Indie Squid Kid

The Tumblr blog community is a bountiful source of awesome images of all kinds. However, it is all too common that source or artist attribution is left out of the original post. Take this vintage illustration of Vampyroteuthis infernalis. I’m pretty sure it’s from a public domain book of zoological drawings, and I’ve possibly even posted something from that same source before. But I don’t really know. What I do know is that Vampyroteuthis has never been creepier. One could almost believe that it truly is a vampire squid!

(Via Monster Made of Eyes)

Vampire Squid by Wildlife Artists, Inc, originally uploaded by Cryptonaut.

Here we have another excellent toy from Wildlife Artists. It was produced in 1999, and, to my knowledge, it is the only plush reproduction of Vampyroteuthis infernalis ever made.

This little guy is 7″ tall/long, and its arms also span about 7″ across. The detail on this toy is fantastic! Not only is the color dead on (I love the eerie pale blue eyes!), but there are also a number of lighter spots on the mantle to represent the animal’s photophores. If you flip it over, its arms are lined with little dark marks to indicate the cirri, and it has a dark spot for the mouth/beak.

Like the plush cuttlefish (also by Wildlife Artists) featured earlier this week, I got this at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in 2001. That year they had a cool special exhibit about life in the abyssal ocean, and the gift shop was full of cephalopod-y goodness.

I can’t think of a better way to kick off Halloween Week than with a look at Vampyrotheuthis infernalis, the enigmatic deep-sea cephalopod whose name literally means “vampire squid from hell!”

V. infernalis is the only known living representative of the Order Vampyromorphida, and, despite the common name “Vampire Squid,” it is considered a closer relative to the Octopoda (octopuses) than the Decapodiformes (squids and cuttlefish). It is also not actually a vampire, but this small (~1 foot long) cephalopod is still wonderfully creepy.

Here’s why…

• It lives in the lightless ocean depths (2,000-3,000 ft.)
• Its body has a jellyfish-like gelatinous consistency
• Its color ranges from jet-black to blood-red
• It has eight webbed arms, tipped with suckers and lined with fleshy spines (called cirri), and two retractable sensory filaments
• When threatened, it inverts its “cloak” so that the cirri point outwards in a menacing fashion
• Adults have two ear-like fins, but during development there is stage where they have four, a condition unique among cephalopods
• Its skin is covered with light-producing photophores, as are its unpigmented arm tips, which can also produce a luminescent cloud of glowing particles suspended in a mucus matrix
• Its milky-blue eyes have sphincter-like “eye lids”

The Vampire Squid is sometime referred to as a “phylogenetic relict” because it possesses features thought to have been shared by the primitive ancestors of both octopuses and squids. Fossils from Middle Jurassic deposits in France indicate that vampyromorphids go back at least 165 million years.

This detailed replica of the fascinating deep-sea cephalopod Vampyroteuthis infernalis most likely came from a museum or aquarium gift shop. It’s hard to say since I probably bought it about ten years ago. If I had known then that in 2008 I’d start a blog dedicated to cephalopods, perhaps I would have taken some notes…

The replica is about 6″ long and made of soft purple rubber. (It seems there is also a green version.) It has red eyes and four large glow-in-the-dark photophores. Apart from “TAMJ 97©” printed on the underside, I haven’t been able to find out anything specific on who made this toy or if it still available anymore.

Read more about Vampyroteuthis on Tree of Life.

What Would Cthulhu Do?, originally uploaded by Cryptonaut.

I mentioned in my previous post that I used to work at the Bull’s Head Bookshop, the trade book store at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Our offices were in the basement of the main Student Stores building, and, as a result, we had no windows. So, in what some might consider a futile attempt to disguise the bare cinder block walls, we took to decorating with with images cut from magazines, effectively turning our work space into a series of giant collages.

This is a small section of the wall above my desk, and it is a single unit composed of three separate elements:

1. Tessek the Quarren (aka Squid Head), who is obviously deep in thought. Taken from an issue of Star Wars Insider.
2. Two different shots of Vampyroteuthis infernalis, commonly known as the vampire squid. From some wildlife magazine or other.
3. The caption that ties it all together, “What Would Cthulhu Do”–cut from various book inventory bar code labels.