A beloved octopus is entering the last stage of her life in Long Beach,and will spend the remainder of her days caring for eggs that will never hatch.
News of the approaching demise of Ghost — a giant Pacific octopus who has called the Aquarium of the Pacific home for more than a year — prompted an outpouring of sadness on the aquarium’s social media accounts.
The last phase of an octopus’ life cycle is known as senescence. For males, it occurs after mating. For a female, like Ghost, the phase includes sitting on her eggs for six to seven months and a short period of time after they hatch.
Ghost most recently laid unfertilized eggs because she did not have a mate.
“Though senescence is part of the natural life cycle of a female octopus, it is still a sad time for us, especially for those who formed a bond with her as they care for her each day,” said Nate Jaros, the aquarium’s vice president of animal care.
“It has been our custom to announce the senescence of our giant Pacific octopuses, and we have received passionate responses since we know people care about these animals as much as we do.”
This species of octopus reproduces toward the end of life, when a female chooses a large male to mate with, according to the Ocean Conservancy. The giant Pacific octopus can lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time.
“One of the decisions that we have carefully made to support their well-being is to not pair these octopuses since they can be very aggressive and even lethal to each other,” Jaros said.
During senescence, Ghost will wholly devote herself to caring for the eggs — ultimately neglecting to tend to her own basic needs, aquarium officials said.
“The octopus behaves the same way whether or not the eggs are fertile, and female octopus senescing while caring for unfertile eggs is a situation that also naturally occurs in the wild,” Jaros said.
Her duties include keeping them clean and free from fungi, bacteria and algae. But Ghost could experience symptoms such as retraction of skin around the eyes and uncoordinated movement, as well as develop white nonhealing body lesions, according to a report published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science.
A giant Pacific octopus will live an average of four to five years in the wild. Ghost’s exact age is unknown, but based on her weight and size “we can approximate she is in that age range,” the aquarium said.
“She is a wonderful octopus and has made an eight-armed impression on all of our hearts,” the aquarium posted on social media. “In the coming days, she will be moved behind the scenes for the remainder of her life.”
Ghost arrived at the Aquarium of the Pacific in May 2024 from a “carefully vetted collector using humane and sustainable collection practices,” Jaros said.
Ever since, the octopus has been cared for with hand-prepared restaurant-quality seafood, curated activities and habitats, and state-of-the-art veterinary care, he said.
Giant Pacific octopuses inhabit the waters of their namesake ocean from Southern California to Alaska.
Matt is joined by Justine Bateman—writer, director, producer, and SAG-AFTRA negotiation committee consultant on the use of AI—to check in on the latest developments on AI in entertainment. They discuss Lionsgate’s new deal with AI company Runway to make movies and shows more efficiently, Meta’s new deal with celebrities to voice a new AI chatbot, and whether other studios will follow suit (02:24). Matt finishes the show with two opening weekend box office predictions for Megalopolis and the animated film The Wild Robot (26:03).
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Rosa, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s oldest sea otter and one of its social media stars, died Wednesday, the aquarium said in a statement.
The southern sea otter, 24, had served as a surrogate mother for 15 otters, the most in the aquarium’s history. She outlived the life expectancy for her species in the wild, which is typically 15 to 20 years, according to a post by the aquarium on Facebook.
Rosa was known for her blond head and “her signature head-all-the-way-back swimming style,” the aquarium wrote.
“Rosa was one of our most playful sea otters, and even at 24 years old, she would still be seen frolicking and wrestling with the younger otters when she instigated it,” said Melanie Oerter, curator of mammals.
“Rosa was usually found sleeping against the window while on exhibit with her chin tucked tight into her chest and her tail swishing back and forth,” she said.
She first arrived as a “five-pound, four-week-old pup after being stranded as an orphan in September 1999,” and was released into the wild for several years, according to a page about Rosa on the aquarium’s website. She returned to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2002 after experts determined that she had become too accustomed to humans and was not suited for life in the wild.
In the past several weeks, Rosa’s health deteriorated, and experts at the aquarium decided to euthanize her. “She passed away peacefully, surrounded by her caretakers,” according to the aquarium’s post.
In the post, the aquarium called Rosa a “charismatic ambassador for her threatened species” who played “a leading role in the story of sea otter recovery from near-extinction during the fur trade.”
An elephant at the Los Angeles Zoo died this week, the second in about a year and just days before a vigil is set to be held by animal activists at the zoo to mourn elephants who have died in captivity.
Shaunzi, a 53-year-old female Asian elephant, was euthanized early Wednesday morning, according to zoo officials.
Around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Shaunzi was seen lying down in the exhibit she shared with the zoo’s other female elephant, Tina, and appeared unable to get up. Zoo veterinarians and care staff evaluated her condition, but efforts to help her were unsuccessful. She was sedated and subsequently put down.
“The decision to euthanize Shaunzi was a consensus decision made by her care team based on several factors including prognosis and welfare,” zoo officials said in an email. “These factors include her age, past medical history, her inability to right herself with supportive efforts to raise her” and other concerns.
“As a result, it was deemed the best for her welfare to let her go,” the statement concluded.
