Little Known Desert Fauna No.1 – The Giant Sand Squid
It started in 1992, when veterans started to come back from the first Gulf war. They reported strange hollows in the sand that appeared overnight, odd patches of ground stained with a bown sticky substance.
Then the disappearances started. First, an army cook who’d gone outside for a little, ahem, private time, then a signals captain, a notoriously early riser, whose comrades heard him go out one morning and who was never seen again. The disappearances were sporadic and occasional, and chalked up to insurgent attacks. Soldiers who talked about hearing odd, eldritch cries in the night were quickly hushed up. But the troops knew the truth – that the disappearances were linked.
One Lance-Corporal was alert enough one early morning to take a picture, and what she saw was both new to science, and an untested enemy- a sand squid.
Previous to these sightings, land-based squid had been known only via the existence of the arboreal yet posssibly related endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. (It has been posited by Chinese scholars that there may be ruminant cuttlefish in isolated valleys in the Altai mountains, but as yet there have been no sightings.) Other than the fact that they are both members of the genus cephalopodia, the sand squid is so swift and silent, and sightings so rare, that as yet it has been impossible to obtain samples for DNA comparison with the tree octopus. As of now all science can do is theorise from the available data.
Because of the chaos surounding the current Gulf conflict it has proved impossible for biologists to study the pheneomenon of nature that is the sand squid any further, and the secrecy surrounding the numbers of dead in Iraq has obviated against any possible post-mortem or even investigation into the causes of deaths. But there are anecdotal reports of recovered bodies in desert areas showing signs of both sucker teeth and beak marks, so we at least know that it’s quite possibly carnivorous .
Personnel currently stationed in the Gulf are urged to be on the lookout and to please send on any details of sightings. To assist them, here’s the only extant pic of the elusive Giant Sand Squid, shown attacking a military convoy:
Let’s hope that this elusive new squid lives deep enough to be unaffected by artillery fire and DU rounds. It would be a tragedy to science if it were to become extinct before it can be studied.
Read More: Cephalopods
Pacific Tree Octopus
