[Featured]: Architeuthis (Giant Squid) Sightings

[mmmccrthy3000]

I work at a zoo that has a manatee hospital, and have helped with many treatments... when you find yourself at the bottom of a drained pool with 1,000 pounds of pissed-off sirenia, it can be pretty unnerving. Just saying.

mermaid = sirenia

 

[cephalopodcast]

Sweet. I am down in Sarasota. Been looking forward to this. Will have to check it out soon.

 

[mmmccrthy3000]

Here be some pics. Kinda crappy, my apologies. There are also ammonites, and the like.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79892962@N00/

 

[joe chow]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/new_zealand_colossal_squid
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070222/wl_nm/newzealand_squid_dc

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand fishermen may have caught the largest Colossal squid ever found -- weighing around 450kg (992 pounds) and with rings the size of tires.



The adult Colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was caught by fishermen long lining for toothfish in deep ocean off Antarctica, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said on Thursday in announcing the catch.

 

[WhiteKiboko]

In the interest of simplicity, i'm going to lock the thread....

discussion can be found here:
[News]: Very Large Colossal Squid Caught

 

[Phil]

I think I may have found two images of a live giant squid that we have not seen before on a Japanese fishing website. Don't get too excited as the images are very small and it is hard to make out exactly what is going on. They appear to be dated 15th April 2004, and seem to show a very large squid feeding off bait squid on a line.

If anyone can speak Japanese on this site, perhaps it may be worth contacting the fishing site for better images. Volunteers most welcome.

Here's the link anyway: http://homepage1.nifty.com/ozok/daiouika3.htm

Have you seen these before Steve, Kat? I'm afraid the two thumbnails below are actual size and there are no larger versions to be found. Frustrating indeed.

 

[Phil]

They look very similar indeed to our mysterious blue-water Daiouika photo we found a couple of years ago. I wonder if they are from the same sequence?

 

[Clem]

Phil, great finds! More Japanese folks speak English than vice-versa, so I'd go ahead and write to the man. Those pics have to be of the squid you found way back when...there's another pic at Ozok's site that I hadn't seen before, it's really strange, either the squid is diving down and away, hiding the mantle, or it's broken in half! Link here.

Clem

 

[tonmo]

those eyes are just unbelievable to me!

 

[Clem]

My sense is that those two areas that look like eyes are mantle openings separated by the nuchal fusion (head to mantle). Attached is an enlargement of one pic that Phil found, put through PixelNhance; you can see the mantle openings clearly, and the bulges on either side of the head (just above the arm corona) could be the eyes.

 

[Tintenfisch]

I hadn't seen these before - they also remind me of the photos of that mystery large squid in Tonga.

 

[OB]

And there's these to consider, including Tisanoteuthis (?) my long lost "spent Moroteuthis" and an oarfish. Clem, where did you get those high res versions? I'll dig deeper into the site, I guess...

 

[Clem]

Hello Ob,

Where did you find those? I don't know the story behind your long-lost spent Moro, either. I once lost a favorite ball at the beach when I was young, and I never got over it. That last pic I posted was high-res only in the sense that I had enlarged and enhanced it with some software. Here's another enlarged one below, with the noise dialed way down and the yellows reduced (gave slightly better definition to the arms, head and mantle). There's a lot of dark, reddish matter in the water, and what looks like froth from the boat's engine; the last enlargement I posted showed visible damage to the squid's arms. Could this Archie have collided with the boat's prop?

Clem

 

[OB]

I would say we're seeing tentacles as "a lot of dark reddish matter" in the above pic. The previous ones I posted (that's Thysanoteuthis, obviously...) are also from the same japanese site, just click on the arrows at the bottom, lots of T. rhombus, billfish and the occasional small oarfish.

The rusty red pic used to be on the previous incarnation of this page, in between the arrow squid and Architeuthis: it always intrigued me, showed a large mantle, large fin, tiny eyes squid that was apparently a spent female Moroteuthis. It disappeared from the site, for a while still showing the "broken" icon. I really wanted to see that picture once more to see how it would teach me anything on Meso's ocular appearance.

The high res pics I was referring to to you, are the ones you linked to earlier: I was simply curious whether there were any more high res versions of the big thumbnails.



A right treasuretrove this turns out to be!

 

[kracken]

those pics with what looks like eyes on top of the head really remind me of the kraken pic here...

Kraken - Wikipedia