New Giant Squid documentary

Special was kind of... lame... however... will ratings affect say possible funding for more dives etc...?

I want actual footage so bad... how do these things get funded? How can I help? Thanks.
 
I suppose a lot of us watched Discovery and saw our very own Steve plus some interesting footage of the giant squid. It was the best view I'd ever had of sucker rings, beaks and the squid in various poses.
It looked much more active and lively in the photos than in the animations, but I guess that's to be expected.

Nancy
 
Very cool, nice to see Steve in the flesh (so to speak...). I was wondering about the computer animation of the squid catching and eating the fish. I understand that the two tentacles "zip" together, but do you think they really bring the food to their mouth like that? All other cuttlefish and squid that I have seen just retract their tentacles straight in and don't bend them toward their mouth.

Also why were they calling the bait cuttlefish/squid? Weren't they squid?
 
In all seriousness, I hadn't realized they got so many different shots, or that the squid struggled for that long. The question remains....how would that one hunt, or was he destined to slowly starve?
 
Thales said:
They were squid! :smile:

Except when they showed how small squid hunt by showing a "squid" in a tank; I'm pretty sure that was a cuttlefish, but they called it a squid. Although maybe it was a sepioteuthis... it seemed to have a skirt all the way around the mantle, though, which I thought was a feature unique to cuttlefish...

I am watching it now. Amazing they used all that Neil Diamond music! :wink:

When they introduced Steve, they said something like "he has a singular obsession with one thing..." and I said out loud, "yeah, Neil Diamond"

And I agree with everyone who didn't like the animations. ick. And they showed the squid "strobing" when fighting with the sperm whale... It looked like they were going on dosidicus for that, but I thought architeuthis had no photophores at all. I certainly didn't notice any evidence of photophore or chromatophore activity in the severed tentacle. Seeing it grip with its suckers was pretty cool, though...

And was that a brief shot of Kat next to Steve at a lab bench? I didn't think it looked like her face for momentary shot, but I wasn't sure...
 
Urm, alright, I'm watching it now. I can tell you right now that the narration is a problematic translation (from the original Japanese?), and often out of synch with the images. Guess the translators didn't get the different ways "ika" can be modified...

Holy cow...amazing footage of sperm whales eating giant squid at the surface...I've been waiting for that stuff for years, too:wink:

What? Man in boat attacked by huge squid? No ID, no information or translation of what the man says? Did they only have a Japanese translator? (The fellow looks Northern European)

What?! That's got to be a Mesonychoteuthis club Steve pulls out of the bottle...no clue about it in the narrator's voice-over...

Ah, there you are, Steve...Did you appear in the Japanese version? If so, what did the Japanese translator do to you?

WHAT?! That's got to be animation from the elusive "Animal Face-Off" showing a colossal squid fighting back against a sperm whale...hence the photophoric strobing...again, no word in the narration about it being a totally different kind of squid...

And those had to have been Messie beaks they were sorting in a tray...wait, that wasn't Kat, was it? No, not the beaks, I just caught a glimpse of a young woman with an American accent and hair that wasn't black and pointy...

Oh, here we go...here comes the severed tentacle (called "part of an arm," eh)...Wow. Wow. Video of moving, gripping Architeuthis tentacle, that's a remarkable sight. Thank goodness they had a camcorder on the boat, at least...

Damn, the full sequence of still photos is stunning, absolutely stunning...squid really stretches his arms out wide, and if those were the eyes they were opened very wide, too.

Steve, did you cut your hair with a weed-whacker again?

More Messie CGI. Why does it sound like a dog's squeak toy?

Like what you have to say at the end, there, Steve. Such good-will between scientists is nice to see.

If the aim of this program was to get Japanese folks revved up about the potential for further exploration and research (and kick in some cash), then it must have done rather well, but the English narration isn't very good and is sometimes almost perversely uninformative. TONMO folks who've been following this story will get more out of it than most, I think, but the footage is fantastic and should spark some general interest, here, too.

Oh, and were those Messie's beak-marks in that whales snoot?

Clem
 
Clem said:
Steve, did you cut your hair with a weed-whacker again??
:tomato:
I haven't seen the doco Clem, but I did read the transcript and know where you are coming from.
 

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