The etiquette of squid-eating

Tantalizing news: somewhere out there in the wide, wide world is a video of a pilot whale eating a large squid.

"We looked hard and saw a tentacle of a squid hanging from its mouth and there were other pieces of squid stuck to the whale's body. It made a number of brusque movements on its side in the water to free the tentacle to eat it — and there we were filming and photographing it all."

If you follow TONMO you already know it's probably not a giant squid, as the article breathlessly reports, but it's still going to be interesting because whales that feed on squid do have a problem: the tentacles are clingy and in many of the large species are equipped with sharp hooks — and they writhe and grip even when the animal is dead. How whales manage a struggling meal is going to be something of interest.

Arrr, I nail a virtual doubloon to the mast of the good ship Pharyngula—first matey to spot the whale and his prey gets it.

More like this

...err..well, not exactly. But it is a much easier way for a 45 ton sperm whale to get a quick bite to eat. This amazing footage of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) shaking cod fishing lines 108 m deep off the coast of Sitka, Alaska, is the first ever of sperm whales feeding - albeit not on…
A colossal squid, a 33-foot-long adult male weighing half a ton, was captured recently in the Antarctic Ocean. Because International law requires that anything caught in Antarctic waters must be taken onboard and documented to guard against overfishing, the captain had no choice: haul it aboard.…
Imagine that you hand is made of jelly and you have to carve a roast using a knife that has no handle. The bare metal blade would rip through your hypothetical hand as easily as it would through the meat. It's clearly no easy task and yet, squid have to cope with a very similar challenge every…
About four million years ago, in the shallows of an ocean that once covered what is now southern Peru, a large shark bit into the jaw of a baleen whale. The whale had been dead for some time, but it was kept afloat but the gases building up in its body as it decomposed. It was absolutely rotten,…

It's pretty straight forward, isn't it? Don't drop any of the rings on your shirt. Choose a nice Sangiovese to accompany it. And preferably at a table that overlooks the sea.

;-)

"Aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me.... He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it...."

That, and he eats squid.

By Eveningsun (not verified) on 22 Sep 2007 #permalink

Down with vertabrate chauvinism: Octopus eats shark.

My two-year-old grandnephew's favorite video.

By John Emerson (not verified) on 22 Sep 2007 #permalink

>and they writhe and grip even when the animal is dead.

Though I hear that breading them and deep frying them solves this problem.