cool critter blowing the top off there and smacking that crab. I feel sorry for the crab
10:58Right. Okay. That is the end of my little slide stuff, but not the end of the nonsense that continues
11:04so a couple of other weird creatures for you
11:07There is an animal in the deep sea called the hairy anglerfish, right?
11:12Now when science first found these things, they only used to find these big fat beautiful fish
11:18Covered in hair with these great big lumps hanging off them. It sounds like me basically
11:23And they're like, well, you know, what is this is the female we know this is the female
11:28Where's the male? Where's the male for this thing?
11:30So we the science look for ages trying to find the male anglerfish couldn't find it couldn't find it
11:35Until science realized that
11:38What they got was both male and female anglerfish and they're not hermaphrodites. Well, I eat male and female at the same time
11:47Anglerfish while the female is this big beautiful creature that goes around feeding. However, she wants
11:53The male is a tiny weedy little thing with a huge nose and all he does in his brief life is
12:00Swim through the ocean
12:02Sniffing out for a female the minute he gets the scent of a female he swims right up to her without saying hello
12:09Hi, how you doing without getting a phone number or even following her on Facebook or anything like that?
12:13he swims right up to her and bites her right on the bum and
12:17Then he doesn't let go
12:19He then loses his internal organs. He starts to suck her blood through his body
12:26Hello Maggie
12:28She's given me the five-minute warning, but that means nothing to me
12:34He starts to suck her blood through his body and he physically becomes an extension of her
12:40So these lumpy bits that we were finding on female anglers were the male anglers
12:45They essentially just become hanging pods of testes that the female can use at any time to get pregnant. That's pretty weird
12:53I'm glad we don't do that
12:55You know young gentleman today if you're you know ever courting a woman
12:59Make sure you get the phone number off her first. Don't just bite her on the ass. She won't be in for that
13:04She might be in for that in which case I don't know maybe run that could be dangerous
13:08So with my so with my last five minutes, I know so many disgusting things about the ocean
13:14With my last five minutes. I talked about it. Yeah yesterday. I'll talk about it again. I love it
13:19We're gonna talk about the hagfish also known as the sly meal, okay
13:24Now this thing it's like a long tube and it's it's a fairly sort of boring fish to look at
13:30It's very very ancient fish so ancient. In fact that it doesn't have a jaw like we do
13:35Okay, because our jaw is evolved from fish
13:38Its jaw is actually like two cheese graters that go together like that
13:43We know this fish from watching it scavenge on like whale carcasses where it gets hold of a piece of flesh and then because it's
13:50so slimy and so
13:53Pliant it can just pull off chunks of flesh by tying its body into a knot and pushing the knot
13:59Down onto the prey or onto the carcass and we thought wow, this is you know, this is pretty cool
14:04These things are scavengers. That's great. But then deep ocean
14:07We know more about the surface of Mars than we do our deep ocean
14:11All right, and so only recently we found out that they're not just scavengers
14:15They're hunters because the hagfish has the other name of the slime eel
14:20And that's because they are the leading exponent in snot
14:24They can make make snot very very quickly and slime eel mucus is very very sticky
14:31They use it as defense if something comes along tries to eat them
14:34They can jet snot into the mouth of a predator clogging its gills and they can make an escape fine. Cool. No worries
14:41They use this snot not just for defense
14:43but during their predatory actions because a deep-sea robot caught one swimming along the bottom and
14:50In front of it a fish saw it coming away. Oh and went straight into the sand
14:54All right hidden the sand and the hagfish went straight for it
14:58The hagfish went into the burrow with with this fish
15:02Gripped it by its tail
15:03So the fish couldn't escape and then put its slime glands into overdrive and filled the burrow up with snot
15:11Drowning its victim in mucus. Okay basting it in slime, right?
15:16So however, you might feel about the catering here today be glad it's not done by hagfish
15:21All right, because that would be pretty grim and and I need to turn around. Okay. Yep
15:27Is that the simp the turning around symbol?
15:30Yeah
15:31Yep. Nope. Yep. Brilliant. I've got a watch of you
15:35You don't not today. We're doing the chicken dance now, are we I'm just annoying people now. It's fun, isn't it?
15:41I was filling in a slot. I've done my best and now I'm done. Thank you very much. Ladies gentlemen

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