Giant squid caught on video for the second time | Hacker News Reader

Giant squid caught on video for the second time

nytimes.com

161 pointsbookofjoe64 comments

If you're just looking for footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqim34DvCrs

very neat to see that they swim 'forward' with their tentacles grouped together as one. freaky

I saw that too. I couldn’t tell if it was a video artifact or not though.

What I also find a kind of 'freaky' is that it touches the object and then feels it is attached to something and says 'nope!'. And it is gone.

Ofcourse this is no proof but to me it shows some kind of intelligence.

I wouldn't say this behavior is part of intelligence, it's probably the first thing nature crafted in any life form. Unfamiliarity => move.

Maybe this one specific behaviour doesn't convince you of intelligence, but squids, octopi, and cuttlefish are among the most intelligent cephalopods, which are in turn the most intelligent known invertebrates.

Oh, I'm well aware of their prowess, it's been taped and discussed (also many more animals have more cognitive abilities than were thought before). I was just discussing this particular reflex/behavior.

I don't know if this is true. Most simple animals are very curious.

If it doesn't move => go check it out.

well, the squid do check it out but it didn't like what he found

Is this worth eating or fighting (for) it?

I have no knowledge on how they identify/distinguish food over a rock, if the tentacles have some sort of receptors on them, but apparently this didn't "taste" like food, thus unworthy of eating or fighting for and therefore better safe than sorry.

Maybe something on the surface didn't mesh well with the succion-cups

There is plenty of proof that cephalopods are intelligent, but we keep moving the goal posts on what we define as intelligence.

They have advanced problem solving capabilities and a distributed nervous system that can achieve levels of parallel processing software devs dream of.

We don't need to go to other planets to find intelligent life, it is already here. We are just aren't smart enough to communicate with it yet.

Squids do not use the tentacles to swim and all species advance with the ten arms fused in a cone. Taking the more aquadynamic shape possible Is the more efficient way to swim for them

Squid jet propulsion: https://youtu.be/9OIjaHIrM0U. 8 arms + 2 tentacles: https://www.aqua.org/blog/2017/October/Cephalopods-Arms-or-T...

I wish there was some kind of relatable size reference in the video, like a car or person next to it or something.

I wonder if it’s possible for somewhere in the deep ocean for an environment to exist with the perfect availability of resources for one of these squid to grow without bound, until they reach a size that can threaten ships.

We humans are too hypocritical to let that happen, we conserve other species only as long as they remain submissive. The moment we feel threatened by them (think giant squids sinking ships) we start killing them off.

Uh, what? If they start sinking ships, we should start killing them off.

We would first try to frighten them off.

Hypocrisy is an interesting synonym for self-preservation.

It's hardly self-preservation. More like a first world problem/solution: my transport structures are not hard enough to withstand squid attacks - we clearly need to kill the squids.

That is exactly self-preservation. At least for those on the transport structure.

If you're already on that ship, sure. As a planned action... you can be somewhere else instead.

> first world problem/solution

Surely the opposite.

Your typical Neanderthal isn't going to do an ecological impact statement before clubbing the snakes to death.

What kind of moronic creature kills off threats?

> we start killing them off.

or else they will kill us?

They probably did historically threaten ships back when ships were wooden and smaller on average than modern ships. IIRC, the belief is that The Kraken was probably a giant squid.

Source? Not that I don't believe you, that's just fascinating if there's any shred of evidence.

Authors over the years have postulated that the legend may have originated from sightings of giant squids that may grow to 13–15 meters (40–50 feet) in length.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken

Related all time classic: Roger Callois: La Pieuvre : essai sur la logique de l'imaginaire.

I'm not familiar wth it and I'm not finding anything in English about it. Perhaps you could give a brief summary?

In 2003, a famous navigator, Olivier de Kersauson, claims his ship has been "attacked" by a giant squid and that he had to cut a tentacle to free the rudder of his ship. Many people doubted his story at the time, as he had no proofs of it and at the time we had no reports of giant squid at ships' depths.

