Forget outer-space, inner-space is way cool too. by Haken

TALK STORY

Forget outer-space, inner-space is way cool too.

POSTED BY: HAKEN
UPDATED: Monday, April 14, 2003 04:33
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Thursday, April 3, 2003 8:59 AM

HAKEN

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Just check this out. A colossal squid was caught.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/04/03/colossal.squid.reut/index.h
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Thursday, April 3, 2003 10:28 AM

LOSTANGEL

My apologies Haken. I was about to tell you that they've caught lots of those things. I didn't know they were talking about the giant squid's BIG brother.

Woah. Kinda makes me feel safe to know that homo sapiens are the biggest bad-a$$ ABOVE the water. I don't want to know what's BELOW it, 'cause this thing might NOT be the biggest thing down there.

______________________
Lost Angel

WASH: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.
ZOE: We live in a space ship, dear.
WASH: So?

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Thursday, April 3, 2003 10:44 AM

SARAHETC

Word. That rules! I really want to know what is 3000 meters down!! Seems amazing.

I'm a dying breed who still believes, haunted by American dreams. ---Neko Case

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Thursday, April 3, 2003 1:11 PM

HAKEN

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by Sarahetc:
Word. That rules! I really want to know what is 3000 meters down!! Seems amazing.

I don't know, but something is definately down there. A bit of Googling turned up the following for the deepest fish:

Quote:

The fish which holds the depth record is a species of cuskeel (family Ophidiidae) called Abyssobrotula galatheae.

This 20cm long fish has been collected from the Puerto Rico Trench at a depth of 8,370m (27,455 feet).

The cuskeel in the image is Barathrites sp. It was collected at a "mere" 3300m off Sydney, New South Wales. This fish is registered in the Australian Museum Fish Collection as AMS I.28746-002.

I can't even begin to imagine the kind of pressure this fish can handle.

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Thursday, April 3, 2003 1:17 PM

HAKEN

Likes to mess with stuffs.

Quote:
Originally posted by lostangel:
Kinda makes me feel safe to know that homo sapiens are the biggest bad-a$$ ABOVE the water.

Actually, we're not. I think the cockroach is.

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Thursday, April 3, 2003 4:41 PM

ARCHER

From Peter Benchley's "Shark Trouble", Random House nonfiction, published 2002.

"My fascination with giant squid began in the late 1970s, when Teddy Tucker and I decided to try to catch one off of Bermuda where giant squid bodies-and pieces of bodies-were found floating on the surface quite often. We went out at night and from the stern of his boat lowered two 3,000 foot lengths of cable woven of forty-eight strands of stainless steel. Each cable carried clusters of baited hooks of varying sizes, plus Cyalume chemical lights, which, we hoped, would attract the squids' attention.

We had visions of grotesque monsters of the Stygian deep, throbbing with the colors of excitement (all squid have in their flesh chromatophores that allow them to change color with the speed of a strobe) as they attacked our baits; of titanic struggles as the cables strummed with strain and spat droplets of water from each stressed strand; of the stern of the boat being pulled down, down, until-perhaps-Teddy would decide that the only way to save our lives would be to sever the cables with the axe he had stowed by the transom.

We waited all night, bouncing around in rough seas, and got nary a nibble on either cable. At dawn, morose with disappointment, we began to haul in the cables on giant spools.

They came in easily. Too easily, in fact. Strange.

The five hundred foot marker passed, then the thousand foot, and with every turn of the spool the cable seemed lighter, much lighter, weirdly light. The fifteen-hundred-foot marker passed, and now the cables felt too light. Definitely.

Over the stern the cables popped. The lights were gone, the baits were gone, the hooks were gone. The final thousand feet of cable were gone.

The cables had been severed. They hadn't popped from weight or stress; the strands were all still tightly wrapped. They had been cut, bitten off."

The conclusion was that it couldn't have been a shark or a whale, because they couldn't just bite through the line like that, and fighting the cable would have been evident on the surface. It had to be something with a beak, like say a squid.

Every year since then, they've gone back and tried again. Every year, same result. One year they tried buoying the line with three floats that each could support five hundred pounds of weight. Came back and the floats were gone. Just as they were about to give up and leave, the floats come popping back up... hooked to severed line, again. They've piggybacked cameras down to depths of two and three thousand feet and seen all sorts of wild things, deep-water sharks and other fantastic critters, but never a hint of the squids or whatever happens to be taking the bait.

So whatever they're feeding down there has displayed a certain level of intelligence, not to mention the capacity to yank down with brute force a cumulative buoyancy of fifteen hundred pounds.

Fascinating stuff. I definitely recommend the book for anybody with a passing interest in the ocean or marine biology, as it's chock-full of anecdotes both amusing and informative.

"The ocean is the only alien and potentially hostile environment on the planet into which we venture without thinking about the animals that live there, how they behave, how they support themselves, and how they perceive us. I know of no one who would set off into the jungles of Malaysia armed only with a bathing suit, a tube of suntan cream, and a book, and yet that's precisely how we approach the oceans."

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Thursday, April 3, 2003 4:57 PM

NOOCYTE

Oh, great. Now Cthulhu's gonna be REALLY pissed (and in the Ross Sea, no less)! Mind the Shuggoths!

Department of Redundancy Department

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Monday, April 14, 2003 4:33 AM

CHANNAIN

i DO aim to misbehave

Quote:
More dangerous
American marine biologist Kat Bolstad said the colossal squid was a more dangerous animal than the giant squid, the mythical monster of the deep that attacked Captain Nemo's Nautilus in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."

"This is a very aggressive animal and moves quickly. If you fell in the water next to it you would be in big trouble," said Bolstad.

very cool. i'm an innerspace nut too. imagine for a second what it would do to your heart rate to have a full-grown blue whale come to the surface next to your boat...okay, it hasn't happened to me yet, but someday.

the upside of outerspace is that so far nothing big enough (say boo-dong size) has come along to swallow up the astronauts...or the space station, for that matter.

"I'm still flyin'...that's enough." ~ Mal

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