Indie Squid Kid

We interrupt Halloween Week to bring you this exciting news bulletin:

Sperm Whales have finally been photographed feeding on Giant Squids!

It has long been known that the Giant Squid was on the menu of Physeter macrocephalus, the Sperm Whale, but the legendary encounter has never been captured on film. Before the first specimens of Architeuthis were described by science, whalers would find their remains among the stomach contents of harvested Sperm Whales, and those whales would sometimes bear enormous sucker scars. There were even reports from sailors who claim to have witnessed the two leviathans locked in mortal combat, and the image of squid vs. whale has become iconic.

Underwater photographer Tony Wu photographed a pod of six whales—five adults and a calf—in the waters off Japan’s Ogasawara Islands (the same area where scientists filmed a living Giant Squid for the first time back in 2005). Dr Mark Norman speculates that the adults were in the process of teaching the young whale how to dive and hunt for food. Recovered nearby was one of the squid’s 3.5 meter long tentacles.

See these amazing photos at The Daily Mail Online.

The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival promotes the works of H.P. Lovecraft, literary horror, and weird tales through the cinematic adaptations by professional and amateur filmmakers. The festival was founded in 1995 by Andrew Migliore in the hope that H.P. Lovecraft would be rightly recognized as a master of gothic horror and his work more faithfully adapted to film and television.

If you live anywhere near Portland, OR (Natalie, I’m looking in your direction) and are a fan of things that go Bloop in the night, this is the event for you!

www.HPLFilmFestival.com

October 8th, 2009 marks the 3rd annual International Cephalopod Awareness Day. Of course, every day is cephalopod awareness day here at Indie Squid Kid, but I can’t pass up an opportunity to help in my own small way to make everyone even more aware of the coolest animals in the planet. This year, ICAD is a three day event:

Thursday, Oct 8 is Octopus Day

Friday, Oct 9 is Nautilus Night

Saturday, Oct 10 is Squid Day

So what does this mean exactly? The editors at CephalopodCast.com invite anyone in the blogosphere to participate in the three day celebration. Bloggers, artists, poets and musicians are encouraged to create one or more works to mark the occasion and submit them for aggregation on a special Cephalopod Awareness Days commemorative page. Topics can be scientific, cultural or fictional. As long as they somehow include cephalopod awareness, they will be considered. If you don’t have a blog, but still want to contribute, contact the editors for ways your creation can be hosted on the site.

Additionally, free promotional space is available to artists that contribute to the ICAD campaign. Any artist that creates a Cephalopod Awareness Day badge can have it featured prominently on the site, along with a link to their Web site, Etsy shop or portal. See example above. Badges should not be more than 200×200 pixels in jpg or png format. Badges submitted after October 8 will be irrelevant. See the guidelines on the Cephalopod Awareness Days official commemorative page for more details.

For my part, I plan to use these three days to focus on the biology and natural history of the different cephalopod groups. I’ve been wanting to ratchet up the science around here, and can’t think of a better excuse than International Cephalopod Awareness Day!

The U.S. Department of the Interior reported today that a 19.5 foot long Giant Squid was unexpectedly netted off the coast of Louisiana. The 103 pound squid was caught July 30 in a trawl net at a depth of more than 1,500 feet as it was pulled by a research vessel. It was the first Architeuthis specimen to be found in the Gulf of Mexico since 1954, and the first ever to be recovered by a scientific expedition. The scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service were participating in a pilot study of the diets of Sperm Whales.  The rare squid, which did not survive the rapid change in water depth when brought to the surface, was sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History for further study.

Via Reuters and NOAA

photo credit: NOAA

OK, so this doesn’t have anything to do with Cthulhu Week, but I thought this story was cool enough to break protocol.

Paleontologists in the UK have discovered a fossilized cephalopod so well preserved that the creature’s ink sac was still intact. In fact, scientists were able to extract a portion of the ink and use it to draw a picture of what the creature looked like when alive!

The 150 million year old fossil of Belemnotheutis antiquus was found in a recently rediscovered dig site in north Wiltshire that was first excavated during Victorian times. The excavation was lead by Dr. Phil Wilby, and was sponsored by the British Geological Survey and the Curry Fund.

B. antiquus was a belemnite, an extinct form of cephalopod closely related to modern squid and cuttlefish. Belemnites were abundant during the later part of the Mesozoic Era, but they went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. They resembled living squids, although they had ten hook-lined arms of equal length (no feeding tentacles) and an internal shell which protected the rear portions of the animial. This “guard” is usually the only part of a belemnite to become fossilized.

Via Daily Mail Online

As Dr. M at Deep-Sea News deftly points out…

The Giant Squid (Architeuthis dux) and the Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus gigas) are two very different animals. So, no matter what many in the media are reporting, thousands of Giant Squids did not wash ashore after an earthquake, and Giant Squid are not invading the waters off Southern California.

Squid Fail indeed.

This very dramatic video further documents the recent invasion of Humboldt Squid into the waters of Southern California…

From NBC Bay Area via Pharyngula

The Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus giga) is a large predatory squid found all along the Pacific coast of North America. Also known as the Jumbo Squid, the Jumbo Flying Squid, and the Red Devil, Humboldts can grow up to 7 ft long and weigh as much as 100 lbs. They generally inhabit deep water, but come to the surface at night to feed. They can be very aggressive, and have reportedly attacked divers and fishermen.

Could a realatively minor earthquake (magnitude 4.0) really cause a school of squid to beach themselves? The experts seem to think it is just a coincidence, and point out that these type of strandings, while rare, have happened before.

Hot on the heels of Movie Week, I find out that Disney is working on a prequel to their classic 1954 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (covered previously here and here). Due to be released in 2011, and titled Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, McG (Terminator: Salvation, Charlie’s Angels) is attached to direct. And I am afraid.

Supposedly, the prequel will tell the story of how Captain Nemo goes from being an Indian prince to the brooding science pirate we all know and love. Or, in McG’s words “Where you look at the original picture [Nemo] just enters and he’s already pissed off and underwater and what we want to do is show how he got there.” McG has also stated that he wants Will Smith to play Captain Nemo.

Wait…Seriously?!

Don’t get me wrong, I like Will Smith just fine, but why go through all the trouble of adhering to the character’s original backstory (in The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne reveals that Nemo was Prince Dakkar, son of the Raja of Bundelkhand) but not cast an Indian actor? I’m having troubling visions of a mutant mashup of the abysmal League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie and Wild Wild West.

The Hollywood Reporter reported (duh!) yesterday that the script for Captain Nemo is undergoing a major rewrite, but only time will tell if this is a good thing or not. (For the record, I’m getting all this second-hand from Meredith Woerner over at io9, THE blog for science fiction news.) I guess the odds are pretty good that there will be some kind of cephalopodian element to this movie, and, if so, I fear the odds are even better that it will end up in the Indie Squid Kid Movie Hall of Shame.

So, to cheer myself up, I’ll end with some production images from Disney’s original 20,000 Leagues movie. All of these and more can be found at Pat Regan’s wonderful www.volcaniasubmarine.com.

James Mason as Captain Nemo

Production sketch of the squid fight.

Nemo vs the giant squid!

Still from the discarded "sunset" squid fight sequence.

The photos below show two of the many amazing entries to the annual Sand Sculpture Festival at Weston-super-Mare’s Beach Lawns which runs from July 4 – September 6. This year’s theme, as you might have surmised, is the sea.

From on BBC Somerset via Deep-Sea News