Sighting?

Thanks, Steve! Sad about the whales... :frown:

Boy, what a site...mysterious sea globsters...tragic tales of cetacean love and loss...mysteries solved in under 24 hours...clownfish recipies and wine selection...Kiwi teuthologists...

You JUST can't get that on Yahoo.

rusty
 
An article posted yesterday later in the afternoon now features the headline, Chilean 'Blob' May Be Giant Octopus, Whale Blubber.

While I am happy that this stirs up interest in octopuses, thus increasing traffic and membership to TONMO.com :smile:, I'd say it's pretty clear that Steve is right, this is most probably whale blubber -- and I'm a layman. I have definitely seen pictures of these "globsters" before (such as the infamous St. Augustine, Florida globster), and they have invariably been discovered to be decomposed whale blubber. :chillpil: :smile:

Hey Phil, didn't you get a postcard of a globster off eBay a few months back? That was a good catch if I remember correctly...
 
tonmo said:
Hey Phil, didn't you get a postcard of a globster off eBay a few months back? That was a good catch if I remember correctly...

Yeah, that's right Tony. I meant to post a picture of it at the time....but I forgot!

Anyway, here it is. It's very strange image and was billed on e-bay as a postcard but is infact a photograph. It's a pity that there is no location or date on the photo (any ideas?) but there is some form of car in the background which looks as if it was built in the late twenties. The car is hard to make out, though.

The 'thing' in question looks more like a sculpture than an amorphous globster. Perhaps Mr Barnham was up to his old tricks again? Amusingly, someone has written that the specimen (?) belongs to the Octabus family!
 
Obviously , We have been incorrect. This is an Octobus giganteus ssp.noterietious A well known subspecies of the drifting, amoral form of Octobus giganteus giganteus.
" O.g.noterietious is a commonly occuring cephalopod of unusual dimensions, adults are frequently in excess of 200 meters in length, living in small sand depressions near carnivals and traveling shows (especially those featuring the bearded lady). Their food preferences are still unknown, but a scattering of popcorn boxes and empty ice cream tins does suggest a varied diet of junk food...
Several were found last year near crop circles in Iceland, damaging the watercress crops of two farmers quite severely, and this subspecies now has been listed as a "pest" species on the USDA list of ill-mannered animals not for human consumption."
from the Emerging Animal Report, USFW 2003

Gosh all...shouldn't we be embarrassed????
(sic) :lol:
Greg
 
Submitted for your approval -- a 30-foot-long communal jellyfish with 9-foot-long tentacles:

http://animal.discovery.com/convergence/futureiswild/poll/poll_100mill.html

[Click on the "Ocean Phantom" pic]

Then read the short story "The Man With A Thousand Legs" in Frank Belknap Long's anthology RIM OF THE UNKNOWN.

Has the future arrived 100,000,000 years early?

Or is life imitating Cthulhu Mythos literature?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Taningia Danae, Scholar-in-Residence
Dana Scully Academy of Urgent Whispers and Furtive Glances
 
tonmo said:
I have definitely seen pictures of these "globsters" before (such as the infamous St. Augustine, Florida globster), and they have invariably been discovered to be decomposed whale blubber.

Tony,

The identity of the St. Augustine "Monster" is still a subject of debate. The last time it was subjected to a scientific study, the authors analyzed what was left of a tissue sample and announced that it wasn't an octopus, but couldn't decide on what it was, offering as provisional ID's a Basking shark or whale skin/blubber mass.

The Chilean blob shows one striking point of similarity to the St. Augustine blob: a straight, short cut in the tissue of the bulbous "head." Perhaps this is the blow-hole aperture, turned inside out?

I, for one, am interested in the mechanics of a whale's decomposition. How does a floating, dead whale become a beached skin? Is it opened up by scavengers and "cored" until the skeleton drops out?

Clem
 
Even the BBC is now claiming that this is a giant octopus of some description - see BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chilean blob could be octopus. Richard Sabin, whale specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said he would be surprised if this turned out to be whale blubber, though he's made this judgement on the basis of the photos alone (though I suppose we've ALL made judgements just from those photos!).

He's quite right when he says that we won't know for sure what it is until a bio-sample gets back to a lab for a thorough investigation.

It's an intriguing one alright!
 
p.s. hi to everyone on the forums - the above was my first post (I've been a silent observer up to now but have a great love of everything piscatorial or sea-based, having grown up about 300m from the sea on the south coast of England).

I shall look forward to contributing to the forums as best I can in the future!
 
Clem
Dead whales decompose very rapidly - the blubber is such an efficient insulator that the body heat is retained after the animal dies, enabling bacteria to decompose the insides rapidly. A sperm whale washed up on a beach will virtually dissappear in 10 days - including most of the bones. (Sperm whale bone is full of oil and apart from the jaw & atlas/axis vertebare articulations, very soft and almost spnge-like). The only part of the body that persists is the blubber, which forms a strange ragged white fibrous mass (often with little smell) variously identified as "mystery monster". Makes for better newspaper headlines than "big dead smelly whale on beach"
 

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