Cecil says, “How could scientists overlook a five-foot fish.” Unca Cece-- there are a lot of lot bigger things in the ocean that we only have clues about. The squid that sperm whales live off of, for one. Whalers used to find remnants of fifty-footers in whale stomachs, and there has to be a pretty big population to support the sperm whale population… but no one’s ever caught one.
Ditto for the mega-something that chewed up a Navy ship’s sonar dome back in the sixties. Took big bites out of the rubberized coating on the 20-foot dome, left behind long needle-sharp teeth, never has been identified.
So give the marine biologists a break, hey?
Another fine production from Nitrosyncretic Press *
IIRC, the thing that tore up the dome was probably a giant squid. The teeth patterns resembled those sound in the suckers of smaller squid. Of course this is TLC-based info, so take it FWIW.
I used to rock and roll all night and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I’m lucky if I can find a half an hour a week in which to get funky.
Also, there’s the giant octopus that washed up on the shore of Florida in 1898, I believe. With tentacles outstretched I think it was about 200 feet from tip to tip.
200 feet? I’d always heard that Architeuthis (the giant squid) was on average far larger than Poulpe Geant (the giant octopus). The largest recorded Architeuthis (New Zealand, 1887) was only 57 feet from mantle to tenacle tip.
The problem with the flesh of cephalapods is that it is extremely “stretchable”. I’ll bet the local fishermen played tug-of-war with the poor beasty before they called the press.
There’s a great book by Richard Ellis called * Giant Squid* that presents a much more realistic study of this elusive creature than you usually get from the likes of Ripley’s Believe it of Not! and The Guiness Book of World Records.
Good point; I meant to stick the word “apparently” in my post at some point, apparently I forgot to do that. Anyway, it’s a pretty well documented incident, I believe. The story goes that a large mass washed up on the beach, a flesh sample was taken, then the tide washed it back to sea. Subsequently, a Smithsonian team ID’d the flesh as coming from an octopus. Decent evidence, I suppose, that there are octopi of that size in the ocean, but, as you point out, there certainly are other possible explanations of the incident. I guess the jury’s really still out on it.
which, perhaps, isn’t the most reliable source of information, I’ll admit. Anyway, I just very briefly scanned the entire article. I did notice this: The mass wasn’t nearly as large as my post implied, it was about 18 feet long and 7 feet wide, and, based on that, they figured it must have had 100 foot long tentacles.
Thanks for the link. Somehow, I’d never heard of this fairly well documented event, even though I’ve read a lot about Verrill. 200 feet or 100 feet, that’s still pretty impressive. Too bad they didn’t have bulldozers and giant freezers back then.
In what was alleged as a factual article that made reference to the St. Augustine creature and the tests that later proved it had octopus DNA, Arthur C. Clarke indicated that there were extant photos taken at the scene (in 1898).
The St. Augustine creature may have been a kraken, a gigantic octopus that has been reported from time to time over the centuries. Like giant squid, they have allegedly attacked ships. There’s a old drawing in one of my high school history books that shows such an attack. While it may be exagerating the size of the beast, it is clearly a giant octopus. Before Cecil disses marine biologists any more, perhaps he should remember that the ocean is a huge place, and that most whales probably live their entire lives without ever seeing a human.
–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.