Oh man, I have a story to tell everybody.
So I was working with Dr. Gilly - yes, that Dr. Gilly of Humboldt Squid fame - and Dr. Ken Baltz (a NOAA researcher whose project du jour was inventorying the stomach contents of Humboldts) and one of Dr. Gilly's grad students at the National Science and Engineering Festival, and Dr. Gilly says that he's reserving one of the squid until 2:00 or something because it's some kid's birthday.
I learn later that the kid and his family flew ALL THE WAY FROM MICHIGAN to the National Science and Engineering Festival because Dr. Gilly is his personal hero.
The kid - probably a 10- to 11-year-old boy comes to the booth and I swear he reminds me of me when I was his age (though I'm female). Precocious little bugger, obviously very bright. And I tell his mom that he reminds me of me when I was his age and that she's doing a good job, and she looks fairly pleased 'cause I tell her I'm now in school as a biology major and well on track to study cephalopods in grad school.
I excise the animal's brain (which apparently his grad student learned how to do from me, and I admit to feeling rather smug - it actually required decapitating the animal just to be able to get at the cartilage cleanly, and the rest of the brain - minus the optic lobes, which have the consistency of wet yarn except are significantly more delicate and mushy and composed of tissue - is the size of an individual nut of a peanut), and it, including both optic lobes, gets weighed on a luggage scale Dr. Gilly brought, and we compare it with the animal's body mass, which I think is awesome. Dr. Gilly said, I quote, that it was somewhere between "a frog and a dog".
I managed to quietly hand the kid one of the Humboldt squid's marbly lenses as a birthday gift from everybody.