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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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