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Giant squids – once they were despised and feared for their habit of turning tall ships into matchsticks and gobbling more seamen than, uh... actually, let's not go there.
In times past, we’ve all seen the dodgy lithographs of giant squid tackling sperm whales and laughed them off along with tales of voodoo magic, bible stories and global warming.
We’ve seen photos of sucker marks tall as a man on chunks of whale blubber and chuckled nervously.
Then we went a bit quiet as they started washing up on remote Tasmanian beaches.
Nowadays giant squid are more popular than Jesus and increasingly less legendary, mainly thanks to a team of hungry Japanese scientists, who in 2005, sent a camera down 900m to unobtrusively film a giant squid in its natural environment.
The camera surfaced with the first ever footage of the legendary deepsea dweller as it chased the bait.
It also delivered two massive tentacles ripped off courtesy of the team’s clever strategy of holding the bait on with chemically sharpened hooks.
Since then, the giant squid’s harder big brother, the colossal squid, has dropped its guard and started getting enmeshed in trawlers’ nets with increasing regularity.
There’s even a trans-Tasman rivalry breaking out after a Victorian fisherman hauled in a 230kg colossal in 2008. It’s not even half the weight of last year’s 500kg effort by the Kiwis, but the game is definitely on.
Because there’s something strange going on in the world of colossal calamari. Either fishermen are trawling deeper as fish supplies dwindle, or giant/colossal squid are simply sick of their whaley wrestling partners stealing the environmental spotlight.
It’s a moot point, really. The main thing is that the legend is most definitely real, and the race is regularly on to be the first to send the day’s “Pics of Giant Squid” story around the office email circuit.
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