rather large Squids, &c

Sept 29, 2005 Weird sex: Giant squid do it deeper
There's a photo there, but just of one squid all by himself itself.

Sept 28, 2005 I don't have any photos handy of the Giant Squid "captured on film," but I reccomend checking out Google News for the latest Squid Info.

Jan 20, 2005. Nearly 500 Dosidicus gigas (weighing up to 17 pounds) wash ashore near Orange County.

Yeah. 17 pounds doesn't exactly sound gigantic to me, either.

marine biologist Steve O'Shea and his Colossal Squid.
Click Pic for the Reuters wire story.

The BBC story has some good colossal squid photos. Who you gonna trust? TONMO, The Octopus News Magazine Online, has yer octopi & squid--normal, giant & colossal-stories, photos, and a 4.5meg absolutely-amazing Squid fact-sheets stuffed fulla pictures, charts, graphs, &c. There used to be a Giant Squid Resource Center but all seems gone, including the Google-cache. A brief fragment of a whiff of a hint suggest it might have been a high-school project... SlashDot is chattering. A January article from the BBC on a Giant Squid Attack!. 7 or 8 metres long. Dr. Steve answers question on Giant Squid in this 2002 feature from the Discovery Channel's Chasing Giants. Another 2002 Discovery Channel report sez Global Warming is "causing squid to grow abnormally large." We we warned! (This "report" is no longer available at Discovery.com; the links leads to a page within The Heat is Online which is well worth digging through. They also cover jellyfish.) A 200kg giant squid washed up onto a beach in Hobart, Aus in July 2002. Here's George Jackson, with a photo, linking it to global warming. The LessonPlanLibrary has this Giant Squid pdf to help you break the news of these friendly maurding montsters of the deep. Cool engraving, as well!

It may not have been colossal, but Jules Verne had a giant squid attack the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Karen C. points out the the original English edition had more than 1/4 of it cut out. She provides a lot of links, including to several complete public-domain e-texts.

C.B. Adams brings us some photos and text on the Walt Disney World Nautilus.

TurboSquid.com has absolutely NOTHING to do with real squid. "Founded in early 2000, Turbo Squid is a fully-featured digital media marketplace for 3D assets." What a gyp.

Dr. Squidd isn't a REAL squid with a doctorate, no! He's a "Zine featuring b-movie reviews and articles about low-budget and no-budget movies, actresses, obscurities, sci-fi, comic books and other weird stuff."

SQUIDLY has nothing to do with our colossal friend, other than another nod an article, but (s)he's got a relevant domain name & image at the top o' the page. Tasteful.

CNN.com - Giant sea creature baffles Chilean scientists - Jul. 2, 2003

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) -- Chilean scientists were baffled on Tuesday by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen. The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.

'We'd never before seen such a strange specimen, We don't know if it might be a giant squid that is missing some of its parts or maybe it's a new species,' said Elsa Cabrera, a marine biologist and director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago. Photographs showed a round leathery substance like a mammoth jelly fish, about as long as a school bus."

Short BBC story with picture. They call it a "giant blob."
Marc Laidlaw has a different opinion

July 11: Turns out that the gelatinous blob was a dead whale after all. :::sigh:::

CNN.com - Mysterious squid deaths investigated - Sep. 18, 2003: "Scientists are trying to find out what caused two enormous squids, one of them 40 feet long, to wash up dead on Spain's northern coast this week. [....] The second squid to wash up in recent days was a 191-lb female and was found by a man swimming. He told a Reuters photographer he had attached one of the tentacles to a float and dragged the creature toward the shore."

CNN: Spanish navy shocks blamed for giant squid deaths - September 19, 2003. Navy denies the charges.