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Giant Squids Finally Caught on Camera


KipWellsFan

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Neat. Thanks for the link.

 

I hate to sound too cynical, but I’m thinking: Japanese are big whalers => sperm whales eat giant squid => find out more about giant squid => catch more whales.

 

But I do like (regular-sized) squid. Umm, ika is tasty.

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This is quite an historic event, actually. :headbang :headbang

 

Sure it was just a matter of time before live observations were made, but people have spent years trying. Claude Roper at Smithsonian has pretty much become the Captain Ahab of the giant squid community, and most folks thought Claude would be the first to nab one.

 

Interestingly, it is really fortuitous that the tentacle (which looks to me to have been one of the two lsex tentacles that house sperm packets in males and serve as copulatory organs. Without expert close examination of the suckers and hooks on teh tentacles, they likely would not have been able to peg the animal as Architeuthis.

 

Kudos, Japanese Sqid Dudes! :cheers

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QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Sep 28, 2005 -> 08:27 AM)
This is quite an historic event, actually.  :headbang  :headbang

 

Sure it was just a matter of time before live observations were made, but people have spent years trying.  Claude Roper at Smithsonian has pretty much become the Captain Ahab of the giant squid community, and most folks thought Claude would be the first to nab one.

 

Interestingly, it is really fortuitous that the tentacle (which looks to me to have been one of the two lsex tentacles that house sperm packets in males and serve as copulatory organs.  Without expert close examination of the suckers and hooks on teh tentacles, they likely would not have been able to peg the animal as Architeuthis.

 

Kudos, Japanese Sqid Dudes!  :cheers

 

In the article, I thought it said that the suckers had small teeth and that another kind of squid (the colossal squid?) is the one with the hooks? And the colossal squid is even bigger than the giant squid? So many question marks.

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QUOTE(Mercy! @ Sep 28, 2005 -> 03:48 AM)
Neat.  Thanks for the link.

 

I hate to sound too cynical, but I’m thinking:  Japanese are big whalers => sperm whales eat giant squid => find out more about giant squid => catch more whales.

 

But I do like (regular-sized) squid.  Umm, ika is tasty.

Bingo, Bro!

 

The Japanese are always trying to expand their "scientific" (BULLs***!) whaling program, including taking sperm whales, and will no doubt they will use the need for more information on Architeuthis as a justification.

 

Korea, Iceland, and Norway and Russia to a degree - are the other big pro whaling nations, and they have been pulling out all the stops in trying to roll back the International Whaling Commission ban and resume limited commercial hunts. Iceland already engages in such, in open defiance of the world ban. The ICW provisions say that if any whale stocks return to more than 50% of their historic levels limited takings can resume, and the pro-whaling position is that several stocks are close to those numbers. Recent genetic work however suggests that the historic stocks may have been underestimated by an order of magnitude, so in fact the current numbers may be closer to 5% and not 50% of pre-exploitation population numbers. The work was done by the same people who used DNA probes to prove that there were lots of illegal whale meat products being sold in Japanese and Korean markets as legally caught "science" species. So needeless to say, Japan is doing all it can to cast doubt on the validity of the new population estimate data.

 

I'll stop being a nerd now.

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QUOTE(Milkman delivers @ Sep 28, 2005 -> 07:36 AM)
In the article, I thought it said that the suckers had small teeth and that another kind of squid (the colossal squid?) is the one with the hooks?  And the colossal squid is even bigger than the giant squid?  So many question marks.

Small hooks = tentacle teeth, just different lay terminology. No, the colossal squid is smaller than the giant squid. On the sex arms hooks are actually peobably used to grasp femalse during copulation, aned not primarily for predation or defense.

 

There are actually about a half dozen very large squid (2 meters or greater) that most biologists all group together as 'giant squid," althoiugh Architeuthis is the holy grail mac daddy of them all.

 

Some of the indirect historic giant squid size estimates that came from sucker marks on captured sperm whales were huge overestimates of the sort that led to the Jules Verne sci-fi sized fictional squids. Basically, the scientists assumed all the suction marks were recent marks when in fact they didn't have to be. That meant that if a juvenile sperm whale had silver dollar sized suction cup wounds on it from an ecounter, in 20 years that animal as an adault would have marks that had stretched to the size of a small dinner plate, hence the overestimate.

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QUOTE(Palehosefan @ Sep 27, 2005 -> 07:53 PM)
Scary to think that there could be a 75 foot giant like that roaming the deep.

 

Scary if they ever mutate and take to land like out of some crazy 50's Sci-Fi flick! But as is, I doubt I will ever encounter one. :D

 

Just giving ya a hard time.

 

But this is soooooo friggin' cool! I saw it in the Yahoo news items, and before I did anything I went right to it to check it out. It is sooooo damn cool. I love those critters. The deep sea fascinates me with how little we know about it.

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QUOTE(Palehosefan @ Sep 27, 2005 -> 08:53 PM)
Thats is amazingly cool. Especially for a Animal Planet/National Geographic dork like myself. I can't wait until a live one is captured and can be studied in captivity. Scary to think that there could be a 75 foot giant like that roaming the deep.

 

I dont think we will ever see one of these giants in captivity. There just isnt a pool deep enough and big enough to corral one of these things safely for the animal. The pictures of this squid are from 900 meters deep. Im sure there will be plenty of observation from now on, something akin to the coelocanth discovery and subsequent study, but capture would surely kill them.

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Its plausible to capture a giant squid and keep it alive. It couldn't be for public display though. They would have to block off an area of ocean deep enough for it to survive and study it with camera's, microphones, and submarines.

 

Then they can teach it to play a giant underwater piano to make it useful.

 

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/giant...re/feature.html

Edited by Palehosefan
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QUOTE(Palehosefan @ Sep 28, 2005 -> 02:13 PM)
Its plausible to capture a giant squid and keep it alive. It couldn't be for public display though. They would have to block off an area of ocean deep enough for it to survive and study it with camera's, microphones, and submarines.

 

Then they can teach it to play a giant underwater piano to make it useful.

 

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/giant...re/feature.html

 

Yeah, it may be plausible. But the article you have talks mainly in theories for these creatures. They are just now starting to get the smaller animals to survive short periods of time. I thought this was telling also:

 

Cripe says running into walls is a common problem for animals used to open water because they're simply not equipped to deal with barriers.

 

Some animals are just not meant to be put in a cage. And setting up a sort of a cage for these animals in the ocean really wouldnt be studying them in their habitat if you ask me. The animals would know that they are being penned up, and wouldnt act the way they would in the wild. Until man figures out how to navigate the deep conveniently, I think this is going to be a creature that's life cycles and habits are pretty much going to be theory and myth.

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I was reading through the seperate pictures on National Geographics site, and realized that those pictures were taken last September. i wonder why it took a full year to let the public view them?

In most types of legitimate scientific inquiry, everyone keeps their mouths shut (or at least tries to keep things under wraps) until they can get their results presented in a peer-reviewed publication.

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