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Underground > Laboratory >

New Giant Squid Found.

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12:03 / 21.12.01

It's called Big Fin, and has the longest tentacles of any squid species.

NPR reported on it last night
quote:Today, scientists announce the discovery of something that even seasoned biologists say is truly bizarre: a squid that grows as long as 25 feet, and lives more than half a mile deep.

quote:The squid in the video is no mushroom. "The arms are really really long, on this animal the estimate was over 20 feet long, much much longer than anything we've seen before," says Vecchione. "They also hold them in a very strange way. They have what's almost like an elbow in each of the arms. There's a bend fairly close to the body and then the really long spaghetti like projections coming off of that."

Vecchione suspects that the arms act like a spider web.

The squid have 10 arms, though two of them are technically called tentacles, and they appear to have suckers on part of the arms -- much like other squid. But it's another video of one of these squid that suggests the spider web comparison. The video shows a collision between a submersible and the squid.

"This particular animal happened to brush up against a submarine and the arms got stuck to it and the animal seemed to have trouble letting go." Vecchione thinks the arms are very sticky and used to trap food. The squid lets its arms hang underneath it and waits for small crustaceans to bump into them and stick, like insects sticking to a spider's web.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

05:17 / 26.12.01

Cool. It's been far too long since the news has covered a story about monsters.

Jack The Bodiless

05:17 / 26.12.01

Yeah. Thatcher left power years ago.

The Return Of Rothkoid

10:12 / 26.12.01

I'll remain unhappy with this discovery unless the word "kraken" is used by all involved. You know it makes sense.

16:39 / 27.12.01

No real comment, but would just like to thank grant for posting all this stuff. It does not go unnapreciated.

Sir, I salute you.

Edited only because I was trying to find a smilie with a Windsor Davies style 'tache and salute.

[ 27-12-2001: Message edited by: Duncan ]

17:46 / 27.12.01

Finally.

Cthulhu is rising.

Ia.

Zoom.

17:50 / 02.04.03

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.

18:53 / 02.04.03

Great Scott!

This squid has one of the largest beaks known of any squid and also has unique swivelling hooks on the clubs at the ends of its tentacles.

...The specimen, which was caught in the past few weeks in the Ross Sea, has a mantle length of 2.5 metres. That is a larger mantle than any giant squid that Dr O'Shea has seen and this specimen is still immature, the NZ scientist believes.

"It's only half to two-thirds grown, so it grows up to four metres in mantle length." By comparison, the mantle of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, is not known to attain more than 2.25 metres.

That's huuuuuge!

If it's got a mantle of five metres, that's 16 feet.

The mantle is the part from the tail to the base of the head.

On an average, calamari-on-the-table squid, that's generally 30cm, or about a foot long. The tentacles - those two long things sticking out from the eight arms - they're generally about the same length as the mantle.

So, if this creature has the same body proportions (as it appears to from the photos), we're talking about a predator about the length of a public bus or a small Winnebago.

18:58 / 02.04.03

No, wait, I lied. The arms are about the same length as the mantle. The two tentacles are even longer.

11:55 / 03.04.03

I hope Takoma hasn't been talking to them...

The Natural Way

12:54 / 03.04.03

Urgh.

The Natural Way

12:57 / 03.04.03

"This squid has one of the largest beaks known of any squid"

Urgh Urgh.

You'd be surprised how many people don't realise squids and octopi have beaks. It's really shocking. Everyone should know. Urgh.

13:12 / 03.04.03

Well, what separates squids from octopuses isn't the body shape, and it isn't the fins... it's the fact that squids have hooks in their suckers.

Now, cross that with this:

How big can a squid get? Estimates based on damaged carcasses range up to one hundred feet. One story, though, suggests they might get even larger. One night during World War II a British Admiralty trawler was lying off the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. One of the crew, A. G. Starkey, was up on deck, alone, fishing, when he saw something in the water.

