Collosal squid caught "alive"

OB

Colossal Squid
Staff member
Moderator (Staff)
Joined
Oct 19, 2003
Messages
3,111
Hello ob,

:notworth:

I believe you've just "made your bones," as we say in la cosa nostra.

This is most definitely not old news. Something similar happened back in March/April of this year, but this is the first I've heard of a Mesonychoteuthis capture in June.

Those pictures look like stills from a video. Stills are wonderful, of course, but if there's a video...

Congrats, ob. Great find.

Cheers,
Clem
 
It's the same one Clem; I'm glad the news is out. Seems to have been quite some week for squid!

I haven't seen this specimen ob, but I was contacted by the observer several months ago (and made ref to some sensational new photos that would soon be released). I understand that there IS some video of this brute, albeit at the surface.
 
Steve,

I guess I must be missing something (or the South Georgia newletter got its dates wrong) because I remember hearing about this back in April, but the article says the event happened at the end of June.

I'm experiencing temporal displacement.

Clem
 
Clem said:
I'm experiencing temporal displacement.
Not to worry; I have no recollection of dates - I've just asked someone what month it is. Everything is a blur of late.
 
I did some webtrawling on our photographer friend Ramon Ferreira Gomez, but didn't get much further than the fact that this man has commandeered at least two *different (fishing) vessels, one of them being the Belize registered Arbumasa XXV, actively fishing antarctic waters and landing him a brush with the French navy at one stage: "Excusez moi Monsieur, but eet eez ne pas le season de messie!" I guess Clem's right with his assessment that we all experience some temporal misallignment at some stage in our lives 8o)

*Edit: The Isla Santa Clara is actually the same ship, flagged by Chile in 1999

Now, for that video...
 
This is astonishing! The time of the squid is upon us.

Ob :notworth:

From the article it looks like the Natural History Museum (UK) may get some samples (or may already have some by now).
 
ob, thanks much for posting. I've gone ahead and removed the "Old News?" from your subject title, as it is not!

Aren't there some video clips available on the 2nd link in ob's post? Looks like yes, but requires quicktime.
 
Tony, Apple rules.... albeit a very small kingdom. I know #2 links to a commercial site (no plug intended), but "signing up" is for free and gives you access to the higher definition versions of interesting footage of all things under the sea. Number of cephs to enjoy and rare footage of animals like finback whales underwater.

One of my favorietes, the mimic octopus:

http://www.oceanfootage.com/stockfootage/Mimic_Octopus/

Has this beautifully adaptive species found itself a thread on this fine forum yet?

For the ever curious, it was apparently first discovered in 1998

http://marinebio.org/species.asp?id=260

National Geographic in 2001: "Mark Norman of the Melbourne Museum in Australia and fellow researchers Julian Finn of the University of Tasmania in Australia and Tom Tregenza of the University of Leeds in England describe the octopus mimic in the September 7 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of London."

"Tregenza said the octopus may decide which creature to impersonate depending on what particular predator is near. Evidence of such behavior came from observations showing that when the octopus was attacked by territorial damselfishes, it mimicked one of the fishes' common predators, the banded sea snake."

You can see the latter in movie #4 to be downloaded from the marinebio.org link supplied above. Bloody impressive!

Sorry Tony, it again requires Quicktime:biggrin2:
 
:smile: I do have quicktime on my desktop PC, but not on my laptop... as I'm writing to you now from my PC, I can say -- cool videos! I believe had seen that link here some time ago, but it looks like there's some new footage as well. Thanks for sharing!

Re: the videos in the link in the first post in this thread, I now see that those of course were not Mesonychoteuthis but rather Humbolt vids... (but Quicktime should not have been required to make that observation, I should have just read the text to the right!) ...oopsie-do ... :oops:
 

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