A team of Japanese squid researchers, after being the first last year to photograph giant squid in the wild, now has a video tape of a half-grown female of the species struggling to avoid capture. It failed, and died. The AP’s Eric Talmadge put the story on the wire and, inevitable with any monster story, it is getting extensive pickup by dailies. It was 24 feet long including tentacles, about half the the species’s upper limits. The leader of the team, based at Japan’s National Science Museum, believes the animals are fairly abundant. They found this one by searching in an area where sperm whales were feeding.
What would really get the little kid monster-brain in all of us perking might now be a video of a colossal squid, the Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni of Antarctic waters. It’s more massive and its tentacles don’t have mere, raspy suckers, but big hooks for snaring fish.
No online link to the video seems available but one is sure to show up.
Other stories: Reuters;
Old, Colossal Squid News: BBC in particular has reported on this monster. One 3-yr-old story here. National Geographic News’s James Owen had the story, too.
Leave a Reply