After years of fruitless endeavors by various scientists, National Science Museum team leader Tsunemi Kubodera has finally captured the elusive architeuthis dux, AKA the giant squid, on video!
This one is a juvenile female.
Pardon the pre-ad:
video one
If you can get it to work, there’s apparently more here:
Don’t believe any of the figures in feet or meters that news agencies provide regarding squid sizing, they invariably don’t know what they’re talking about. Just look at the photos and video and be in awe.
As my buddy Steve O’Shea would say:
Architeuthis is frequently reported to attain a lotal length of 60 feet. The largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach in 1887. It was a female and “in all ways smaller than any of the hitherto-described New Zealand species” (Kirk 1887); it measured 55 feet 2 inches in total length, exaggerated by great lengthening (stretching like rubber bands) of the very slight tentacular arms; its mantle length was 71 inches (1.8 m). A comparable-sized female (ML 1.8 m) measured post mortem and relaxed (by modern standards) would have a total length of ~ 32 feet.
Mantle length (as opposed to total length) is the standard measure in cephalopods. Architeuthis is not known to attain a mantle length in excess of 2.25 m. Standard Length (SL) is the length of a squid excluding the tentacles; in Architeuthis this measure very rarely exceeds 5 m. The rest of the animal’s length, to a total length of 13 m, is made up of the two long tentacles. Of 105 specimens that we have examined, none has exceeded these figures (Fig. 7).
