ow, the stupid hurts my brain. And the misrepresentation-- I assume that Richard Ellis told them that most (all?) of the globsters that they listed have been identified as whale parts via DNA, and they just edited it out (cut to fanatical cryptozoologist "expert")
And I'm only 5 minutes in. Still, as always, nice to see Dale and Scott having fun diving.
edit: bah. made up controversy about blobs. cool camera toys, though. Why would a 100 foot octopus eat 10 foot octopuses, anyway? Wouldn't it eat, like blue whales, or the hypothesized-by-cryptozoologists 50 foot lobsters? I'm the "this can't be whale collagen" guy certainly didn't make the case that the stuff was octopus muscle. What's the electron microscopy of big, gelatinous species look like? I bet it's not like whale collagen... so either the blob is a species of octopus that's not like muscular nor gelatinous cephalopods, or it's NOT A CEPHALOPOD.
e.g.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...4A15754C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Also, um, Scott saying "I am a firm believer that the Octopus gigantus for real is a true species"? I can understand "I'd love for this to be a real species," but that sounds pretty silly.
edit: and the computer graphics octopus is awful... but I'm a snob about that.
edit: gah, the beak isn't made of bone. Also "the octopus' beak is linearly proportional to its size." I seem to remember Jean and Steve objecting to my even using that as a rough approximation. Very, verry silly. And the octopus doesn't crack clams by the force of its beak. And anyway, force doesn't scale linearly with size, it scales linearly as cross section of muscle, so the hypothetical 15x as long octo would be 15 x 15 times as strong, hence 225 times as strong. But octos drill or pull clams apart and paralyze them with cephalotoxin, anyway, so the whole experiment is meaningless. (Also, 200 foot octopuses don't exist anyway
)
by the way, having a GPO yank your mask off seems a lot scarier in those "mask + regulator + microphone" things-- do you guys keep an "octopus" spare normal regulator, too?
As usual, the dive footage is awesome. It's frustrating that the MonsterQuest folks seem to feel a need to sensationalize and believe in a 200' octopus, when you guys got to do so much cool stuff... the sunstar footage is great, the GPO looked fun to play with (heck, the footage of the GPO pulling off some other guy's mask looked fun, too, although it's hard for me to stay calm enough to have fun when my mask is flooding even for mundane reasons. )
Maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I think it's sad that the actual cool cephalopods aren't "enough." It's great that you guys get paid and sponsored, but the spin seems kind of "glamorize science by being unscientific" in nature.