Colossal squid update 24/2/2007
First, an apology: The extra three photographs we posted below were not of the 460kg collossal squid landed by the John Bennett and the crew of the San Aspiring off the coast of Antarctica. It seems they were of another colossal squid, caught but not successfully landed earlier this year, on the 8th of January. Those pictures have only recently showed up around the web, unattributed and at the same time as the big news of the giant specimen frozen and en route to New Zealand.
On the bright side, this means that two colossal squid have been caught on camera within weeks of each other! This smaller specimen was also hooked accidentally by a crew fishing in the Ross Sea for Patagonian toothfish.
On the subject of the main news, the largest and best-preserved colossal squid specimen found to date, New Zealand newspaper, The Nelson Mail, have an interview with John Bennett online here, all about the experience of catching it.
“He just appeared as a great, big, dark shape coming out of the depths. He was wrapped around a 30kg toothfish and he was just munching away on it.”
Colossal squid caught off Antarctica 22/2/2007
A crew of New Zealand fishermen, captained by John Bennett, fishing near Antarctica in the Ross Sea have caught and preserved the best specimen yet of a colossal squid. That’s right, not a giant squid, but a colossal squid.
Colossal squid are longer than giant squid by some magnitude, with a much larger mantle length in comparison to their tentacles. They are believed to be much more agressive hunters, with swivelling toothed hooks on their tentacles.
The huge creature was caught three weeks ago, and is now frozen and on it’s way to Wellington, New Zealand, for study.
Bennett’s ship was long-line fishing for toothfish, and the colossal squid decided to make a snack of one of the toothfish caught on their line. Itself then well and truly caught, the squid was injured and did not seem able to survive. The decision was taken by Jeff Dolan, the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries observer on board, to forget about the day’s toothfish catch and put all the crew’s efforts into bringing the squid aboard intact. It died very soon after being landed on board the vessel.
This is not only the best-preserved specimen of a colossal squid so far, it is also the largest. The creature weighs 460 kilograms and is around 39 feet in length.
The New Zealand Government report is here, there is a BBC News report here, and a few pictures from the landing below. Update: It looks like we were led astray—these pictures are not of the same squid, but another colossal squid caught (but probably not successfully landed) a couple of weeks earlier. It was a smaller, female specimen. Thanks to the community over at TONMO for putting us right!
(Thanks to Harry M. and Clive Thompson for the tip-off.)
Largest bioluminescent squid filmed 14/2/2007
Taningia Danae, the dana octopus squid, has been filmed in high-definition attacking an illuminated, squid-shaped lure.
Dr Tsunemi Kubodera and his team, the same researchers responsible for the first live giant squid footage, have created a deep-water high-definition camera system and this is the first fruits of its use.
The dana octopus squid is the largest known biolumiscent creature in the seas, growing to an adult length of around 2.3m. Dr Kubodera and his team successfully filmed adult squid attacking their lures between depths of 240 and 940m off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific. The family of ‘octopus squid’ are so called for only having eight tentacles, rather then the ten possessed by regular squid. These tentacles are covered in rows of hooks, rather than suckers; a difference which shows how aggressive they are as predators.
The BBC have good coverage of the film and a great set of still images, Clive Thompson wrote a great piece on it over at Collision Detection, and the full published paper and abstract are available as a PDF here.
Giant squid caught (literally) on video 29/12/2006
Tsunemi Kubodera from the Zoology department of Japan’s National Science Museum has managed to capture a living giant squid on video for the first time. What appears to be a very young female was caught by hanging a smaller squid from their boat as bait, after following a group of sperm whales south of Tokyo, in the hopes they would lead the research team to groups of giant squid.
Once they had it hooked, it took two team members to reel in the giant squid and pull it onboard. The injuries it sustained during the struggle led to its death.
The carcass has been preserved and was displayed at a press conference earlier this week at the Tokyo museum.
You can watch the video of the squid being reeled in here.
The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin 13/2/2006
This isn’t quite our ‘usual programming’, but so what? One of my favourite authors, William Gibson, has been posting snippets of fiction on his blog—whether they are sketches from a new novel, or disconnected little narratives in their own right, is unknown. They are short, sweet bursts of descriptive prose though—and the latest one kicks off with the image of a virtual squid, information flickering across its shimmering mantle.
Gibson’s blog is an oddly-structured thing and a permanent link to this piece would probably end up incuding anything else he gets around to writing this month—so hopefully he won’t mind me reproducing the piece here:
She stood beneath the squid’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting-tentacles. Something about Victorian girls in their underwear had just passed, and she wondered if that was part of Picnic At Hanging Rock, a film which Inchmale had been fond of sampling on DVD for pre-show inspiration. Someone had blended a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery for Bunny, and she hadn’t noticed it loop yet. It just kept coming.
