Wired has a pretty gallery of images from the recent Colossal Squid necropsy. If you’ve ever wondered what a pile of squid guts would look like on a table, here you go.
It’s too bad the images aren’t quite large enough to use as wallpaper on my laptop.
Oh, and those colors—that’s exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.
Yuck!!
Now I know how they look like.
How do they taste?
They don’t taste to well i’ve read, unless you like ammonia.
The question is: who’s bringing the marinara?
Oh, and love the shirt of the guy in picture number 10.
See, this is why I went into engineering. There’s always something sliming you in science.
Except particle physics, I suppose, but there’s always the chance of accidentally taking a high energy positron to the head.
Well, they’d *say* it was an accident. Never piss off people with 10 gigajoules in their electromagnets.
I bet the smell is priceless.
The first person to commercialise an affordable “odour card” for PCs to complement the current audio/visual multimedia suite gets a punch in the face.
PZ…. whats the stripy thing in the middle?
I was at the lectures the day after the necropsy, so I know the answer to some of these questions…
The scientists involved all had a taste, to check whether Colossal Squid are ammoniacal (They’re not); apparently, the verdict was divided, but they don’t taste too bad. Dr O’Shea, who’s a smoker, thought it was quite good, but Ku thought it wasn’t very good at all, and the Japanese are famous for discernment in seafood.
For a full account, check out my blog.
Great brown gobs of greasy, grimy squidy guts,
Mutilated monkey meat
Dirty little birdies’ feet.
Great brown gobs of greasy, grimy squidy guts,
And me without my spoon
Thanks for this, PZ. Next time someone asks why I’m not a biologist, I’ll just link to it.
A set of gills, I’m pretty sure.
Reminds me of the scene in John Carpenter’s “The Thing” when Wilford Brimley dissects the burnt remains of the dog-Thing.
Well, I used to be hungry.
(.)(.)
This needs to be reproduced permanently in plastic, and made available to the public.
I need a new coffee table display.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Yeah, the first thing I thought was “what’s the grey striped thing in the middle?”
I can smell it from here…and why isn’t that scientist wearing exam gloves?
LOL!
This photo must seem familiar to most scientists. If you can relate to this photo maybe its time to pull your head out
seazoria
http://www.seazoria.com we do dragons
Gross!
And awesome!
But still gross!
While it’s great to see some by-catch put to good use for a change, it presents a serious ethical dilemma knowing that Patagonian Toothfish (Chilean Seabass) were the catch.
Why is this a “necropsy”? That is, what’s the difference between an autopsy and a necropsy?
Also, I want a labeled/tagged version. Facebook style.
“Early teleportation devices were unreliable at best, but with the price of gas at $22.50 a gallon, people were willing to take the gamble.”
(Oh, sorry, it’s just that I really, really miss “Monkey Fluids” It’s a sickness I tell ya…)
@#21 octopod —
Though they are interchangeable in modern usage, autopsy comes from Greek auto (self) + opsis (sight) whereas necropsy comes from Greek necro (dead) + opsis (sight). So even though you *can* say that you’re doing a “self-examination” on a squid, it doesn’t make as much etymological sense.
A necropsy is conducted on an animal, and an autopsy is conducted on a person. As Etha said, it wouldn’t be quite right to call a squid like oneself. Unless one has something going on that we don’t know about.
Yes, the grey stripey things are indeed the gills.
@#8wazza
I wouldn’t trust Steve O’s judgement on something like taste, the man listens to Neil Diamond.
I once cooked banana slugs for a gourmet dinner of local and scavenged foods. I modified the protocol recommended for snails (you can’t keep slugs in cornmeal for a couple of weeks to clean out the grit from their guts, as you can with snails). When I cut them open they consisted almost entirely of ‘guts’, so I threw those away and just chopped up the body walls. The final dish of slug bits in butter with garlic and parsley and lemon, eaten with toast, was quite tasty.
How big is the pen on that thing?
I hate slugs (and other snails)!
Very irrational, I know, but if I could, I most certainly would pull the lever that exterminated all of them everywhere.
Scavenged foods? I don’t know what’s creepier: those gutsy squid photos or the thought of eating (or even touching) a banana slug. I once found a really big one curled up inside a cake pan I left to dry on a draining board. It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. And cleaning the pan wasn’t easy, either. That slime is like super glue.
In the immortal words of Biggie Smalls,
Escargot, my car go, one sixty, swiftly
Wreck it buy a new one
Your crew run run run, your crew run run
And cleaning the pan wasn’t easy, either. That slime is like super glue.
