Scotoplanes

Image credit

Scotoplanes, known more whimsically and pronounceably as the sea pig, is a genus of deep water sea cucumbers that reside on the abyssal plains of the world's oceans. Unlike most sea cucumbers, sea pigs use a set of enlarged tube feet to scuttle about the ocean floor, and prefer walking to swimming. I'm assuming creatures without brains have preferences, which may not strictly speaking be the case. The Wikipedia article on the sea pig is rather terse, but let's be honest, the real reason I'm writing this is as an excuse to post this video, which is one of the best things I've seen on the internet in recent memory:

This is a teachable moment on technical language. A cloaca and an anus are not the same thing, so statements like "the sea pig breathes through its anus" aren't really correct. The narrator makes this distinction one time, then proceeds to completely ignore it during the rest of the video. It's for comedic effect, and I sympathize with that, but it's still not right. Words mean things. An explosion is not the same thing as a fire or a rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD), weight is not the same thing as mass, and a motor is not the same kind of thing as an engine. Playing fast and loose with well-specified language often still gets the point across, but is a dangerous game in the land of science and engineering. More on that later.

Did I really just spend a paragraph complaining (mostly) about why people should be careful about when they use the word "explosion?" Engineering school has ruined me forever. Enjoy learning facts about the sea pig. Any of them, really, it doesn't much matter which one.