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At the June Apogaea regional Burning Man event in Colorado, they burned a wooden/cloth giant squid. Before the burn, participants could crawl into the base of the body and turn a massive kaleidoscope with sun shining in the top. (Pictures of the squid and its demise. A picture from the inside.)
I sure want to know more:
Giants have very strange sexual behaviour where the male has a metre-long muscular penis that he uses a bit like a nail gun and shoots cords of sperm under the skin of the female’s arms and she carries the sperm around with her until she is ready to lay her big jelly mass of a million eggs.
Tomorrow, in Australia.
EDITED TO ADD (7/16): More news.
EDITED TO ADD (7/22): A final note:
…the poor museum volunteers, the hardy souls who showed the members of the public around, explained what was going to happen, and led them to their seats. Raise your glass to …
the super calamari giblet exhibition docents.
It’s twenty-five feet long, with tentacles the size of human legs.
We’re contaminating the squid:
The toxic chemicals that Vecchione and colleagues from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found are a rogues gallery of scary initials: PCBs, TBTs, BDEs, and DDT among them. Scientists classify all of them as POPs, or persistent
Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs.
These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude that the cuttlefish embryos must peer through their eggs, and learn to recognise their prey, a behaviour which will help give them a head-start in life.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.