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From the latest New Scientist magazine comes this story:

Gruesome habits of the giant squid
Emma Young; 30 July 2005; Magazine issue 2510

Enshrined in myth as ferocious beasts that overturn boats to munch on sailors, giant squid, it appears, also indulge in cannibalism

ENSHRINED in myth as ferocious beasts that upturned boats to munch on sailors, giant squid could have a diet that is even less palatable in reality: Architeuthis dux may indulge in cannibalism.

Identifying the prey of A. dux has not been easy because the squid finely macerate their food, the digestive systems of most specimens studied have been empty, and none has ever been examined alive.

Now Bruce Deagle of the University of Tasmania, Australia, and his team have analysed the gut contents of a male giant squid caught by fishermen off the west coast of Tasmania in 1999. Among the slurry of macerated prey, they found three tentacle fragments and 12 squid beaks. The beaks could not be unequivocally identified, but all of the squid DNA in the slurry, and the tentacle fragments, was found to be that of A. dux (Journal of Heredity, vol 96, p 417).

The full New Scientist story doesn’t say much more than this, although it does quote Steve O’Shea who suspected that the cannibalism was accidental:

“The male giant squid has to use a puny 15-gram brain to coordinate 150 kilograms of weight, 10 metres of length and a 1.5-metre-long penis,” he says. “He physically plunges this penis into the female’s arms, which are rather unfortunately right next to her beak. Because he is coordinating so much with so little, I think occasionally bits get chewed off when they inadvertently get too close to the beak.”

The discussion on TONMO is, of course, the best place to learn more about this story. (The photo comes from here, and is reproduced here - apparently there are inaccuracies with this second article.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Squid Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.