squid – Wis[s]e Words

Kraken — Wendy Williams

Published on January 17, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Kraken

Kraken
Wendy Williams
223 pages including index
published in 2011

This was a bittersweet pleasure to read. As an homage to Sandra I wanted to read some of her favourite books and writers this year and Weny Williams’ Kraken was one of the last books she was really enthusiastic about. I had gotten it for her as part of an Amazon order in June of last year, when it still looked she was going to beat her illness and to cheer her up in hospital. Once she had read, she was keen on me to read it too to see what I thought, but I never made the time to do so, having so much else to read. It’s something I regret now, as I would’ve liked to discuss this with her, but at the same time it is nice as well to be able to read a book that reminds me so much of her. Sandra loved squids, octopuses and every kind of cephalopods; they were her favourite animals and any book on them that was any good had her favour.

And Kraken is quite good. At some twohundred pages without the index it’s not an indepth treatment of Cephalopoda, but it is a good look at what makes these creatures so fascinating. The cephalopods are invertebrates, part of the molluscs, with octopussies and squid traditionally seen as evil devil beasts that as soon drown a sailor as look at them. Yet the more we learn about them, the more fascinating they’ve become. It’s quite clear that many of them are incredibly smart, well adapted to their surroundings and with some amazing abilities — most possess chromatophores, coloured pigment cells under conscious muscular control which they can use to camouflage themselves or even “speak” with. They’re curious, they’re playful and in short, they remind us a little bit of ourselves.

Deepsea dentures

Published on September 26, 2005

Pharyngula answers the age old question: how is it squids can bite so hard without an internal or external skeleton?

If you think about it, though, cephalopods don’t have a rigid internal skeleton. How do they get the leverage to move a pair of sharp-edged beaks relative to one another, and what the heck are they doing with a hard beak anyway? There’s a whole paper on the anatomy of just the buccal mass, the complex of beak, muscle, connective tissue, and ganglia that powers the cephalopod bite.

I just love this kind of stuff.

Two for my sweetie

Published on August 8, 2005

pciture of
vampire squid, nicked from Pharyngula
Picture of vampire squid nicked from Pharyngula

S—, as you may or may not care to know, loves the cephalopod: squid, octopus, cuttlefish, she likes
them all. The following two links, both found at Pharyngula are for her.

First, there’s an interesting overview of cephalopod evolution, slightly marred by forced attempts to be hip involving Kang and Kodos, the alien squid monsters from the Simpsons, that’s right. Ignore this and you still have a good article, especially for those not as into the cephalopod as S—.

Second, take a look at what happens when a big octopus meets an equally sized shark in this videoclip from the Seattle Aquarium (Realplayer required). Suffice to say that the aquarium staff got a slightly surprising answer to their question as to why the sharks in this tank kept dying….

Squid profit from global warming

Published on October 31, 2004

We may not like it, us poor folk in the Netherlands especially, but squid apparantely thrive on global warming, overtaking humans in biomass. Not only are there more squid, according to Dr George Jackson from the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean they are also getting bigger:

“Many of the species have exponential growth, particularly during the juvenile stage so if you increase the water temperature by even a degree it has a tremendous snowballing effect of rapidly increasing their growth rate and their ultimate body size.

“They get much bigger and they can mature earlier and it just accelerates everything.”

The squid not only thrive on global warming, but also due to more direct interference by us. Since we seem intent on hunting their predators like tuna, to extinction, as well as their direct competitors, various finfish, squid can expand enormously. A good thing perhaps for them, not so good for the oceans’ ecology.

Also not good, the reports about Humboldt squid moving north into the waters around Alaska, when normally the furthest north they come is San Francisco. these squid are normally warm water animals, not suitable for living in colder waters (and indeed dying off in large numbers). The worry is, that this is happening because the warm water currents in the Pacific Ocean are shifting. And squid aren’t the only sea animals being found far north of their usual habitat: both thresher and great white sharks, as well as a hard-shell turtle and a jack mackarel have been sighted in Alaska recently…