Sighting of Possible Large Cephalopod Near Portugal

Sorry--just found this thread. Is this an elaborate put-on?
Everything about it seems to indicate just that. (I didn't
check the original post date--it wasn't April 1, was it???) :shock:

I've had a looooong week.

Vince
 
mournblade;116161 said:
Sorry--just found this thread. Is this an elaborate put-on?
Everything about it seems to indicate just that. (I didn't
check the original post date--it wasn't April 1, was it???) :shock:

I've had a looooong week.

Vince

Hmmm, a possibility I hadn't considered (silly me). His join date was 3/31 which could easily have been 4/1 in the UK... It seems like rather late in the game for continuing the joke, but I suppose it is still April...

edit: he recounted his tale here on 11/9/07:

User:Tim lipington - Wikipedia

which, I think, rules out April Foolery.
 
A siphonophore is something I hadn't considered at all... interesting idea (and it led me to discover the interesting website at Siphonophores ) Reading a bit, I found that many siphonophores are free swimmers... are they fast enough to account for this?
 
I'm pretty sure that in an el nino year the upwelling that normally occurs on the eastern border of the oceans switches to downwelling and some upwelling takes place on the western border of the oceans. But then again the temperature change from the warm water downwelling might cause an animal to move out of its usual location. And that website that Monty linked to states that siphonophores have been found as long as 40 m (~131 ft)
 
monty;116163 said:
Hmmm, a possibility I hadn't considered (silly me). His join date was 3/31 which could easily have been 4/1 in the UK... It seems like rather late in the game for continuing the joke, but I suppose it is still April...

edit: he recounted his tale here on 11/9/07:

User:Tim lipington - Wikipedia

which, I think, rules out April Foolery.

Hallucinogenics are also a possibility. . . . :bonk::rainbow::bugout:

Sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk--really, I don't! But again
this all sounds ludicrous.

But then, I could be completely wrong.

I'm a skeptic.:zappa: (I know--the Zappa icon has nothing to
do with my post, but I thought it was cool anyway.)

Vince
 
mournblade;116198 said:
Hallucinogenics are also a possibility. . . . :bonk::rainbow::bugout:

Sorry, I don't mean to be a jerk--really, I don't! But again
this all sounds ludicrous.

But then, I could be completely wrong.

I'm a skeptic.:zappa: (I know--the Zappa icon has nothing to
do with my post, but I thought it was cool anyway.)

Vince

Well, I've certainly learned that a lot of things that sounds ludicrous can sometimes be right... but I'd like to look at the sighting at face value, and see what we can figure out. I'm pretty skeptical about the huge cephalopod, because it seems inconsistent with what is known about huge cephalopods (and it's no doubt obvious that I got more than a bit grumpy on that point) but I can believe that Tim saw something unusual. I'm pretty suspicious that the "looks like a fishing net" is indicative that it was some animal caught in a fishing net, disguising its appearance, since I'm not aware of any marine animal, ceph or otherwise, that has a fishnet pattern... but I can easily imagine that a net in some sort of red flourescent plankton or algae could explain part of this. I started to look for what animals red flourescent protein ( used in molecular biology) was cloned from, but I got distracted by looking at the squidcicle webcam... green GFP was cloned from a jellyfish, but there's a whole page of different red/yellow/green/blue/orange floursecent protein genes that are inserted into embryos and such, and I didn't find a good reference for what animal/plant/etc each comes from... Since I did find a lot of references that red at depth is only known in dragonfish and siphonophores and perhaps a few rare organisms, I'm guessing that the source of the red light was likely to be something relatively shallow-water, like surface plankton or algae.

I want to give Tim's story a fair shake, and not accuse him of hallucinating or fabricating it, but I'm finding that the squid explanation is requiring more and more science fiction added the more closer we look, so it seems that there is a lot of evidence that it's barking up the wrong tree.