"As I gazed, fascinated, a circle of green light glowed in my area of illumination. This green unwinking orb I suddenly realized was an eye. The surface of the water undulated with some strange disturbance. Gradually I realized that I was gazing at almost point-black range at a huge squid." Starkey walked the length the of the ship finding the tail at one end and the tentacles at the other. The ship was over one hundred and seventy five feet long.

13:18 / 03.04.03

Ahahahahahaha!

Love's arrow. Or, rather, love's giant hypodermic needle. Cupid's arrows are rather benign compared with those of some squid. Some small squid will use their sharp beaks or tentacle hooks to rip open the skin of females. They then insert spermatophores with their penises. In the giant squid, however, the male's penis is formidable, muscular, and almost a meter long. It is powerful enough to insert spermatophores directly under the skin of the females. The males are not always accurate, for males themselves are sometimes impregnated in this manner during the squids' deep-sea orgies.

(Norman, Mark D., and Lu, C.C.; "Sex in Giant Squid," Nature, 389:683, 1997.)

If you want to see more pictures, up close, of squid sucker hooks, dig this page.

The Natural Way

15:08 / 03.04.03

I don't like the way their flappy bits are called "clubs".

15:37 / 03.04.03

Pah! These denizens of the deep still aren't as creepy as the horror that is Vampyroteuthis Infernalis.

That eye. That awful, staring eye...

15:45 / 03.04.03

I wrote a song about giant squid taking over the earth. Glad to hear the invasion is on schedule.

15:54 / 03.04.03

Flame, you're never gonna be a superstar if you don't learn to hype yourself: surely you meant

"I wrote a song about giant squid taking over the earth. You can listen to it here!"

19:20 / 03.04.03

Great song, by the way. I like the phone conversation.

----

The colossal squid, I just wrote about it for the paper.

I didn't include this in the story: the scientific name means "Hamilton's middle-clawed-squid." Probably because unlike most squids, the arms (the middle?) as well as the tentacles have claws.

Shall I repeat?

The arms have claws.

14:05 / 28.09.05

Japanese scientists have finally done it.

They've photographed, for the first time, a living giant squid.

It was 27 feet long and swimming 3,000 feet under the ocean.

And the big discovery is that not only are they freakin' huge, but they're fast....

Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum in Tokyo and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association in Tokyo collected more than 550 digital images taken over more than four hours. These show the squid repeatedly attempting to detach a bait dangling beneath the camera, which was at a depth of 900 metres.

During these attempts, the club of one of the squid’s long feeding tentacles became caught in the bait equipment. It eventually broke off, and the team retrieved and genetically sequenced the 5.5-metre-long severed section to confirm that the animal was indeed Architeuthis dux. They estimate the squid’s total length was at least eight metres.

The images are set to change ideas about the giant squid’s predatory techniques. Despite its ferocious reputation in myth, experts had thought that A. dux was a sluggish predator that dangled its two long feeding tentacles like fishing rods to snare passing prey.

“But the pictures show an animal that’s more like a python striking a rat,” points out Norman.

More photos here:

They have close-ups of the captured tentacle. It's big.

All Acting Regiment

17:21 / 28.09.05

We'll all have trouble sleeping tonight.

Those pictures are great.

20:22 / 28.09.05

Speak for yourself, Legba. I'll be having lovely, lovely dreams of calamairi steaks as long as my forearm.

Man, it's been a great couple of years for Giant Squid info.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

20:55 / 28.09.05

That's it. I'm not going back in the ocean. EVER. Sharks, giant squid, Deep Ones, and Jacques Cousteau. NEVER!

I'm going to go hide under my bed, eat food, and go to class. My nice, safe, very land based class...several kilometers away from the nearest body of water. I've even got my plus Elder Sign right here. The squids aren't getting me. No way, no how.

...damn this stuff is cool looking. Definitly a lot of new photos for my "Weird Shit" folder.