And standing under it, conveniently engrossed, head stuck in the wireless helmet, let her pretend she wasn’t hearing Bunny hissing irritably at Alberto for having brought her here.
It seemed almost to jump, now, with a flowering rush of silent explosions, bombs blasting against black night. She reached up to steady the helmet, tipping her head back at a particularly bright burst of flame, and accidentally encountered a control-surface mounted to the left of the visor, over her cheekbone. The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin vanished.
Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car in and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed at once familiar and banal. Within it, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, and was difficult to read.
She was turning, to ask Bunny what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over.
This left them frozen there, the helmet between them. Bunny’s blue eyes loomed owl-wide behind diagonal blondness, reminding her powerfully of one particular photograph of Kurt Cobain. Then Alberto took the helmet from them both. “Bunny,” he said, “you’ve really got to calm down. This is important. K.T. is writing an article about locative art. For Node.”
“Node?”
“Node.”
“The fuck is Node?”
“Magazine. Like Wired. Except it’s English.”
Or Belgian,” K.T. offered. “Or something.”
© William Gibson, reproduced without permission. I’ll gladly take it down if asked.
Squid conference in Tasmania 8/2/2006
Running from February the 6th–10th, Hobart Tasmania is hosting the Cephalopod International Advisory Council’s 2006 international symposium.
Cephalopod researchers from the world over will be meeting there to show and tell the year’s findings. There will be symposia on squid movement and migration, squid reproductive patterns, management and conservation of squid species, biodiversity and their role in the food chain. There will be workshops on very similar themes, plus the use of cephalopods in laboratory experimentation.
James Wood is using the symposium as a chance to gather cephalopod photographs from as many researchers as possible—he aims to set up the most comprehensive squid image bank ever and make it available online.
Full details on the 2006 international symposium are online here.
More on the first live giant squid photos 28/9/2005
There it is! The first living giant squid caught on camera. It’s really happened.
It’s a busy day for giant squid news, and our day jobs are getting in the way of reporting. Finishing off the repairs to this blog is well and truly out of the window for a while. Here’s the latest though: Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori’s paper on their amazing photography expedition is now online. Go read it in PDF format here. The paper includes some of their amazing photographs, and a diagram of the camera/lure system they used for the survey.
The BBC have published a typically authoritative news report here. As Dr Steve O’Shea mentions there, whilst this is far from the biggest squid out there, or the meanest, it’s the species which has caught the public imagination. Getting these first pictures of a living specimen is a huge acheivement.
First live footage of a giant squid 27/9/2005
Looks like it’s really happened in our lifetime. Roughly a year ago a team of Japanese scientists led by Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum in Tokyo and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association caught on film (at one frame every 30 seconds) a real live giant squid. Their findings are published today in British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The team dropped a line to a depth of 900 metres, with bait in the form of mashed up squid genitals attached to a camera and strobe light. Their hope was that a sexually excited giant squid would attempt to mate with the camera, giving them great footage.
It seems that they sort of got what they wanted, but sort of didn’t. An eight-metre long giant squid did turn up and did have a go at the bait. Unfortunately, the squid then got caught on a hook (presumably the hook was what said bait was hanging from). The poor creature struggled for four hours before breaking free – leaving a whole tentacle behind. The tentacle was recovered by the scientists; “its huge suckers were still able to grip the boat deck and any fingers that touched them.”
The pictures have not yet been released for public view.
Following today’s publication of the report, this news is popping up all over the internet. We found the most extensive article so far to be at News24.com.
Sorry for the mess … 25/9/2005
… We’re redecorating here at Squidblog. Well, sort of. We were attacked by evil spammers — they exploited our Wordpress blog software and used it to send out a metric fuckload of spam from our address. Yes, that’s a technical term.
Our fantastically efficient hosting company, Dreamhost, spotted what was going on and put a stop to it. Before we can return to normal service though, we need to wipe the slate clean and upgrade to a more recent (and more secure) installation of Wordpress. If you’re reading this, then all must be underway and going smoothly. It will probably be a while before everything’s back to normal, and before we have the place looking the way we would like it to — if we’re starting from scratch, may as well give the place a new lick of paint whilst we’re at it. Most likely, our ‘recently visited sites’ links and our chiseled good looks will be the last things to get repaired.
Giant Squid in Kaikoura Canyon? 15/7/2005
Squidblog reader John Howard kindly realates a tale of what could be a first - a genuine sighting of a live giant squid.
“… diving yesterday (14 July 2005) on the edge of Kaikoura Canyon just off the east coast of New Zealand and I looked down and just faintly (the water was relatively clear) I could make out the form of what was clearly a fast moving giant squid which I estimate was 25 to 30 ft long.”
We’re not jealous. Much.
