Nik said:
As a start (and please feel free to move this question if it should be in another forum) is there anything in particular you’d like to witness first hand in terms of archi or messie behaviour?
1) We often talk about the oesophagus of the squid passing straight through its brain. There's a 'pill' out there that docs use, you swallow, about the size of a vitamin pill; there's a camera inside that pill. What I'd dearly love to see is a reconstructed CG sequence of prey being dismembered by the beaks, passed over and manipulated by teeth on the palatine palps (see images in a thread on Phys & Bio titled 'research opportunity: comparative study of palatine palps ...' [or something to this effect]), down the oesophagus (and constriction around the brain), crop, stomach .... until finally you reach the anus. What a sequence that might be!! One day when technology has improved, and we can fit a video inside this 'pill', I'd like to do this on the real thing; right now we're limited to stills.
2) ditto, inside the whale (from the squid being caught [without the whale using its teeth], swallowed, down the whale's throat and into the first stomach; totally darkness; pill-light goes on to reveal cavern inside whale, a few glowing/expiring photophores of earlier-ingested squid, and many thousands of squid beaks). The undigested squid beaks inside the stomach supposedly assist with the mastication of fresh squid. Have the squid being tumbled around, dismembered, abraded, shredded ... and after a couple of days (and 2000-3000 squid later) the whale regurgitates the beaks back up (rather than passing them through the intestine and out the anus (sharp beaks ... ouch)). One day, with a REAL (albeit dead)
Architeuthis (and I've got one lined up for the task - just need to seek permission to do something like this ....), I'd like to attach a tiny video camera (tiny being the operative word) to this floating carcass, in a place frequented by sperm whales, and hopefully have the thing swallowed!!! Then you could get the actual footage of what goes on inside the whale ... and have the 'video pill' either regurgitated or passed out the back end, with a transmitter on it to pick it up once 'set free'. Wouldn't that be cool!
3) Most people consider the tentacles of
Archi are propelled out to restrain prey, but this isn't the case. The tentacles suspend near-vertically below the squid, and like a pair of pincers their expanded distal clubs pluck unsuspecting prey from the water column. The entire animal (squid) then lunges forward to restrain the prey many metres below (in the pincer-like distal tentacle clubs), restraining it with the arms before dispatching it with the beak. This hasn't been recreated in CG, even on my own docos, because this isn't how people expect the squid to behave (it's supposed to be a monster, rather than an animal with table manners).
4) What could that buccal membrane (see images in Phys & Bio in the thread started by CarlS, 'scale ref drawings of Archi' [or some such title]) be used for? You could have a lot of fun with this!! Does it serve to create some vacuum, or act as a pump, to smother prey, or as some big muscular hand to hold prey whilst the beaks are dispatching it??? To date only a vestige of the membrane has appeared on any squid, because the structure of it is so complicated and animators have had a terrible time getting their head around it.
Extreme silliness? Neil??? Nooo
ooooooo, not here, surely!