Posted by Peter Etnoyer on August 12, 2008 Can you name the genus of this deep-sea squid?
This is one of those WTF videos that came flying across my desktop today. I had never heard of the genus or seen the video ’til this morning, but even if you don’t study squid, there’s no forgetting this one. The video is attributed to Shell, from the Perdido section of Alaminos Canyon at 7800 feet depth in the Gulf of Mexico. MBARI has more footage here.
I might not know squid from calamari, but that was eerie. Do you have any sense of the scale?
HJ
No lasers here, but that looks like a 55 gal drum at the base of the rig. You could use that for scale. The tentacles are probably ~1-3m long.
Kinda eerie, that critter. It’s the just hovering there and getting the feeling he’s watching, out of the depths.
You know, the jerky camera has a sort of “you are there” horror movie style to it. The alien aspect of the creature, its stillness, the darkness…it all adds to that effect. When I meet the Mama Alien in my robot-suit for the final battle, I expect that I will be circling something that looks remarkably similar. Very, very cool. Thanks for that. I’ll pass it on.
HJ
Definitely Magnapinna or closely related, undescribed genus. These are the third longest cephalopods in terms of total length (if your curious the top four are in order: Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, Architeuthis dux, Magnapinna, Enteroctopus dofleini)
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