Isn’t there a point where you just get a new cake pan?
Escargot, my car go, one sixty, swiftly
Wreck it buy a new one
Your crew run run run, your crew run run
Go, Speed Racer, goooooooooo!
I’ve been wondering this for many many years.
How come people who work with dead squid always use their bare hands??? I work in a toxicology lab, and I wear gloves when I work with just ethanol; it’s just the normal procedure.
After working there so long, dealing with a dead animal without gloves just seems heretical.
The picture came up just as I bit into an apple fritter.
Yum.
Larry #9 – I was thinking the same thing, but couldn’t remember all of the lyrics…
I loved this comment with the pics on Wired:
PZ, do you find this “law” to be true?
As a PNW native I would like to say that the rest of us just put salt on slugs instead of cutting them open to see if they have zebra striped organs.
Wow, maybe I’m weird but that looks like fun.
And now I have to go do some research because I suddenly have to know if/how much squid organs correlate to human organs and what kind of exciting extra stuff they have in there.
Yes, yes, but seriously–what the hell is the striped thing??
No, seriously: it’s a gill.
Seriously.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0805/S00013.htm
Does this answer your question about taste? ;)
@#22 RamblinDude:
That would be the perfect caption for this photo – thanks for the smile.
Hey, cool. I’ve got a picture on my computer that I took, it’s a screencapture of the live feed from the tank while they were taking picture #1 on that website.
Thought I’d be sort of postmodern, to take a picture of a webcast of a picture being taken for publicity.
Wasn’t Colossal Squid the hero in Minoru Kawasaki’s The Calamari Wrestler?
The greatest interspecies wrestling film ever!
TWO TENTACLES UP!
“If you love sushi, cephalopods, magical realism and wrestling, this is the film for you!”
.
>that’s exactly what slug guts look like, too. We natives of the Pacific Northwest have many opportunities to get familiar with those.
I’m going out to dinner tonight, and I won’t be having calamari. ;-)
I had a few rings of fried calamari with me Chinese buffet today at lunch. And I feel great about it. (Never thought of calamari alla romana as especially Chinese, but I suppose we learn something new every day.)
Sili @29: for shame, for shame. Slugs are wonderful (as are their less advanced snail cousins, dependent though they be on a sufficient source of calcium). And yes, I have stepped on them at night in the dark. With bare feet. And still I admire them.
The first person to commercialise an affordable “odour card” for PCs to complement the current audio/visual multimedia suite gets a punch in the face.
break out the brass knuckles…
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/9928/
How come people who work with dead squid always use their bare hands???
my guesses, having dissected a few “normal” squid:
the internal tissues are often very delicate, and require a good sense of touch to avoid damaging them.
the sense of touch is also important when evaluating a specimen, just as much as eyesight, smell, etc. Texture is important information, and cannot be gleaned correctly when wearing gloves.
then there’s just pure aesthetics. It’s simply part of the experience, and then the smell carries forward for many days afterwards, reminding you of that special experience.
;)
actually, I only recall using gloves on mostly rotten specimens, or ones preserved in formalin (nasty stuff) of anything I have ever dissected.
otherwise, it’s always in the buff, so to speak.
Oh, that looks delicious.
There is an “Eats. Shoots. and Leaves.” feel to the title of this post.
Maybe they are chemists. Chemists almost never wear gloves, not even when making tin iodide (nice orange crystals that leave traces on your hands for at least 7 years thereafter), and would laugh out loud at the thought of wearing gloves when just handling ethanol.
Molecular biologists do usually wear gloves, though, when they prepare a gel. Staining your own DNA in vivo ruins it majorly.
[with Epstein inflection]
Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!
Mistah Myers! Mistah Myers!
What’s the stripey organ? It’s really cool looking.
Chemists almost never wear gloves, not even when making tin iodide (nice orange crystals that leave traces on your hands for at least 7 years thereafter), and would laugh out loud at the thought of wearing gloves when just handling ethanol.
you took organic chemistry, right?
are you seriously suggesting that chemists don’t wear gloves when dealing with toxic substances dissolved in acetone, for example?
ethanol… no, but acetone… definetly yes. Was the very first lesson of the very first hour of the very first Ochem lab I ever took.
just saying, I wouldn’t be suggesting that chemists don’t wear gloves without some sort of tongue-in-cheek signal.
skin is hardly impervious.
deviljelly (#7):
In the same way that some species of ants raise aphids as livestock, colossal squid raise fish in a symbiotic relationship. The stripy organ is a signalling device displayed to the fish to control the phenotype of the client species – if the fish see it when they mate, they produce zebrafish as offspring.