21:44 / 28.09.05

don't come to australia then, bard. spiders? yep. big ones? yep. really really poisonous ones? yep! snakes? yep. really really bad ones? fourteen of the world's fifteen deadliest, with the aptly, if curtly, named 'fierce snake' pretty well up there at the top... did i mention the saltwater crocodiles? or the great white sharks? or the box jellyfish? how about the stone fish or blue ringed octopus...?

but call by for tea if you do!

great link again grant - ever grateful to your keen eye for an angled chink of science!

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

23:58 / 28.09.05

I wonder if the near-extinction of the sperm whale has anything to do with these sightings.

you know, the carniverous predator's away, and all that...

ta
tenix

00:38 / 29.09.05

Bard, Legba Rex-
If that freaks you out, consider that most biologists think that they're probably quite intellegent, having the largest brain of any invertebrate.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

04:10 / 29.09.05

Astrojax:

Funny thing is, I WANT to come Australia. I will, someday. I fear only horrible undersea things.

Lekvar:

Ia, Cthulhu baby! R'lyeh wasn't built by squids. It sank beneath the seas and the squids dug the architecture. We are all so, so very screwed.

05:18 / 29.09.05

I saw this real Elder God-looking bastard squid on a documentary once- it was a Devil Fish from the Gulf of Mexico, bright red and bigger than a man, and it has a trick of flattening out its tentacles, arms, whatever, into a manta ray shape and zooooooming around at high speed like Johnathan Livingston Squid! This diver with the documentary crew was paddling along and VOOOMP! this James Cameron badboy comes barrelling up like a crappy CGI, RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS FACE, stops dead in the water, does this Transformers thing, from "guided missile" to "uncle creepy" and I swear to ghod, FRISKS THE DIVER, very efficiently, head to foot and back, before transforming and taking off again. Carry on, citizen.
Again, I remind you that we have no idea how intelligent these things are, and what kind of animal behaviur is "frisking", anyway?!

07:34 / 29.09.05

I love it when the little guys get a shot like this. No high tech subs, just bait and a camera. Fishing for giant squid.

They're more active than everyone thought, which is good. I don't like the thought of giant squids hanging limply in the sea, weakly trying to grab a passing fish. Giant squids need to be fast moving vicious bastards, it's in their contract.

New Scientist has some interesting stuff on these badass beasties.

All Acting Regiment

09:34 / 29.09.05

Seriously now, it would be great if we were able to communicate with these things in the manner of dolphins etc. I have no clue how we would do this, but just imasgine it.

10:20 / 29.09.05

Seaworld would be more fun, that's for sure.

10:44 / 29.09.05

Seriously now, it would be great if we were able to communicate with these things in the manner of dolphins etc. I have no clue how we would do this, but just imasgine it.

<Bad Joke>They already have ink-- surely they just need a quill?</Bad Joke>

Captain Nemo and Jules Verne must feel vindicated. Just wait until they find a missing and fertile continent in the Antarctic and the circle of irony will be complete...

19:47 / 30.09.05

it would be great if we were able to communicate with these things in the manner of dolphins etc.
It's been pretty well established that some squids use bioluminescence to communicate, though they're most likely just saying, "A/S/L? anny girlz yu wanna party LOLZ?!?"

There was a great article in National Geographic (I swear I just get it for the pictures!) about a gent in Australia, one of the bigwigs in the Giant Squid Hunting community, who had given up on trying to catch an adult and had instead decided to grow his own from hatchlings. At the time the article was written he'd had no luck whatsoever, but you have to admire his approach to the problem.

P. Horus Rhacoid

01:31 / 01.10.05

Huh? How could he possibly hope to grow something that had never been caught? Was there cloning involved?

P. Horus Rhacoid

01:34 / 01.10.05

Hmm, I see that I am either very tired or dumb. I'd like to think that it's the former, but maybe not. Anyhow. Was he just unable to keep the hatchlings alive in captivity?

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