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New Deep Sea Squid
texchanchan writes: "Yahoo reports on a newly discovered species of deep-sea squid, quoting scientists as saying the creatures are very different from normal giant squids. 'New species are a dime a dozen. This is fundamentally different' in behavior and appearance -- with 10 identical long skinny arms and a jellyfish-like hunting strategy. 'We don't know of any cephalopod that has arms like that.' --Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. 'I had never seen anything like this creature,' oceanographer William Sager of Texas A&M says."
The article is a little light on details. Other than the ten legs nothing else seems to suggest this is a squid. It feeds like a jellyfish, it looks like a jellfish(to me). Radial symetry is characteristic of jellyfish so ten legs of equal lenght don't rule out jellyfish. Nothing is mentioned about the rigidity of the beast which would point in the direction of the squid. Tranceparency (can't tell from the photo) might indicate jellyfish, but not rule out squid, depending on internal structures that might be seen. Based solely on the article I am inclined to decalre it a jellyfish. Perhaps more than five or ten minutes of behavioral observation and a captured specimen to study would be helpful.
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Considering that the earth 90% water and how little we have catalouged the deep sea, its going to be interestig to see what we find...
The deep sea pages at Whitman College have some cool pictures of wierd deep sea creatures.
The Beastiary at NOVA also has a decent rundown of whats down there.
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Here is a Link with video. Didn't test it though as I don't have the required Realplayer at work.
watch it swim
(requires realplayer)
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Referenced in several places, along with claims that Architeuthis will aggressively attack whales and ships. Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!
This new species is certainly unusual (compared to the surface beasties that we're used to), but bear in mind that it's part of a subclass that varies in length from 6mm to 16,000mm (and nearly half a ton, that we know of).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
These things apparently can move quite fast and in a coordinated way. That goes way beyond what jellyfish are capable of. A biologist looking at a moving video image would be very unlikely to confuse the two, and I suspect lots of expert marine biologists have looked at them.
Couple of photos I haven't seen on other sites here - as well as a video of it swimming (in QT).
Some very significant differences. They have differentiated tissue-muscles separate from skin, an actual digestive tract, and probably the most-developed nervous system of all of the invertebrates, including eyes structured similarly to ours. Squid also have an actual circulatory system, but something that actually functions almost like a heart. And squids are actually bilaterally symmetrical. In plain English, that means there's one plane down which you can split a squid, and the two parts will be mirror images of each other.
OTOH, jellyfish are like anemones and hydrae. That means they're undifferentiated. Their tissues are only two cells thick, because each cell needs to be exposed to seawater in order to get oxygen or nutrients. They're undifferentiated, meaning they don't have different types of cells. They have no real nervous system at all. Nor do they have a circulatory system. They're radially symmetrical, meaning that any radial section will be pretty much identical to any other.
In all seriousness, probably not very good. A lot of large deep-sea squid taste like ammonia.
How efficient could propulsion by rounded tentacle be[...]
It doesn't use the tentacles for swimming, according to the story on NPR yesterday. It has a pair of elephant-ear-shaped wings on top of the body, which give it both good speed and fine control, and make it to hover while it's feeding.
Current conjecture is that the tentacles are "sticky" (whether due to a substance or suction mechanisms, they didn't say). One specimen that was actually caught on video seems to be "stuck" to the submersible that was shooting the video, and coudn't easily get free. The squid appears to spread the tentacles much like a spider's web, hoping to snag smal crustaceans that bump into it.
Here is the original article from Science magazine.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/294/
And here are more videos on Science's website.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/294/
These are from Science's new Brevia section, which includes some quite interesting and readable articles.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/current/#brev
Actually, I was referring to the "first post" from CordMyer, in which s/he asserted that all squid have 10 arms, that 2 were typically elongated, and that "the other 8 are used for propulsion." I'm not sure exactly how this new breed is said to get about, but I thought known squid types did move by a form of underwater jet propulsion, not by using 8 arms for propulsion. Other squid also have the "wings" on the mantle noted on the new mystery beast, but those aid in directional control, not in propulsion.
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