I watched some of a live stream video that was being broadcast through the Sydney Morning Herald website of the dissection of a Giant Squid. The dissection was being done at the Science Gallery of Museum Victoria by some obvious squid experts of some kind. There was this huuuuuge tray, with this squid plopped on it, and when I say squid, I mean giant squid.... This thing was pretty big, imagine the calamari rings you could get off it LOL.
Anyway, there was one guy talking, and a cameraman called Jasper (cos the guy talking kept telling Jasper to come over here and look here) while about three of four other guys were taking measurements and poking about the squid subtly in the background for their own research/records.
It appeared that there was quite an audience also but they were silhouetted by the bright lights on stage so it was hard to see how packed it was. The guys poking about also didn't wear gloves which was interesting to see, but they did wear the typical green surgical gowns.
After he had poked about these suction caps (like giant press studs), and then showed the gills, and explained how these giant squids had three hearts, one above each gill (being one gill on each side of its head) and one in the middle. Apparently because the squid blood is a copper based system (which is why it is a pale-ish blue colour instead of red like human due to the iron content) it is really poor at carrying the oxygen around the system so it needs multiple hearts to get the blood around fast and efficiently enough. Evolution at work. He then showed some branches of a stellate ganglion, and WHOA, it was fricken MASSIVE..... I have seen like one or two nice stellate ganglions in humans, and there are like maybe mm thickness, no more than probably 2mm thick near the ganglion body, but the strands coming off this was like 1-1.5cm thick each...... damn, the conduction speeds would be insane, which would account for why they can move so quickly in the water with absolute control of their tenticles.....
He then proceeded to draw a diagram on a whiteboard and then commented "We're going to have to throw out this board afterwards" LOL, I can imagine the smell would linger considerably....
I didn't watch the entire thing since it was streaming at about 35k/s which, depending on how long they were going for, would probably eat up quite a lot of my bandwidth. Might see if there is a video of it available online later on in low-res or something from Museum Victoria and download it instead. Interesting stuff though.
Anyway, there was one guy talking, and a cameraman called Jasper (cos the guy talking kept telling Jasper to come over here and look here) while about three of four other guys were taking measurements and poking about the squid subtly in the background for their own research/records.
It appeared that there was quite an audience also but they were silhouetted by the bright lights on stage so it was hard to see how packed it was. The guys poking about also didn't wear gloves which was interesting to see, but they did wear the typical green surgical gowns.
After he had poked about these suction caps (like giant press studs), and then showed the gills, and explained how these giant squids had three hearts, one above each gill (being one gill on each side of its head) and one in the middle. Apparently because the squid blood is a copper based system (which is why it is a pale-ish blue colour instead of red like human due to the iron content) it is really poor at carrying the oxygen around the system so it needs multiple hearts to get the blood around fast and efficiently enough. Evolution at work. He then showed some branches of a stellate ganglion, and WHOA, it was fricken MASSIVE..... I have seen like one or two nice stellate ganglions in humans, and there are like maybe mm thickness, no more than probably 2mm thick near the ganglion body, but the strands coming off this was like 1-1.5cm thick each...... damn, the conduction speeds would be insane, which would account for why they can move so quickly in the water with absolute control of their tenticles.....
He then proceeded to draw a diagram on a whiteboard and then commented "We're going to have to throw out this board afterwards" LOL, I can imagine the smell would linger considerably....
I didn't watch the entire thing since it was streaming at about 35k/s which, depending on how long they were going for, would probably eat up quite a lot of my bandwidth. Might see if there is a video of it available online later on in low-res or something from Museum Victoria and download it instead. Interesting stuff though.
2 comments:
Sounds fascinating. Could it possibly be about this squid? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/29/giant-squid-being-thawed_n_99120.html
Hard to say because there has been several giant squid been caught across Oceania, the Japanese got one lately, the NZ folks caught one, and I think some Australians also got some too....
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