Shaunzi is the second L.A. Zoo elephant to die in about a year after Jewel, a 61-year-old female, was euthanized in January 2023 due to what zoo officials said was her declining quality of life. Asian elephants typically have a lifespan of 60 to 70 years in the wild, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
The L.A. Zoo has two Asian elephants remaining: Tina, 58, who arrived at the zoo in 2010, and Billy, a 39-year-old male who has been at the zoo since 1989.
Shaunzi was born in 1970 in Thailand, where she lived for about a year before she was captured and used in circus work in the United States. In 1983, she was given to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where she lived before being transferred to the L.A. Zoo in 2017.
“Shaunzi lived a full life and was an ambassador for her species,” the zoo said in a statement on her passing. “She helped Angelenos learn about her wild counterparts and the challenges they face in their native range.”
Shaunzi’s death comes days before a group of animal welfare activists are set to hold the annual International Candlelight Vigil for Elephants outside the L.A. Zoo. The event is meant to honor the elephants who died in captivity over the last year at zoos and sanctuaries around the world, as well as highlight the host of problems they face compared with elephants in the wild, including medical issues such as arthritis and the bone infection osteomyelitis.
“The lack of space alone is extremely cruel, because their brains and their bodies are meant for walking huge distances,” said Courtney Scott, an elephant consultant for In Defense of Animals, one of the groups behind the event.
The vigil is set to take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Saturday outside the Los Angeles Zoo, at 5333 Zoo Drive. Zoo officials said they were aware of the event but declined to comment further.
Movies inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing are often so oppressive that they can be exhausting. Lovecraft’s most central theme (apart from the virulent racism and all) was the idea that we live in a howling, empty void — a cosmos that’s indifferent to humanity at absolute best, and so inimical at worst that even a glimpse at the true horrors of the universe would drive most people insane.
And yet a handful of filmmakers have found the wry humor in Lovecraft’s stories — sometimes for satiricalpurposes, but sometimes without losing the sense of cosmic horror at the heart of his work. Chief among the Lovecraft horror-comedy directors is Stuart Gordon, whose Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon all lend a certain amount of goofiness to Lovecraftian horror. With the gleefully gory new movie Suitable Flesh, Mayhem and Knights of Badassdom director Joe Lynch is openly operating in Stuart Gordon mode. He has the best assistance possible: screenwriter Dennis Paoli, who wrote all three of those Gordon films, and is in his element here, loosely adapting Lovecraft’s 1937 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.”
It’d be easy for impatient streamers who’ve never seen From Beyond in particular to miss the tone Lynch and Paoli are going for with Suitable Flesh. They might turn it off early, thinking it looks too cheap, flat, and glossy to feel convincing, that the acting is too broad, or that the emotions on display feel too fervent. Those are all no-nos in an era of oppressively realistic horror settings. But early quitters will miss out; by the time Suitable Flesh hits its peak and fully reveals its creators’ intentions, it’s a wild bacchanalia of violence, over-the-top humor, and authentic cosmic terror.
Photo: RLJE Films/Shudder
Heather Graham stars as Elizabeth Derby, a psychiatrist navigating the usual ailment of psychiatrists in horror movies. Faced with events the average horror movie character would quickly accept as supernatural, if only to move the story forward, Elizabeth keeps looking for rational psychological explanations. And even when she starts to accept that she can’t rationally explain the things she’s experiencing, her colleagues keep trying to pathologize her, slapping reductive scientific labels on every earth-shattering event she experiences. (See also: Rose Cotter in Smile, a much less funny, much less Lovecraftian horror movie that’d still make for a perfect double bill with Suitable Flesh.)
Elizabeth’s latest patient, Asa (Judah Lewis), is an emotionally ragged young man who’s frantic to get someone to listen to him, even if most of what he’s saying doesn’t make sense. His attempts to explain his anxieties are woefully unclear: When he talks about his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), trying to take his body, he could be talking about anything from sexual molestation to paranoid schizophrenic delusion. Elizabeth initially assumes the latter, especially after seeing Asa undergo a surprisingly violent process that winds up with him adopting a completely different personality. She immediately decides he’s suffering from dissociative identity disorder — which in no way limits her completely inappropriate attraction to him.
What follows between them starts out as half body-snatcher horror, half ludicrous erotic thriller, complete with a panting Cinemax-era softcore sex scene that’s a little too ridiculous even for something openly meant as satire. But the balance shifts sharply toward the body-snatcher end when Ephraim decides he wouldn’t mind claiming Elizabeth’s body in multiple ways. When Elizabeth finds out that Asa’s father really can use occult powers to force body swaps — the first few of them temporary, leading up to a permanent one — she only has a few chances to stop him before she ends up trapped in someone else’s far-less-suitable flesh.