For more information on the region, and some nice squid animations and movies, take a look at this National Geographic feature on a 1997 expedition to search for giant squid in the 5,741 foot deep canyon. Shame they didn’t have as much luck as John Howard did!
Bobtail Squid changes biologists’ understanding of bacterial behaviour 14/6/2005
The diminutive bobtail squid has been responsible for a pretty major turnaround in biological understanding. In a paper published near the end of last year, Professor Margaret McFall-Ngai at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains how a toxin (specifically tracheal cytotoxin) known to cause both whooping cough and gonorrhea in humans acts instead as a biological trigger in the tiny squid, prompting the development of it’s light-producing organ – which helps the squid to mimic the appearance of starlight, confusing predators.
This discovery overturns the previously-accepted notion that such toxic molecules have a set purpose, instead showing that they can have wildly different, even opposite effects dependent upon context. This leads to some serious concerns over the use of antibiotics in the treatment of illnesses.
There’s a much more in-depth explanation in Professor McFall-Ngai’s press release here.
Real monsters play in the sea. Not your closet.
Aside from showing James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep in their IMAX cinema, the Franklin Institute have a feature exhibition on now called Monsters of the Deep. It’s centrepiece is a 7,500 ft diorama made up of fossils and fleshed-out models.
New York animation studio Dancing Diablo animation studio have put together a couple of claymation advertising spots to promote the exhibition, one of which features the tentacles of an animated giant squid terrorising a child from under it’s bed …
Unfortunately, the clip doesn’t seem to be featured in their current showreel, but you can read all about it here.
Dr Clive Roper speaks
“Of course, what I’d really like is to have a trained sperm whale to act like a truffle hound. Unlike teuthologists, sperm whales dont have any trouble finding giant squid.”
Aside from being master of the Giant Squid related soundbite, Dr Clive Roper, top squid guy at the Smithsonian is due to lecture tomorrow at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. The subject, unsuprisingly, will be his lifelong quest to spot a giant squid (alive) in the wild.
It’s a little far from Scotland, so we’re hoping a transcript gets posted online …
Update soon.
Hello all, been busy trying to lead real lives, but fear not, we shall update soon.
hello. 4/4/2005
Sorry for the lack of updates, nothing squidworthy has come to out attention recently. If you see anything thing you want to tell us about or just want to say hi, just email us at squidblog.com
Whales. 6/3/2005
Today, I like whales. So, two stories for you, one I found in the pub two weeks ago and have finally got around to blogging and one I found while searching for the first.
The latest interesting news is that whales communicate by sonar and whale song. Well, we all knew that, right? But, the new research indicated that we could previously not understand how exactly whales communicated, just that they did. Now it seems that they ’speak’ to each other across oceans, over distances of thousands of miles, not only that, they also naviagate by echo location, like bats. But they then travel in straight lines to a chosen point, then turn to the next point on their course, same as submarines. And this was discovered by studying data from cold war listening stations. The world is becoming more like a Dan Brown novel every day. Sadly.
Second news, whales die. Again, we knew this. But now there is a theory that whale carcasses could lead to the spread of life across the ocean floor. Life in the ocean works in similar ways as here on earth before the spread of air travel, lots of isolated islands and individual ecosystems. Each sea mount in the ocean has life growing on it found nowhere else, and life cannot travel from one two the other because of the great depths in between. Now the idea is that life could travel slowly from one carcass to the other and thus progress across the ocean floor, perhaps adapting as it goes.
California’s humbolt squid invasion still underway 27/2/2005
SF Gate have a transcript online from this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle rounding up details and conjecture around the recent surge in squid activity along California’s coast.
Here’s an extract:
“[The squid] are roaming the canyons aside underwater seamounts off the Bay Area, 400 to 2,000 feet deep, and then can fire up to the surface, swarming around boats by the hundreds. Those aboard gawk in disbelief as the squid swirl and surge in 20-foot blasts from their water jets, changing from the classic white- bleach color to black, red or opaque with a phosphorescent glow.”
Go read the full article here.
Aussie sea serpent update 19/2/2005
Thanks to Gringo, I came across more extensive info on the elusive oarfish, as seen recently washed up on a Perth beach. This site gives a good basic background on the species, and has images of specimens washed up in New Zealand and Florida – and even links to an eyewitness account of the Florida beast!
iPods and fuzzy squid 17/2/2005
Mule Design have done it again with their squid obsession. This time it’s a squid-themed iPod case. Possibly the oddest product I’ve seen on sale in a while.
Go forth and purchase here.
Pixel robot squid love 11/2/2005
Today’s episode of Diesel Sweeties, the world’s finest webcomic, has a special guest appearance from a romantic squid.
That’s two of my favourite things in the one place.
Go see it right here.
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