Today's conspiracy question: did Dr Ku know about the "Cephalopodmas" quasi-holiday that PZ Meyers (and seemingly few others) has been pushing, and time it deliberately, or is this just a fortuitous coincidence?
I'm wondering if the video ends where it does because the jet of water hit the camera, or if that's just edited for the most mass appeal segment. I was hoping to see more evidence to counter the "architeuthis is kind of weak" theory/myth, but it seems to be fairly laid back, rather like "hey, let go of me, and my food, you jerks, I'll shoot some water at you, and maybe you'll wise up!" not "I shall lash out and thrash you all!" That certainly seems in character for cephalopod personalities, though-- I was just hoping for solid evidence so I could remove the "It is believed that giant squids are too weak to lift their tentacles out of the water" claim from wikipedia... (I still don't believe it-- it seemed pretty clear that it could have lifted its arms out without any trouble; although it does seem like the tentacles are specialized for the long-range grab, so it's likely it's even more disinclined to use them for anything but prey capture...)
I agree with OB on the eye, it looks much more lidded than bulbous, the way they're often portrayed in models. This looks like it has great potential for eye preservation. It's probably desirable to preserve the whole animal, but I'd love to see the results of some detailed eye dissection-- retina electron micrographs, put some rhabdomeres into a blender and compare the photopigment to the well-studied GPO rhodopsin, etc. Getting an idea of the lens and retina geometry would be neat, too-- do they have any regions of higher acuity? It looked like the pupil was a cat-eye slit more than the horizontal slits and W shapes we see in most surface-dwelling cephs; it seems like the deepwater ones (at least Vampyroteuthis) have rounder pupils, but I don't remember seeing any cat-like ones on squids before... Also, it looks like the picture of a dying architeuthis we determined had been photoshopped around the eye was fairly accurate, although the yellow-eye effect wasn't in this video, that could easily be related to the flash picture...
