Squid on ice

Don’t rush to get tickets to New Zealand just yet—the colossal squid is frozen in a block of ice, and they don’t plan to even start thawing it for another year (there aren’t any other reasons to visit NZ than to see the squid, right?).

To minimise handling of the precious specimen, the colossal squid will probably have its temperature raised, over days, in the tank in which it will finally be “fixed”.

“We don’t want to move it too much,” says Marshall.

“When a thing like that is in the water, it’s neutrally buoyant.

“But, of course, when you get it out of the water, you’ve got a big lump of weight and you could try lifting it and your hands would go right through.

“Already it’s got puncture marks from the net.”

Once un-frozen, the creature will be fixed, or embalmed, and then a long-term preservative will be used.

“What I mean by a fixing tank is a tank that you lay it out in, in a natural position, and you then make all the adjustments – align all the arms, pack out the body and all of that. Then you have it in a, say, 5% formalin solution.

“It will require the biggest tank of anything we’ve got.”

Basically, we’re not going to know any more details for a good long while.

Cephalart

You’re all wondering where the Friday Cephalopod might be…it’s delayed. I’m spending my day in seclusion in my secret lair, hammering out some work that’s already way overdue, and I don’t have access to a scanner or my books or any technology beyond the necessities for writing. I will put it up later.

For now, you’ll have to make do with some cephalart.

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The Antarctic octopus gets farked

Fark is having an octopus photoshop contest — most of the entries make me go “eh”, but there are a few nice ones.

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Phil Plait thinks this could be a symbol of rapprochement between the brilliant analysts of the natural world at Pharyngula and those slack-jawed people who stare dully at the sky at Bad Astronomy. (I kid, astronomers probably think a little bit now and then, too.)

Next time you go fishing, be sure to bring a video camera

Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it.

Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. “It really didn’t put up much of a fight,” he says. “Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that’s about it. It certainly wasn’t grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea.”

As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about Antarctic toothfishing for a New Zealand TV station (that’s Chilean sea bass to you and me). He was able to capture a good bit of footage of the squid being hauled in. Bennett confirms that a production company in Auckland bought the footage, though he declines to specify what he was paid. An official with the Ministry of Fisheries told NEWSWEEK that offers to buy the footage had been pouring in and that some were “longer than a telephone number.” Bennett said that a documentary featuring the coveted footage should be released sometime in April.

We also learn about the future fate of the specimen.

Once aboard, the squid was lowered into the ship’s cargo hold and put on ice for the next two weeks as Bennett and his crew chugged 1,700 miles back to the southern coast of New Zealand. The squid remains frozen solid as preparations are being made to hand it over to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. That should happen on March 11, O’Shea says. But first, museum officials have to figure out how to store the thing. “The problem is we haven’t seen it yet,” says museum spokesperson Jane Keig. “We need to get it here to see how we’ll preserve it.”

That won’t be easy, says O’Shea. “We’re dealing with a 450-kilogram frozen lump of flesh. We’ve got to have a specially designed tank constructed.” O’Shea estimates that it could take up to four days for the squid to completely thaw out, a delicate process that will leave him and his colleagues only a small time frame in which to take samples and examine it. Still, those precious minutes could prove more valuable than years worth of colossal squid research. “The scientific value is enormous. It’ll more than double our knowledge,” says O’Shea, who hopes the research will shed light on the species’ hunting and mating behavior, its age and its intelligence (which O’Shea already suspects to be fairly negligible). The brain of a 275-kilogram giant squid is only about 20 grams and shaped like a doughnut, he says, “There’s not a lot of comprehension going on up there.” Might the colossal squid be brighter than its smaller cousin? “Doubtful,” says O’Shea. “In all likelihood, it’s one of the stupidest creatures in the sea.”

Now that’s just mean.

The Calamari Wrestler

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A recent article on Deep Sea News mentions the Ritual of 365 Points—since this is such an important reference to cephalophiliacs, I thought I’d repost my summary of a classic movie that hinges on it as a plot point.

I have seen The Calamari Wrestler. It was…indescribable. I won’t even try. The basic idea, though, is that it’s about pro wrestling in Japan, with a dying wrestler who undergoes a magical transformation in Pakistan to keep him alive, which also allows him to become a super-star in the ring. He battles rivals to learn a heartwarming secret at the end.

I’ve put a few frames below the fold. Don’t try to view them as a narrative; this is a surreal movie about wrestling invertebrates.

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Acres of gore

The archives of Natural History magazine contain some strange old stories—like this tale from 1933, when whales were casually slaughtered, and you could write about their death throes in a popular magazine. There’s a memorable image in it, at least.

Unimaginable numbers of squids, which occur in practically all parts of the oceans, are devoured by sperm whales. The certainty of this is, of course, obvious from the bulk of the mighty foragers and the size and number of the schools engaged in an unceasing quest for food throughout all the warmer sea waters of the globe. It was indelibly impressed upon my mind, however, by an incident witnessed during a South Atlantic cruise in the old New Bedford whaling brig “Daisy.” I manned stroke oar in the mate’s boat, and on one occasion our harpooner made fast to a medium-sized sperm whale, perhaps thirty-five feet in length, which showed very little fight, and which we overtook soon after the iron had been planted. The first pricks of the terrible lance, thrust and “churned” by the mate, evidently found its life, for the whale went immediately into a flurry, swimming desperately around the boat, and rolling over and over so that the line encircled it many times. Then, while we watched its dying struggles at close range, the beast began to belch up squids. Barrelful after barrelful of the tentacled creatures, some but freshly swallowed, others in advanced stages of disintegration, floated to the surface all about our boat. Most of them seemed to have bodies a foot and a half or two feet long, but some were larger. By the time the whale floated fin-out and lay still, the slimy carcasses and fragments of squids covered the space of an acre or more.

Biology isn’t always pretty.