Giant squid

Giant Squid Profile There’s an animal that has inspired legends since the dawn of seafaring humans. It’s a Kraken from the deep, with long tentacles and enormous eyes, and a powerful crushing beak, yet it has no bones and hunts its prey in the inky depths of the ocean. Nobody knows how deep it lives; in fact, nobody knows much about it at all, and only a handful have ever been seen alive. This is the giant squid, and it’s one of the most frightening mysteries of the deep yet to be explained. Credit: AFP News Agency video. Giant Squid Facts Overview Habitat: Deep waters, perhaps <1,000m Location: Worldwide Lifespan: Unknown, possible at least 14 years Size: At least 20m Weight: Over 275 kg (606 lb) Color: Grey, iridescent silver/gold, possibly colour-changing Diet: Fish, crustaceans, other squid Predators: Sperm whales Top Speed: Unknown No. of Species: 1 Conservation Status: Least concern The giant squid is widespread across all oceans, particularly in the North and South Atlantic, and southwestern Pacific ocean. Like all squid, a giant squid has a mantle (torso), eight arms, and two longer tentacles. The giant squid is one of the largest invertebrates on earth. Despite this, it remained undocumented other than from remains inside the stomachs of the largest predator on earth: the In 2013, footage of a live animal was finally captured, and scientists are slowly piecing together the puzzle of this elusive animal. While we know so little about these animals, we can infer fro...

Dead giant squid specimen, minus its two feeding tentacles © Wikimedia Commons What do giant squid look like? Much like other squid species, the giant squid is characterised by a squishy elongated body, huge eyes, a beak, eight arms and two tentacles. Whereas most squid are pretty small, the giant squid is the supersized version. When you look at a squid, it has a mantle, which is the ‘body’ of the squid where all the internal organs are located. The mantle has small fins at the end, used for moving around. Then there is the head, and finally the arms and tentacles. When scientists are establishing the size of a squid, they will take measurements of the mantle length as well as the total length. Mantle length can be considered a more reliable measurement, as the arms and tentacles can be stretched out like elastic, making the animal seem far longer than it really is. How many tentacles does a giant squid have? Cephalopod limbs seem to get the best of us in a tangle. Do they have arms, legs or tentacles? For a start, all cephalopods have appendages that extend from their head and encircle their beaks. Generally, arms have suckers along most of their length, while tentacles only have suckers at the end. More like this But that’s not all. The suckers on the giant squid’s tentacles and arms measure between two and five centimetres in diameter. These suckers are lined with a sharp, serrated ring of chitin; this tough substance is also found in cephalopod beaks, as well the exos...

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A giant squid ( Architeuthis dux) lies on Newport Beach, California on Jan. 19, 2005 after it washed ashore for unknown reasons. (Image credit: David McNew via Getty Images) Legends about gargantuan squid have existed for millennia, with photos confirming their existence nearly 150 years ago. But what is the largest squid in the world? Depending on how you measure, there are two contenders. The giant squid ( Architeuthis dux) is the longest squid, and the colossal squid ( Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is the heaviest. The giant squid, found in every ocean, is estimated to reach up to about 40 to 45 feet (12 to 14 meters) long from the tip of its body to the tip of its tentacles and weigh about 600 pounds (270 kilograms), Heather Judkins, a cephalopod expert at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, told Live Science. There have been claimed sightings of giant squids up to about 66 feet long (20 m), but they have not been verified, according to Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa. The colossal squid, which lives in Antarctic waters but may venture as far north as New Zealand, is estimated to reach about 30 to 33 feet (9 to 10 m) long. However, what it lacks in total length compared with the giant squid, it makes up for in weight — it can reach about 1,000 pounds (450 kg), Judkins said. This likely makes the colossal squid the most massive invertebrate on Earth, according to ocean nonprofit Oceana. Each colossal squid eye is also equipped with a light-em...

Reading Time: 8 Minutes • On Saturday 21 June 1930, four fishermen ran their boat ashore at Bellambi, just north of Wollongong, and scrambled onto the beach. They had just escaped the jaws of “a mammoth sea serpent”. The Mail reported: ‘​”A digger who had seen Gallipoli and Flanders at their worst, and who saw [the fishermen] when they landed, said he had never seen such terror in men’s faces in the battlefields of either.” Two weeks later The Newcastle Morning Herald reported sightings of another sea monster off Scarborough, just up the coast from Bellambi: “It appeared to be at least 80ft long, like a huge eel, and at times raised a long neck in the air.” Australian naturalist David Hearst resisted the ensuing serpent hysteria. He believed these sightings indeed bespoke a monster, but not the kind with a dragon’s head and a spined snake-like body of the like that prowl the edges of medieval maps. He concluded that these sightings were in fact encounters with “Cuttlefish or giant Sea Squid … not any kind of real serpent, but the terrible gigantic Calamary.” Richard Ellis, author of the 1998 book The Search for the Giant Squid, agrees with Hearst’s assessment. Analysing stories of sea serpents from the 14th century to the 1800s, Ellis argues that a And so we find the source of the ocean’s most fearsome monsters, from the sea serpent to the kraken to the seven-headed hydra, all stemming from But the natural history of the giant squid is a history of dead, dying, regurgitate...