Suitable Flesh is an intensely messy movie. It moves breathlessly from solidly plotted psychological thriller to almost Army of Darkness levels of slapstick violence — including a scene involving a van’s backup camera that’s a must-see for every true fan of grisly horror movie effects. Its broadest structure is classic horror, as Elizabeth tries to overcome her own doubts about what she’s experiencing, then tries to convince other people that she isn’t just having a psychotic break. And the entire time, she’s facing a confident, competent foe who knows far more than she does, and is almost always three steps ahead of her. (Purely in terms of plotting, this film would also make a solid double feature with the original Nightmare on Elm Street.) But on a scene-for-scene basis, it’s all over the place tonally, as Lynch and Paoli keep shifting their intentions.
Photo: RLJE Films/Everett Collection
Suitable Flesh is a “yes, and” movie that just keeps taking on new baggage. It’s a cosmic horror movie that respects the intentions and anxieties in Lovecraft’s “Thing on the Doorstep.” It’s a satire of that classic age of steamy potboiler erotic dramas, at least for a few scenes. It’s a cat-and-mouse thriller between two unmatched adversaries. It’s a giddy chase movie that pushes its physical confrontations far enough that even dedicated gorehounds may feel like they’re watching the horror-movie equivalent of Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes in The Simpsons. And it’s an occult mystery with a little ’80s throwback style and a little for-the-fandom nodding to Lovecraft references. (“Filmed in Cthuluscope,” a label on the film proudly declares.)
It’s a lot to take in, and it doesn’t always work together, the way a more tonally consistent and coherent movie would. The shifts don’t always serve Graham well, either — it’s sometimes hard to buy her as the same character from scene to scene, because those scenes put her in such different mental and emotional places, some of which she’s better equipped for as an actor than others.
All of that stops mattering by the final climax, which locks in on that “serious situation, slightly silly execution” that serves Re-Animator and From Beyond so well. For a movie with such a cluttered, kitchen-sink ramp-up, Suitable Flesh charges to a memorable conclusion that’s perfect for celebratory group viewing, whether at the local multiplex with other die-hard horror fans seeking a seasonal thrill, or at home with a group of friends and a stack of Stuart Gordon DVDs as follow-up.
Lynch and Paoli are openly aiming this one at audiences who love Lovecraft-derived work, but don’t take him so seriously that they need to come away from every Lovecraft movie feeling depressed and oppressed. And they’re purposefully pouring this one out for every Stuart Gordon fan who worried no one else would ever make movies quite like he did. His legacy is in good hands.
Suitable Flesh is in theaters and is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Vudu, and other digital platforms.
The cause of death for “Wild ’N Out” star Jacky Oh has officially been disclosed.
The late actor had established herself as a popular talent on BET’s rap battle show but died suddenly at 32 on May 31. The Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner has now completed an autopsy report that gives mourning friends, fans and relatives some answers.
The document obtained by the Los Angeles Times and multiple other outlets Friday revealed Jacky Oh, whose real name was Jacklyn Smith, died accidentally as a result of complications from cosmetic surgery from “gluteal augmentation” in Miami one day earlier.
The popular “BBL,” or Brazilian butt lift, procedure of liposuction and fat transfer from one area of the body to the buttocks concluded without complication, according to the report.
The autopsy showed Jacky Oh was given several post-surgery medications — ciprofloxacin, oxycodone and ondansetron for potential infection, pain and nausea, respectively.
On May 31, a nurse advised her to stop the ondansetron and take ibuprofen for a headache that she said was worsening. She “began to feel like her head was burning” and had “difficulty speaking,” according to the report, prompting Jacky Oh’s aunt, who had traveled to Miami with her, to call 911.
Jacky Oh was found unresponsive in her hotel room when emergency services arrived. She was pronounced dead at Mercy Hospital. The autopsy revealed she had swelling in her brain as well as bleeding of the skin in the torso area when she died.
Jacky Oh is survived by D.C. Young Fly, her former “Wild ’N Out” co-star, and their three children.
Jacky Oh had three children with her former partner, D.C. Young Fly (left).
Paras Griffin via Getty Images
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Jacklyn Smith, known to the world as Jacky Oh, a talented Wild ’N Out family member whose impact will be forever treasured and missed,” BET Media Group said in an Instagram statement at the time.
Jacky Oh and Young Fly began dating in 2015 and had their first child in 2017. She told DJ Smallz Eyes in an interview at the time that she felt pressure to “snap back” after giving birth, and recalled looking in the mirror and thinking: “I need to lose some damn weight.”
Jacky Oh was buried in June at Jackson Memorial Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, according to the LA Times. Young Fly, whose real name is John Whitfield, eulogized his late partner at the memorial before releasing doves into the sky in her honor.
LISBON, Portugal — A prize worth 1 million euros ($970,000) is being awarded to two intergovernmental bodies for their work on climate change.
Organizers of the annual Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity announced Thursday that this year’s winners are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is president of the prize’s jury, said the award would help keep the issue of climate change in the public mind even as Russia’s war in Ukraine and its consequences compete for attention.
The IPCC is a U.N. body which since 1998 has encouraged scientific research and supported government efforts to combat climate change. It shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
The IPBES is an independent organization established in 2012 to smooth the transfer of information between scientists and governments.
The prize was created in 2020 by the Lisbon, Portugal-based Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to recognize important contributions toward mitigating and adapting to climate change.
It has previously honored climate activist Greta Thunberg.
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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
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