Its eyes are the size of dinner plates; its tentacles, large enough to fashion tractor wheel-sized calamari rings. It stretches longer than a semi-truck, weighs more than a Harley, and glides effortlessly throughout the darkest depths of the Antarctic waters, using razor sharp hooks to gobble up the unlucky that fall into its path.
This is not the tale of a fabled sea monster or an excerpt from a Herman Melville classic. This is the true story of a colossal catch netted by New Zealand fishermen earlier this month. It took two hours to land what is presumably the largest and only mature male specimen of a colossal squid -- a rare find indeed.
The squid was alive at capture and feasting on a hooked toothfish, the fishermen's target catch. It has since been frozen and shipped off to New Zealand's national museum where it will be preserved for scientific research.
Officials estimated the leviathan to weigh slightly less than 1,000 pounds and measure 39 feet in length.
This is the second time fishermen have nabbed a colossal squid, the first coming in 2004 with the capture of an immature female in the Ross Sea near the Antarctic coast. These mysterious creatures -- not to be confused with giant squid, which are found in waters around New Zealand -- are found in Antarctic waters and can plunge to depths of 6,500 feet.
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d41295 Posted 3:06 am
26 Feb 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:45 am
26 Feb 2007
Scientists know very little about these beasts. We should thank the fishermen for having had the forethought to preserve the squid in good shape for study.
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caniscandida Posted 6:29 am
26 Feb 2007
We may not wish to assign any blame at all to the fishermen who unintentionally caught the squid. On the other hand, we cannot commend them for going out fishing for Patagonian toothfish.
The linked story (from Reuters?) oddly said that the colossal squid and the giant squid are "not related." That is crazy. Of course they are related, even if they do not belong to the same genus. It would be interesting, though, if gigantism evolved in two separate squid lineages.
Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, is professionally a marine biologist, with a specialization in octopuses and squids. (Journalists ignorantly call her an "oceanographer.") Seeing how questionably she non-finessed her Church's position at the recent global conference of the Anglican Communion in Dar-es-Salaam, maybe she would be well advised to chuck her episcopal purples, and run off to NZ for a while to check out this squid.
On the curious expression, "if this squid were cut up for calamari rings, the rings would be as big as tractor tires," or words to that effect -- a disgraceful anthropocentric, economy-first prejudice shining through -- , which has been repeated in one form or another in various news sources: Do we know the name of the journalist who first came up with that frightful image?
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:26 am
26 Feb 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Ron Steenblik Posted 2:46 am
27 Feb 2007
I don't know about the state of Chilean Sea Bass, but New Zealand's fisheries are among the most tightly regulated (and best managed) in the world. The country is also at the forefront of pushing for new disciplines on (i.e., tighter rules governing) fishing subsidies at the World Trade Organization.
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