This creature is rare and mysterious, living out its days in deep water, going about its natural business. Naturally, man's response is to kill it dead.

I doubt very much that the fishermen were targeting the squid -- that is, it was caught by accident. And I doubt they could have kept it alive for long. Surely they would have known that they would have been heroes if they had managed to. But a squid that size that would need a lot of water and constant oxygenation. It may also have been suffering from too-rapid decompression.

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.

That is an underestimated ethical issue of a lot of ocean fishing.  The relatively rapid heave to the surface of marine animals caught in nets or on deep lines adds to their distress and pain.

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!

BiodD,

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.