Before we begin this week’s column, a quick note about my book and the
current Ebola crisis in West Africa: During the entire month of August,
ALL proceeds from my book “Mysterious Island: Catalina” sold on Amazon or
Before we begin this week’s column, a quick note about my book and the
current Ebola crisis in West Africa: During the entire month of August,
ALL proceeds from my book “Mysterious Island: Catalina” sold on Amazon or
Kindle will go to Doctors Without Borders, that heroic charity that is on the front lines of this disease right now. In full disclosure, out of the $14.95 price of the book (plus tax, shipping and handling and so on), I personally only see $6.64 from Amazon and $5.56 from Kindle from each book sold. Please note that I am NOT a 501(c)( 3) nor any other kind of non-profit. I have no way of proving accountability to you, however rest assured every penny that I see will go to them.
Several years ago, I myself spent three months as a volunteer deck hand on a hospital ship in West Africa and I can tell you this is getting serious, folks.
And now for this week’s column, I remember the first time I saw one of them.
One evening years ago, I was sitting on one of those green park benches on the Descanso Bay side of the Casino, partaking of a fine maduro cigar from the Dominican Republic; a robusto that went by the name H. Upmann.
I was regarding the rapidly enveloping twilight of day’s end and enjoying the visual crescendo of the “Aurora Angelenas,” or the lights of L.A., in the distance. Suddenly, a sport fishing boat came around Casino Point and motored more or less in front of me.
“Hey, stop!,” yelled a voice from on deck. “Look at that! Check it out!,” continued the deckhand. The twin diesels clunked into neutral, then into slow reverse as the yacht edged back a few yards. The deckhand grabbed a gaff hook and, extending it outwards from the vessel’s port quarter, brought aboard an enormous—and quite dead—giant squid. The thing must have been five feet in length (not counting its extensive array of tentacles. From my park bench, I could clearly see the beast’s eyes were nearly as large as those of a man.“Now that,” I said to myself as I puffed great clouds of tropical nicotine into the air, “is a SQUID.” Tales of giant squid have been writhing and wriggling through sailors’ lore for centuries and while Galleon-sized monsters are pretty much discounted, in real life these beasts can actually grow quite large.
Generally speaking, these “jumbo squid” can weigh in anywhere from about five pounds up to nearly 30 pounds. But even these fellows are no match for their large and legendary cousins that dwell deep within the eternal gloom. Enter the “Colossal Squid,” the only known member of the genus Mesonychoteuthis; the stuff of which nightmares are made.
This creature, of which only a handful of specimens (or parts thereof) have ever been discovered, can supposedly reach lengths of more than 40 feet.
The appearance of monsters such as this were originally limited only to fiction. In Junes Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” we are treated to an attack upon the Nautilus by just such a giant squid. But Verne wrote this tale in 1870, more than 50 years before scientists got the first inkling (pun intended) that such creatures existed. For it was in 1925 that the first proof was found of the existence of squid of this size in the form of a pair of tentacles found in the stomach of a sperm whale. This discovery lead to speculation about great struggles between the behemoths of the deep and further fueled giant squid lore.
That speculation had to continue for another half century until 1981 when a Russian trawler off the coast of Antarctica caught a large squid with a body length of about 13 feet. This specimen turned out to be an immature female, meaning the adults could theoretically be much larger. To date, the largest specimen ever discovered was brought aboard a New Zealand fishing boat also off the coast of Antarctica, which seems to be their favorite stomping grounds. Originally thought to measure more than 30 feet in length, after contracting “post-mortem” it was discovered that this specimen only measured about 14 feet in length.
However, Jules Verne fans such as myself (remember this column is named after his classic “L’Ile Mysterieuse” or “The Mysterious Island”) can take heart. Judging by the size of some of the beaks of these Colossal Squid found in the stomachs of sperm whales—beaks relative to the size of the beak of this specimen found in New Zealand—scientists postulate that fully grown adults are most likely “much larger.”
