The Aussies love to brag about their exotic fauna, so I probably shouldn’t inflate their egos further, but they’ve done it again: they’ve netted another ginormous squid. This one is about 6 meters long, and 230 kg.
They always look so flabby and pathetic when they’re shown flopped down dead on a boat’s deck, don’t they? It’s like having human funeral viewings where they soak the body in a lake somewhere for a week — it’s neither pretty nor representative.
By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.
Wired has a pretty gallery of images from the recent Colossal Squid necropsy. If you’ve ever wondered what a pile of squid guts would look like on a table, here you go.
It’s too bad the images aren’t quite large enough to use as wallpaper on my laptop.
Oh, and those colors—that’s exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.
After all, the big squid are washing up on Puget Sound beaches, so I, too, feel the call. I’m going to have to make the journey.
It also helps that the Northwest Science Writers Association has invited me to come out and give a talk. I’ll be speaking on 2 June at the Pacific Science Center on communicating science, somehow. I think I’ll also be spending several days visiting family and friends…and maybe some of those poor lovely tentacled denizens of the Sound who find themselves stranded on the shore.
Since I saw Iron Man last night (short review: AWESOME!!!), I thought I’d try to find a cephalopod with a similar red and gold color scheme…and didn’t get very close. But this one does have the sleek look of a rocket-propelled machine, so it will have to do.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Why is it that every time a journalist writes about large squid eyes, they’ve got to compare them to dinner plates? It’s so trite. How about hubcaps? Frisbees? How about just giving the dimensions and leaving it at that? Oh, well, I’ve had to miss most of the live webcasts of the colossal squid anatomy lesson, just because my schedule is horrid this week, but I’ve caught up with some of the details, thanks to the most excellent Te Papa Blog, which has nicely fleshed out the lessons with lots of photographs.
Last night’s Café Scientifique here in Morris was discussing the dumbing down of traditional media, and comparing coverage of scientific issues on TV and in newspapers (usually execrable) with new media, like blogs (which at least have the potential to actually provide depth.) I was struck by that difference here. Read the USA Today article on the colossal squid eye, which boils down to basically, “Oooh, they’re big!”. Then compare it to the blog entry on the colossal squid eye, written by a scientist. The latter is much more informative, and contains more specific details, and isn’t afraid to challenge the reader with words longer than a single syllable.
…that the colossal squid is dissected and displayed by webcam to the world. It’s also the day I’m in class from 10:00 on, and have a Café Scientifique to attend, as well as another job candidate seminar, so I’m going to have to catch it all after the fact.
Anyway, Happy Squid Hacking Day to you all! Watch the webcams if you get a chance.