A direct attack is very unprobable by the methabolism of giant squids. Being tangled in the chain of an anchor, lifted and mistaken by an attack on the other hand is perfectly possible.

The scenario I heard posited is that they only come to the surface to die, so it's really a large animal in it's death throes thrashing about wildly.

It may not be an attack per se, but that doesn't mean it's no threat to a small wooden ship.

I think they probably did get really big. There are some cases of dead sperm whales washing up that have appeared to be attacked by giant squid. Coupled with the fact that the oceans used to be teeming with life before commercial fishing I would imagine perfect availability would definitely get you some big squid.

This paper talks about fishery populations during WW2 when it was to dangerous to fish. So if you think about how many fish would be available, I imagine that you could have many giant ones roaming around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929348/

As I understand it, the scars on sperm whales can be a bit misleading. Sperm whales feed on giant squid, and acquire sucker scars in the process when the squid resist. Very large sucker scars on adult sperm whales are thought to be acquired when the whales are younger and smaller, and to stretch as the whales grow.

Oh that makes sense.

Not really, is a very interesting hypothese and very suggestive but whales release constantly the dead skin upper layers, as any other mammal. Cookie-cutter shark scars on the other hand are (probably) permanent.

How giant it actually is?

The size of a small boat. Comparable to a whale.

A small whale. Less than half the length of a blue whale, and less than 1% the mass.

Most whales are smaller than a blue whale...

I wondered the same. From the article (conversion to metric mine):

> this one was only — “only” — about 10 feet (3 m) long: a juvenile, in a species that can grow to nearly 40 feet (12 m)

You people may be thinking about thinking about intelligence. I am mostly thinking about: Wow, 10 feet long grilled squid. LOL!

https://xkcd.com/1176/

Anyone have a link that isn’t paywalled?

http://archive.is/fDAK8

I searched for "giant squid second time" and a link to digg came up (blast from the past). I clicked on that and it has a link to the nytimes, except when I click through from there it doesn't trigger the paywall for me. I wonder how that works and if HN can get in on it.

Are we past the point of revolting against our new advertising overlords yet?

The NY Times has been charging for its product since 1851. It's only the past 15 years or so that the latest generation thinks that a newspaper company charging money to cover its costs of doing business plus a small profit are somehow "wrong."

You're entitled to feel this way, too, but many people do pay, and like to discuss what they read here.

That is fine and dandy, but it would be ideal if the nytimes.com subscribers could go and discuss articles on the nytimes.com website. Anyone who can read the article is already supposed to be a subscriber.

It is hardly a good outcome to invite comment on HN by people only able to read the title.

Ok, but the Y Combinator site guidelines say paywalled sites are OK. As their guest here, I follow their rules.

It's entirely impossible to participate in the conversation without having read the article in question. At least drop the paywall when you notice a surge in traffic, right?

Doesn't seem paywalled here (in France). If it's only paywalled in the small fraction of the world that are the usa, it's still quite open to read and discuss.

It's paywalled in Scandinavia.

Sidenote: quickly stopping the page before it is fully loaded makes the paywall avoidable. Wonder if they did that on purpose.

Not sure if it works for NYT but I curled a news site the other day and it happily gave me the paywalled article. User agent hacking is annoying. They want Google to index their search results without actually letting the user see it.

Probably the order of the scripts that are ran in the page. You probably stopped the page-load before it got to the paywall script. This is why I like NoScript, PrivacyBadger and AdBlock+ (some folks also like uBlock). Once you pinpoint the script and block it, you are trouble-free for a few months (until they change something on the script/paywall)

we shall fight on the indexes,

we shall fight on the landing pages,

we shall fight in the forums and in the menus,

we shall fight in the banners;

we shall never surrender

The "web" link underneath the post title is there so you can do exactly this to get around paywalls which have exceptions for those who come from a search page.

Just video: https://twitter.com/DukeU/status/1142113774205362176

So mesmerizing and graceful; the squid is more medusa-like than the camera though.

Isn't this the original source?

https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/19biolum/logs/ju...

the Kraken returns

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