The Sotong Supreme - Colossal Squid from Antartica being studied

When JenMei was offered a place in Stanford, I started to fantasize. If I had the opportunity to go to Stanford myself, what would I study? The answer was easy: marine biology. The Monterey Bay Aquarium would be a lovely place to spend study hours, gazing at silently floating jellyfish, glaring at piranha, glowering at sunfish and gawking at puffers. The aquarium opened in 1984 and was built with a $55M gift from Dave & Lucile Packard. They gave generously also to Dave's alma mater, Stanford University. Memories of Doc from Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, collecting specimens from lonely tidal pools by the Monterey coast come flooding back. And my specialization in the Marine Biology course? Giant and Colossal Squid.

Imagine my delight when I came across an article on Wired's website last night which revealed, based on autopsy findings of a defrosting colossal squid specimen in New Zealand, that Colossal Squid had the largest eyes of any living creature on earth. Eleven inches across, and a lens the size of an orange. Designed to let in as much light as possible in the ocean depths the squid calls home and hunting grounds.

Doing a little more searching, I found this photo and diagram from National Geographic's site:
The article, titled "Photo in the News: Colossal Squid Caught off Antartica" is at available at this link.

For more detail and great links, Wikipedia has pages for both Colossal (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) and Giant (Architeuthis xxx) Squids.

The first exposure I had to Giant Squid (that I recall) was from the Disney version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the film, a giant squid attacks the Nautilus, which then surfaces, and the crew emerge with harpoons and knives to fend off the giant squid. A lovely sequence guaranteed to fire the imagination of any young lad.

Not completely fiction though. It's easy to come across accounts of Giant Squid that attacked ships and whales. Even the credible BBC website has a report of a frenchman whose boat was attacked by one of these lovely creatures. Whales do eat giant squid - finding squid carcasses in the bellies of hunted whales attests to this. And giant squid do hunt (and perhaps eat) whales. Witnesses in South Africa watched an hour long attack on a baby southern right whale. The squid won. Would a whale be too big a meal? Perhaps not as the beak of the giant squid can bite through a steel cables.

There is a phrase I encountered frequently during my army days: "blur like sotong". That phrase was thinking of the little 6 inch body specimens you can buy from Singapore wet markets. We probably need to update that considerably for giant and colossal squids.