There was something familiar about this article on the colossal squid. It seems that when they're young and small, they're long, lean, and equipped with vicious hooks on their arms, but as they get older and larger, they get shorter, wider, and become slow-moving "giant gelatinous blobs".
So…squid get tenure, too?
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Rumor has it that New Zealand's colossal squid is a refined killing machine, hunting down prey at lightening speed deep in the murky Antarctic depths. Turns out rumor may be wrong. Scientists working on the largest ever whole specimen of colossal squid have made some curious discoveries. Far from…
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Look! He's been plastinated and hung in a Paris museum!
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"A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie."
-Robert Green Ingersoll
One of the most amazing…
ROFLMAO!
Apparently so... not that you've noticably lost your vicious hooks, PZ. ;-)
Dr O'Shea speculated that they might blow up like that in order to be able to raise their young inside their mantle... what's your excuse?
Never underestimate the power of the giant gelatinous blob.
*snort*
That went a different direction than I was expecting... Funny!
If squid figure out how to use the dreaded CyberPistol, we're all doomed.
Badum-bum-pssh!
Aw, it sounds cute. They can get fat and lazy all they want--no one's going to mess with something that size floating at them, no matter how wussy they are.
Awww.
If they ate their young I'd say they were catholic priests
As someone who has gained 20lbs over the last year I find this mildly depressing. I'm feeling rather squidish myself lately.
Reminds me of Steve Jones' gag in Almost Like A Whale:
"The sea squirt, after an active life, settles on the sea floor, and, like a professor given tenure, absorbs its brain."
how I miss Jules Vernes Giant Octopuses, but don´t worry we still have the Great Cthulhu to inspire fear in our minds and hearts.
That is not dead which can eternal float;
And in strange aeons, even blobs may gloat.
So THAT'S why I gained 30 pounds my tenure year!
Luke @ #10:
That joke is very old. Fossil records of the joke have been tentatively dated to the mid-Cambrian, raising the tantalizing possibility that the joke may predate not only the tenure system but sea squirts themselves.
LOLOL!!! Oh wow. Just in time for university to start again...
Forgive my serious comment.
Wouldn't a colossal squid have a colossal reach? Would it need to be that agile if it could snatch prey from a considerable distance? It might go from a pursuit lifestyle to an ambush lifestyle - and what better innocuous form than a gelatinous blob?
Like tenured professors with graduate students research?
Not tenure, endowment.
Wait till you see what the squid does to a cracker!