Friday Squid Blogging: Stinky Squid
It’s a mushroom: Pseudocolus fusiformis.
Entries Tagged "squid"
Page 87 of 108
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Police
I like to think this isn’t a typo.
Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Squid
Neat:
Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.
The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac.
The calcified ink was ground with a solution of ammonia to turn it into ink.
Another article.
Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid is "Timid"
Contrary to my previous blog entry on the topic, Humboldt squid are really timid:
Humboldt squid feed in surface waters at night, then retreat to great depths during daylight hours. “They spend the day 300 meters deep where oxygen levels are very low,” Seibel said. “We wanted to know how they deal with so little oxygen.”
Seibel said that while the squid are strong swimmers with a parrot-like beak that could inflict injury, man-eaters they are not. Unlike some large sharks that feed on large fish and marine mammals, jumbo squid use their numerous small, toothed suckers on their arms and tentacles to feed on small fish and plankton that are no more than a few centimeters in length.
[…]
Seibel was surprised by the large number of squid he encountered, which made it easy to imagine how they could be potentially dangerous to anything swimming with them. Their large numbers also made Seibel somewhat pleased that they appeared frightened of his dive light. Yet he said the animals were also curious about other lights, like reflections off his metal equipment or a glow-in-the-dark tool that one squid briefly attacked.
“Based on the stories I had heard, I was expecting them to be very aggressive, so I was surprised at how timid they were. As soon as we turned on the lights, they were gone,” he said. “I didn’t get the sense that they saw the entire diver as a food item, but they were definitely going after pieces of our equipment.”
I don’t trust the research, or the squid.
Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Invasion
Thousands of jumbo flying squid, aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles, have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on beaches.
They’re aggressive:
One diver described how one of the rust-coloured creatures ripped the buoyancy aid and light from her chest, and grabbed her with its tentacles.
…a powerful, outsize squid that features eight snakelike arms lined with suckers full of nasty little teeth, a razor-sharp beak that can rapidly rip flesh into bite-size chunks, and an unrelenting hunger. It’s called the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid, and it’s not the sort of calamari you’re used to forking off your dinner plate. This squid grows to seven feet or more and perhaps a couple hundred pounds. It has a rep as the outlaw biker of the marine world: intelligent and opportunistic, a stone-cold cannibal willing to attack divers with a seemingly deliberate hostility.
[…]
Humboldts—mostly five-footers—swarmed around him. As Cassell tells it, one attacked his camera, which smashed into his face, while another wrapped itself around his head and yanked hard on his right arm, dislocating his shoulder. A third bit into his chest, and as he tried to protect himself he was gang-dragged so quickly from 30 to 70 feet that he didn’t have time to equalize properly, and his right eardrum ruptured. “I was in the water five minutes and I already had my first injury,” Cassell recalls, shaking his head. “It was like being in a barroom brawl.” Somehow he managed to push the squid-pile off and make his way to the surface, battered and exhilarated. “I was in love with the animal,” he says.
That article is a really fun read.
This isn’t the first time they’ve invaded the waters of Southern California, and they’ve been spotted as North as Seattle.
Info on cooking them.
Friday Squid Blogging: Bottled Water Plus Squid
Only in Japan:
Bandai toy company from Japan has finally realized that bottles of water just aren’t cute. As Japan is the cute capital of the world, this just wouldn’t do. To fix the problem, they developed these adorable floating squids that can be added to any bottle of water. Thank god for Japanese innovation. Of course, they’re only available in Japan, but at least they’re affordable at only $6 each.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.