Friday 16 January 2009

Some days it's difficult to resist the lure of Conservapedia. I've been browsing the mollusc section. Nothing approaches their entry on slugs for misinformation and entertainment, but they provide some tasty tidbits.

I loves me my whelks ...
Whelk Trivia
  • Whelks (Buccinum undatum) are a shellfood eaten around the world, and you can find them in just about any restaurant.
  • Queen Victoria of England was said to be fond of whelks. Other whelk fans include the singer Madonna and former First Lady Nancy Reagan


Very a-peel-ling
Banana slugs are a variety of mollusk that look like bananas.


Size does matter; spelling not so much
Although the term "giant squid" is often used to refer to any large species of squid, giant squid are actually one specific family of squid, separate from, for example, the even larger Collosal [sic] Squid.


But it's an encylopedia, so it's important to reference evrything ...
While "octopi" is the popularly use plural form of "octopus" and is sometimes listed as such in dictionaries [2], it is incorrect [3], with the strictly accepted plurals being "octopuses" and "octopodes". Scholars working with cephalopods have settled on the usage of "octopuses" as plural for "octopus" in the narrow sense refering to species within the family Octopodidae[4] and "octopods" the plural to refer more broadly to all species within the order Octopoda[5].


... except for the bit about the tree-dwelling cephalopods.
there's no such thing as an arboreal octopus and 'venom' and 'poison' are not the same thing FunGuy 09:23, 26 July 2007 (EDT)


I'll keep reading it, so you don't have to.