May 10, 2012 - I Have My Eye on You
 

http://cellar.org/2012/whatisit.jpg

Take a guess, go on, tell us what you think it is . . .

(No hint in the image name this time! ;))

The answer lies here.

A huge colony of cyamids, going for a ride.

It's Count Dracorca.

A very interesting reef island with a massive sinkhole in its lagoon?

A glory hole in the Whaling Wall?

I thought it was a giant octopus

Yeah, I'm guessing a reef somewhere.

Octopussy!

A closeup of the bread that's been in my refrigerator for 4 months.

The Breads Have Eyes!

So it was pretty obvious to me that it was a detail of a whale, but I thought it was a humpback whale, which was wrong.

I wondered about those white spots. I always assumed they were just barnacles. It's true there are some barnacles in there, but mostly the white stuff is "whale lice," or cyamids.

If you look just below the eye, you can see some of the individual lice clearly and see their legs. Creepy.

The cyamids live on tough patches of whale skin, like callouses, called callosities. The cyamids just live in the crevasses of the callosities and give them a white color. They are basically little miniature crabs that hook onto the skin and eat it. Poor whales.
Attachment 38707

Thanks for the rousing bout of piloerection!

I like my reef island better.

Do not flush air tanks
Crabs can scuba dive

But isn't it dead skin? Like those little fish that eat on people's feet in the spas in Japan.