Stumbled upon the Glass Jellyfish, a photo album over at PangalacticTrading.com. They are pictures of the works of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. It reminds me a of the delicate glass rotifer sculptures at the American Museum of Natural History.
The second half of the 19th century was a time of great scientific discovery. New museums were being built throughout the world and many existing private museums were opening to the public. New galleries were designed to display the expanding array of known living plants and animals. For many groups of animals this was easily done…But what about soft bodied animals such as jellyfish and sea anemones? Examples of these animals could be pickled in spirit to preserve them, but this in no way reflected their extraordinary appearance in life. Their colours quickly faded and their shapes became distorted as the tissues shrank. Papier-mâché and wax models could not capture their translucence and transparency. Leopold Blaschka, a brilliant glassworker and amateur naturalist, devised a solution to this problem - vividly recreating these life forms modelling them in glass.
![SeaScope Aquatic Activities from LaMER [200x150, 12K]](http://www.cephalopodcast.com/img/pic/pic_061226a.gif)
Continuing with our tour of supplementary material made available by your local Sea Grant College Program, we turn to Louisana’s Marine Education Resource Center. Their SeaScope Aquatic Activities section offers the following PDF handouts for free:
SeaScope activity folios are written by teachers for teachers. They use the video microscope nicknamed “Scope-On-A-Rope” (SOAR) in science lessons on aquatic organisms.
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An interactive virtual squid dissection demo is available from another site, Froguts.com.
In May, 2001, 5th graders at Lunalilo School dissected a squid and posted a video documentary of their experience.
![Link to Amazon [150x200, 12K]](http://www.cephalopodcast.com/img/pic/pic_061220a.gif)
A couple months ago, I picked up a reprint of The Whale Book
by Adriaen Coenen (1585) at my local indie bookstore.
In the late 16th century, Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen scanned the beaches of Holland for interesting marine material and produced several illustrated manuscripts of his findings, covering anything from the commonplace herring to the exotic moonfish. Coenen’s work contains the earliest European pictures of whales, naïve but easily identifiable, which makes it a rare visual and textual source for the natural world of his day.
![Link to Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) [150x200, 12K]](http://www.cephalopodcast.com/img/pic/pic_061220b_kb.gif)
You can thumb through a detailed, Flash-based facsimile over at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (click on Blader in het Visboek). Reading the commentary in the reprint, it’s interesting seeing the transition from medieval murk to rational enlightenment. Today technology makes the oceans less opaque to exploration, but back then most knowledge came from whatever rot washed up on the shore. Consequently, it was easy to get a distorted vision of what many sea creatures really looked like.
![Link to National Diet Library [200x150, 12K]](http://www.cephalopodcast.com/img/pic/pic_061220c_ndl.gif)
It is also interesting to compare the European naturalist’s depictions to those from Japan. Over at Pink Tentacle, they link to the works of Kurimoto Tanshuu (1756 - 1834), who sketched wildlife during the Edo period. Japan’s National Diet Library makes hi-res scans available of these original works.
Coenen and Tanshuu worked some 200 hundred years apart and both seemed to take some liberty with their depictions. But Tanshuu’s skill and level of detail is compelling. Be sure to check out the comments on Metafilter for some translations of the Diet website.
The Delaware SeaGrant program produces short radio announcements on ocean topics called SeaTalk. They have material going back to 1998 in wav and mp3 formats. Wouldn’t take much to syndicate this stuff and turn it into podcasts. How about it Delaware? Don’t keep your content bottled up. Let me know if you need help. 
As a public service in conjunction with more than 35 area radio stations, Delaware Sea Grant produces SeaTalk, a bimonthly series of 30- and 60-second radio announcements on subjects ranging from sharks to sand dunes to current marine science research. The series has been in production at the University of Delaware for more than 30 years.
SeaTalk Sampler
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