Hello!

Joined
Apr 28, 2008
Messages
3
Hey there, yet another new person posting!

I've been trawling this site for a wee while now so thought it was about time i made myself known:smile:

My main reason for poking about here is that I’m a student studying forensics and at the moment I’m doing an Ecology module, which involves a 10min presentation (:tomato:) which in my wisdom thought I’d do it on giant squid! I've always been interested in squid but wow! never knew there was so much info about them!
I’ve got to take my hat of to everyone that works on this site, I’ve gathered a tome of information from here as well as it being really interesting so a big thank you for all that hard work!!! (count me in as a regular!:wink:)
 
:welcome: to TONMO!

If you haven't already, check out the ARTICLES tab at the top, which has a few articles Steve and Kat have written about giants. And, of course, the physiology & biology forum...
 
Thanks for all the welcomes :biggrin2:

Well i've prepared myself for a long day got a tank of coffee and i'm now ready to research giant squid! :read:
but first i'm looking for some suggestions....

I'm slight torn between what i should actually talk about i don't know whether i should go down the path of why it's important to research and find out more about these Cephalopods as they are barometers of environmental change.

Or about why it's important to find out about these creatures and how they live as they are a gateway to neuron research for humans.

So if anyone has any imput or ideas on which topic i should go for it would be greatly appreciated

(p.s i LOVE the smilely's here hehehe)
 
If you're not completely beholden to actual "giant" squids and you'd settle for mere "jumbo" squids, the Humboldt jumbo squids Dosidicus gigas have been studied a lot by the folks in Monterey (Hopkins in Gilly's lab and MBARI, is that where Zeidberg is, or is he in Gilly's lab, too?) as a marker for possibly climate-driven changes that allow their migration northwards (there's some argument that fishing impact, changes in the anoxic layer, and so forth are related, too.) A google scholar search for "Dosidicus gigas" should help with papers on that, the news often calls them "giant squids" even though they're strictly speaking "jumbo squids" but there are a lot of "giant squids invade the California coast" type mainstream media articles... searching for "Humboldt squid" or similar will probably get most of them.

Although I'm about as big a fan as one can get about studying cephalopods to learn about nervous systems in general, I think that giant squids and other deep-water cephs aren't so great for that for purely pragmatic reasons: they're hard to observe in their natural settings, and they don't really make good candidates for lab culture. Studying squids has been a fundamental part of neurophysiology, in that Hodgkins and Huxley based their model of neurons in general on the squid giant axon, but that is a very large axon in a normal-sized market squid (Loligo). Based on current research, there's not much reason to believe that studying giant, deep-water squids will tell us a lot that studying small, shallow-water squids doesn't, as much as I wish the NIH would fund giant-squid-observing expeditions because of their great potential to improve our understanding of human neuroscience. If you want to go that route, though, see what books by J.Z. Young are available in your school library, and also look for Hanlon and Messenger Cephalopod Behavior. I think studying cephalopods in general is a great idea as a gateway to understanding neurobiology in general, and hence human neurobiology, but I wouldn't think that's as easy an argument to make if you're scope is limited to giant squids. J.Z. Young pretty much devoted his entire life to understanding brains in general with the focus on cephalopods as model animals.
 
I think Monty is right. In either of the ideas you have for your presentation, you will find more information about the Humboldt than you will about archi. Good luck.
 
monty... your a fount of information!
thanks for all that imput, and no i'm not dead set on giant squid. i wanted to talk about them more for my own curiosity than anything else but i shall take what you said and go forth to the world of google!

once again thanks :cool2:
 
my pleasure. Good luck with your presentation, and let us know if there are other ways we can help!
 

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