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Banvivirie β Spirula
by-nd
Published: 2013-08-08 03:05:36 +0000 UTC; Views: 1978; Favourites: 66; Downloads: 0
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Description
Spirula spirula aka ram's horn squid. Probably my favorite cephalopod. A disappointing number of pictures available to reference, considering it has an important evolutionary relic - an internal spiral shell. It also has a yellowish-green photophore at the end of its mantle and a vertical-oriented swimming style. The juveniles are able to withdraw their head and arms entirely into their mantle when startled. The adult is not much bigger than your thumb, and its shell is found on beaches all over the world.Related content
Comments: 20
It was filmed recently the first time. It looks like a squid burrito
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This is fantastic. I agree with you that these are absolutely fascinating cephalopods. May I ask what sort of references you used for this one?Β
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As I had bemoaned with another artist, nearly all photographs of deep sea life are of either preserved or extremely stressed/dying individuals. So I referenced the proportions of multiple photographs along with the descriptions and my knowledge of living cephalopods and used them to make my own pose. I hope that makes sense.
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Ah, yes. Thank you, it makes sense now.
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Great drawing! That's an interesting pick for favorite cephalopod species; mine would either be Architeuthis dux (which are just plain awesome, even if Mesonychus hamiltoni are bigger) or Thaumoctopus mimicus (the mimic octopus). But yeah, spirulids are fascinating for their place in coleoid evolution.
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Very interesting. I have never heard about this animal even though I have read about a ton of evolution books.
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That's too bad! 
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You learn something new every day! Β I had never seen, much less heard of a Ram's Horn Squid. This one is a little cutie though!
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They're quite interesting, more people should know of them.
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Neat! Β I didn't know about the photophore. Β
You're right-- it is rather weird that there aren't more references pictures of intact animals. Β Especially considering it's position in the evolutionary continuum from cephalopods with shells to those without.
This looks slightly different from your usual style. was this done with colored pencils or pastels? Β
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Nope, same technique as usual, except for lately I've been coloring the linework as well as the whites. Maybe it just looks like poo because I turned it out in less than a day. (In between assignments, "I want to draw what I want!")
I know, and even the pictures they do have it's like you can't tell if they're dead or just really really stressed out, and you can tell the technical illustrations were from preserved individuals. I'd like to avoid drawing stress/I'm dying colors, but it's a common problem with restoring deep sea life.
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Yeah, I know. Β I had a hard time getting good reference pictures when I did those anglerfish drawings a while ago. Β Every good anglerfish picture is of a shriveled, bleached, badly-damaged specimen that they dragged out of a pickle jar and threw into a metal pan. Β I had to use other artists' reconstruction drawings from Theodore Pietsch's Oceanic Anglerfish textbook for most of them-- which I'm a bit embarrassed about, because it's really, really obvious if you compare my drawings to the ones in the book Β Β
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holy crap, that level of detail is amazing
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Adorable! You did a great job and that's a bummer that there are not many references on such an interesting creature.
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