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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."
All squid have ten arms, but 2 are usually much longer & skinnier than the others. It seems this one has them all the same length. the 2 longer tentacles are used for feeding, they shoot them into schools of fish & then retract them. the other 8 are for propulsion.
A Soviet tanker in 1965 came across a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale that would have weighed around 40 tonnes. The fight continued for some time and finished far below in the depths, beyond the range of the tanker's sonar equipment. About an hour after the sighting the strangled body of the whale was found floating in the ocean. It still had the giant squid wrapped around its body. But the squid did not win - its head was found inside the stomach of the whale!
Man and Goat
Isn't it obvious what this is? It's a spawn of cthulhu! It's not a squid, but an alien monster that protects the Great Old One and works in colaboration with the Deep Ones!
;-)
I remember reading about these huge squids as a child. It's really cool to have a genuine mystery here, it's just sad that before long it'll get studied and filmed and explained and I can't hope for the Cthulhu link anymore.
Did they ever discover any unexplained ruins in the Antarctic or in central Australia?
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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watch it swim
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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.
Then how the hell do they know it is a squid?
They telnetted into its port 3128.
A cursory examination of the photo would reveal to nearly ANY biologist (marine or not, though my experience is in marine invertebrates) that this is NOT a scyphozoan ("Jellyfish"), or even a Cnidarian (supergroup containing jellyfish, corals, anemone's, hydras etc...) If you really didnt want to believe this is a squid, you might suppose it is a tentacled ctenophore (comb jelly which most people have never heard of but are really quite common).
/. story interested you)
From looking at the picture the animal appears to "fly" using its two HUGE fins (the fins are squid features). The mantle (head covering) is very narrow at the dorsal end (the end at the top of the picture Note to those who know what dorsal means: YES this IS the dorsal side of a squid...) while being fairly broad at the ventral side to accomodate (we presume) the mouth and organs.
The features of this animal are not at all un-squidlike, using occams razor and the BIOLOGICAL features of the animal (not just the way it looks to some shmo) its easy to hypothesize that this is a squid.
Take a look at the Pteropod Sea Angel (Clione) and tell me its a snail. When you can do that successfully come back and comment on this animal. (Note to others: Clione is VERY VERY cool, take a look at the pics if this
In all seriousness, probably not very good. A lot of large deep-sea squid taste like ammonia.
It seems to me like there are a lot of people chasing their tails around about whether it's a squid or a jellyfish. Well if it doesn't really fit into either category, doesn't mean that it is something ELSE? God forbid we have to change the books.
Therefore I propose:
half squid + half jellyfish = Jellysquish
As for "no eyes visible" and "transparent"...we've got one not-very-good photo; the scientists say they videotaped it for up to ten minutes. I think I'll go with their judgement. Besides which eyelessness is not unknown among deep-sea creatures either, like the hagfish. So, an eyeless, mostly symmetric squid that behaves like a jellyfish...it would be a weird squid, but it could still be one.
It can bunch its arms into a flattened oval and develop brown patches to resemble a toxic flatfish, curl and hang its arms and turn light blue to resemble a local jellyfish, elongate and develop stripes to look like a sea snake. Absolutely mindblowing.
Unfortunately the pictures they selected to put on the web don't begin to do it justice.
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