Animal Planet just aired a program about the “Man-Eating
Super Squid”. This was part of its “Monster Week” line-up of supposedly
frightening creatures. For my part, the “monsters” in Monster Week are like the
“news” in Fox News, but I digress. My initial expectation was that I would see
a squid, possibly wearing a red cape, shooting lasers out of its perfectly
round, soulless eyes while slaughtering boatloads of hapless Haitian refugees
or snatching healthy, buxom possibly under-aged young girls from the surf, but
instead there was a collection of sailor’s tales (which are especially known
for their uncanny accuracy) and video of some smallish but excitable squid doing
what smallish but excitable squid do.
For the record, there are presently around 300 species of
squid lurking in the world’s oceans apparently patiently waiting for the
opportunity to dine upon succulent human flesh. They range from the very tiny
(around one-quarter of an inch) to giant, colossal and stupendous (about 45
feet long). They have been around for 60 million years, give or take, and
inhabit virtually every corner of the globe. The best known of all squid is
perhaps Squidward, who lives next door to Sponge Bob, but he sadly is missing a
couple of tentacles and is not a good candidate for being a man eater. When
they are not gleefully eating people, squids enjoy a diet of fish, crabs and
each other. They are also eaten by quite a few residents of the ocean and
slaughtered sperm whales are well known for having bellies full of the indigestible
beaks of large squid, which must leave them feeling bloated and irritable,
perhaps explaining why they often try to smash the boats of the whalers who are
attempting to slaughter them.
Here would perhaps be a good point at which to address the
on-going controversy as to the plural of the word “squid”. Merriam-Webster’s
on-line dictionary says that it can be either “squid” or “squids”. Why we are
given a choice of a very clear usage and an ambiguous and potentially confusing
one, I do not know. If, for example, someone said “the squid ate my mother”, we
would have no idea whether there was one culprit or several. This could lead to
some issues at the eulogy when the preachers says Mrs. So-and-so was eaten by “the
squid”. Some mourners might note that Mrs. So-and-so was a large woman and then
inappropriately extrapolate the required size of the offending squid (singular),
when in reality it was dozens of smaller squid that skeletonized her in four
feet of water off Cocoa Beach. Words do matter.
In the program, Animal Planet shows us a couple of guys who
went diving in the Sea of Cortez where large groups of the Humboldt Squid are
known to hang out. These guys got pestered and ultimately assaulted by a number
of the squid. The Humboldt Squid can grow as large as six feet in length and
weight up to 100 pounds. Apparently they are very curious and don’t like to be
bothered when eating. The divers in the video say the squid punched them, bit
them and pulled them down into the murky depths with hostile intent, perhaps to
eat them, maybe sexually assault them, or possibly just to kill them because
they were boring. Who can say? When the divers were released by the squid(s),
the playful cephalopods flashed various colors, perhaps to say “quit being such
a cry-baby, we were just fucking with you”. In any event, I was disappointed to
see that there were no partially eaten neoprene-clad corpses pulled
dramatically from the ocean with blank, empty eye sockets staring accusingly at
the cameras.
So anyway, what struck me most about the whole program was
the implication of evil intent on the part of our clever mollusk cousins and
the seemingly genuine hurt feelings of these guys who got harassed. A squid is
just a freakily mutated snail with great eye-sight and enough intelligence to
be concerned about what the fuck a human is doing swimming around in its ocean.
In my opinion, hippies and other unrealistic people should not go in the ocean,
because the idea that they may gently commune with the peaceful denizens of
this primitive world is a hash induced fantasy. I am really sorry these guys
got beat up by the squids, but they asked for it. Animals do not like you or
dislike you; they only want to know if they can safely eat you, are you going to
try to eat them and what your fat ass is doing taking up space in the territory
necessary to their survival. We create our gods and our fears in our own image,
but squids and the rest of the world’s carnivores don’t have the emotional capacity
or the idle time to wish us harm. As usual, the only real monsters are the Homo
sapiens who harvest the oceans to the point of exhaustion, dump garbage and
sewerage into the squid’s habitat and eat calamari while watching Animal Planet
and shuddering at the thought of being grasped by a powerful, sinewy tentacle
and dragged off to face the same cold indifference that we claim as our birth
right.
The squid(s) thank you, Sir!
ReplyDeleteDear Repairman, Thank you for reminding us all that contrary to popular belief, marine mollusks do not have evil intent, and generally speaking, don't give a squid's ass about humans.....but there's an exception. In the early 1930s, a solitary, lonely Atlantic squid, Loligo pealeii, pulled itself onto an English beach, hitch-hiked to Plymouth and into the lab of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley. There it graciously volunteered to serve as a research participant allowing H&H to voltage clamp and stimulate its giant axon for months on end. The result was an understanding of how nerve fibers generate action potentials, a discovery for which Hodgkin and Huxley shared the Nobel Prize in 1963. The squid was reported to say he was glad he could make a contribution to science and that he found the experience "electrifying".
ReplyDeleteHodgkin, A. and Huxley, A. (1939). Action potentials recorded from inside a nerve fiber. Nature 144: 710-711.