About Children's Day and Squids

Today is children's day and I would like to wish all children out there, big and small, a Happy Children's Day. Haha. I remember when I was young, how I loved children's day. You have a celebration at school, you get little gifts from the teachers and best of all, it was a holiday. Haha. Yeah! Unfortunately, the "children" classification ended the minute I left Primary school, which is quite sad since I still felt as much of a child in Sec 1, and part of Sec 2 even, as I did in Pri 5 and 6.

Anyway, do you remember ever hearing stories or watching tv shows about the ships of ancient explorers being attacked by giant squids that would wrap their tentacles around the ship and rip it apart? Well, when I was young I remembered watching lots of cartoons and stuff where there'll sometimes be a giant squid "guest starring" inside to destroy the ship of the hero. And to be honest, it really made me afraid of going out to sea for a while.

Well, it seemed to be a fad of that time, cos nowadays you seldom see TV shows with giant squids in them anymore. So much so that I thought that giant squids were only part of fiction. But apparantly they aren't, and for the first time, Japanese scientists have actually captured one live, on film that is.

Previously, all evidence of this elusive creature came from stories of sailors and dead specimens washed up on remote shores. But there was nothing else known about these creatures. How they live, feed and reproduce, were all a mystery. The main reason why these giant squids are so elusive is the immense depth in the seas that they live in, which is believed to be around 1000 meters. And scientists have come up with some weird ways to film them including attaching cameras to sperm whales and even laying a "sex trap" using pureed squid genitals. The Japanese scientists however, used a more common approach - a bait bag filled with mashed shrimp.

Now, with this footage one mystery seems to be solved - the squids are active predators. The squid captured on film was a 8 metre specimen, which is about the length of a bus. It showed how the squid "attacks", how it moved and how it propelled itself. The deep-sea pictures suggest that the squid is not the "sluggish, neutrally buoyant" creature that it has traditionally been deemed to be, but an active predator that attacks its prey horizontally.

Well, I wonder whether we would ever catch a live specimen. I think that would be quite sight to behold. Imagine the Underwater World in Sentosa with a giant squid. Haha. I think it'd probably cover up quite a large part of the tunnel.

Paris - Japanese zoologists have made the first recording of a live giant squid, one of the strangest and most elusive creatures in the world.

The size of a bus, with vast eyes and a querulous beak, Architeuthis has long nourished myth and literature.

Until now, the only evidence of giant squids was extraordinarily rare - from dead squids that washed up on remote shores or got snagged on a long-line fish hook or from ships' crews who spotted the deep-sea denizen as it made a sortie near the surface.

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