Giant, Colossal Squid
As a fan of the sci-fi channel (Love Eureka!) and an even bigger fan of B movies of the 50’s and 60’s, I always thought giant squid only existed in the movies terrorizing submarine crews. Apparently not.
Fishermen in New Zealand captured a giant squid. Known as the “colossal squid” they are the largest known squid species in the world and are believed to have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom.
Colossal Squid. Notice the red hands at the top left.
“The animal was first described in 1925 from two tentacles found in the stomach of a sperm whale. The squid’s known range is from Antarctica to the southern extremities of South America, South Africa and New Zealand. Analysis of sperm whale stomachs suggests the colossal squid makes up three quarters of the diet of large sperm whales and it is likely there are large numbers of them in Antarctic waters.”
Yikes!
A while back I found one of these critters washed up on the beach. A sweet little thing, it measure about 8 inches in length, and certainly a far cry from the colossal squid.
Again, Yikes!
And painter, Skot Olsen depicts squid in his paintings including this one here. Visit his website. The paintings are really quite good and totally absorbing.
Just like the squid, giant or otherwise, life tends to have many different shapes and sizes. How you see it depends on your perspective.
Today, I invite you to shift your position a bit and look at your life from a slightly different perspective. Maybe that giant, colossal problem will look more like a miniature version or maybe it’ll look like a figment of your imagination.
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Copyright 2009 Diana Taylor, Pug At The Beach
Photo credit: New Zealand Ministries of Fisheries, Diana Taylor, Skot Olsen
For more interesting squid info visit:
Squid links: seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/squid_links.html
For copy & paste:
New Zealand Ministries of Fisheries: www.fish.govt.nz/en-nz/Press/Press+Releases+2007/February+2007/Amazing+specimen+of+worlds+largest+squid+in+NZ.htm
Squid artist: http://www.skotolsen.com/
Posted by Diana Taylor at Sunday, June 07. 2009 
Categories: Flora and fauna,beach finds
Tags: squid sea animals
Categories: Flora and fauna,beach finds
Tags: squid sea animals
I loved the story..You are a wonderful writer. You need to contact the newspapers with stories like these..I am looking forward to the next one....
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Thanks Pam. I love sharing the things I find on the beach and I really love my job as writer. For more of my writing, visit:
http://www.pugatthebeach.com/otherwriting.htm
I also write poetry, essays and short, short stories.
Most people don't know that I got my start writing for a small newspaper in Bennington, Vermont. As a gift to myself for my 40th birthday, I wrote a "little story". The goal was simply to amuse myself. Eight months and 10,000 words later, I realized I was onto something.
That story is now a novel called Dolphin Key and, for now, remains unpublished. BTW, the inspiration for that first story was the smile of a handsome gentleman. Jimmy Buffett's Off To See The Lizard not only had good music, but great cover art as well. When contemplating what to write about, I popped this cd into my Bose and thought, gee, I'll write a little story about that smile and what was behind it. To this day, I still wonder about what made him smile like that.
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