I think skepticism is good, jerkitude is not, and I'm also in the "I don't mean to be a jerk-- really" camp. But one of the things I really like about TONMO is that we can discuss Cthulhu stories and hypothetical "what if..." science fiction and discuss real, solid biology, but we are very good at not getting too mixed up on which is which. I signed up on a "true crime" web forum recently, and it's really made me appreciate how TONMO manages to avoid letting kooky theories get out of hand without needing to be condescending or abusive to people with genuine curiosity... I don't think I'll be spending much more time over there... I have complete sympathy for Tim, in that he finally found a plausible explanation for something that's been bugging him for years, and was hoping we'd confirm it... but as much as I'd love for him to have seen a kraken, I just don't see the observations fitting the theory....
 
monty;116163 said:
Hmmm, a possibility I hadn't considered (silly me). His join date was 3/31 which could easily have been 4/1 in the UK... It seems like rather late in the game for continuing the joke, but I suppose it is still April...

edit: he recounted his tale here on 11/9/07:

User:Tim lipington - Wikipedia

which, I think, rules out April Foolery.
I just reviewed this thread, too (but not every word). Lots of content to digest!

Can't you edit / manipulate post dates in Wiki? Even if you can't, it doesn't mean that Tim's involvement here on TONMO.com might not purposefully be in conjunction with April Fool's, with the Wiki entry planted prior. That'd be a pretty good one if it were a hoax! Elaborate, indeed.

But, who knows. Nobody, obviously. So since there is no evidence to support the claims, I'm not sure what left there is to get from this discussion (although as Monty stated, there is nothing here remotely worthy of banning, locking, censoring or closing -- just an observation that there's not much left here of any value).

In the future if someone hauls up a 120 foot squid, or someone finds a squid beak the size of a beer keg, I'll come back and read this thread in more detail! :smile:

:sink:
 
tonmo;116220 said:
Can't you edit / manipulate post dates in Wiki? Even if you can't, it doesn't mean that Tim's involvement here on TONMO.com might not purposefully be in conjunction with April Fool's, with the Wiki entry planted prior. That'd be a pretty good one if it were a hoax! Elaborate, indeed.

Although anyone can edit on wikipedia, AFAIK only moderators or 1337 Haxxors can change the dates or contents of the edit history. But Tim seems genuine to me, just so attached to the (what's bigger than colossal) gargantuan, immense squid theory that he comes across frustrated and defensive.
 
And if we act jerky towards him or accuse him of hallucinating, hoaxing etc. what is the chance other people will speak up when they see things out of the ordinary. I was called stupid by my brother for years for being open minded about giant squid reports, guess who was right in the long run. (he claims not to remember this)

Monty, you didn't go on one of those Bob Crane murder websites did you?
 
esquid;116224 said:
Monty, you didn't go on one of those Bob Crane murder websites did you?

Nah, my only Bob Crane interest is the occasional Hogan's Heroes rerun.

If you must know, I find the San Fransisco "Zodiac" killer sort of embarrassingly :oops: fascinating, I think because he was around and about while I was growing up in the SF Bay Area :goofysca: and was never caught, but sent letters and cryptograms that reveal some of his creepy psychotic cleverness. But I can't deal with wading through the conspiracy theorists and people who see patterns in clouds over at the forum about him... and I tried a bit, because they have found a new suspect (who's deceased) that might actually solve the case, but I like the forums here at TONMO quite a bit better, and they only give me nightmares about Cthulhu :cthulhu: (and occasionally Neil Diamond)

I think I didn't ever lose my youthful interest in the strange and unusual and creepy, but have learned enough about exaggeration, fabrication, and wishful thinking that I'm jaded, so I can't suspend disbelief about most "mysteries," or forget that Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character, but since we have actual knowledge of weird, interesting, surprising, and sometimes giant cephalopods, and it's entirely possible that I was in line at the grocery store with the Zodiac killer, I can't rationalize them away with skepticism. So there's "Monty pop-psychology 101," I guess. :rolleyes:
 

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