Etha Williams (#23) + valor (#24):
Aha! Conclusive logical proof that ‘alien autopsies’ are not real!
OK, I’m done now.
Looks like this thing had eaten a trilobite..
Thanks PZ,
I’m quite “delicate” this morning after a few too many imbibes last night. I really, really didn’t need to see that.
In the same way that some species of ants raise aphids as livestock, colossal squid raise fish in a symbiotic relationship. The stripy organ is a signalling device displayed to the fish to control the phenotype of the client species – if the fish see it when they mate, they produce zebrafish as offspring.
aha!
someone who has learned from Jacob’s example, in that there most scientifical book o larnin’!
;)
“The stripy organ is a signalling device displayed to the fish to control the phenotype of the client species-if the fish see it when they mate, they produce zebrafish as offspring.”
LOL! Wow, the bible really is one of the most advanced science books around!
How come people who work with dead squid always use their bare hands???
Sexual thrills.
then there’s just pure aesthetics. It’s simply part of the experience, and then the smell carries forward for many days afterwards, reminding you of that special experience.
See?
Avoid Ichthyic if he/she says “smell my finger”…
Avoid Ichthyic if he/she says “smell my finger”…
bastard!
whatchya gotta go and ruin my schtick for?
*sigh*
now I’ll have to wait months for people to forget again.
OTOH, I guess I can toss out those dead seals and rotted fish intestines now.
:p
Are we shure the stripey thing is a gill and not a parasitic amphipod? Doesn’t look right to me for a squid gill.
Doesn’t look right to me for a squid gill
I tend to agree; I would expect it to be longer, and more closely associated with the mantle itself (and far more “feathery”.
I’m sure there will be (are?) annotated pictures of the dissection.
OTOH, it really doesn’t look like a parasitic isopod to me, either.
maybe a comparison would help:
http://taylorsinsight.blogspot.com/2007/10/dissection-squid.html
http://giantsquid.msstate.edu/LessonList/dissection.html
hmm, I’m gonna go with part of the caecum.
It’s hard when you aren’t doing the dissection yourself, so you can see where the parts are located when you first open the mantle cavity.
If you go to the linked page, it’s image #9, and the explanation blurb reads:
So yes, those are the gills.
about the isopod idea…
IIRC, isopods that parasitize cephalopods are rare, and the ones found so far typically are small and live in the buccal cavity (oral bulb) of cephalopods.
not saying that isopods don’t have some unusually large examples:
http://tea.armadaproject.org/Images/curtis/curtis-isopod.JPG.jpg
but that would indeed be a first for such a large species to be parasitizing a cephalopod.
So yes, those are the gills.
However, the person who noted they don’t look like cephalopod gills is correct, too.
they don’t.
see this:
http://giantsquid.msstate.edu/Images/GS21.jpg
for example.
the gills are lying on the mantle, separate but parallel to the central organ mass.
“are you seriously suggesting that chemists don’t wear gloves when dealing with toxic substances dissolved in acetone, for example?
ethanol… no, but acetone… definetly yes. Was the very first lesson of the very first hour of the very first Ochem lab I ever took.”
but you can buy acetone at the drug store to remove nail polish. it’s just a harmless little ketone.
but you can buy acetone at the drug store to remove nail polish. it’s just a harmless little ketone.
it’s not the acetone that’s the problem itself.
it’s that acetone is a solvent that can make most things dissolved in it pass right through your skin.
hence, why it was the first lesson, as there is rarely anything one does in an Ochem lab that involves acetone by itself.
well, acetone has been shown to cause liver damage all by itself (vapor inhalation), but that’s not what I was referring to.
bottom line, as they always used to tell us in every chem lab I ever did experiments in:
“no glove, no love”
information about solvents would be useful, I think, if maybe a bit OT:
http://www.chymeragroup.com/volatile_organic_solvents.htm
Ichthyic,
thanks for the link on acetone, I work with it from time-to-time, and never had an appreciation for the danger I have been exposing myself to with my caveman mentality.
Thank you.
Dan in Orlando
Wait, no one’s mentioned the wicked tentacles yet? The suckers have sharp hooks on them??!?? I had no idea. And, I wonder how the giant squid get some lovin’ without hurting each other with those.
#6 I remember Steve O’Shea stinking out the School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, after he left a borrowed octopus (or squid) on his desk in his office and went on holiday. It was gross x a gross!
Unicorn chasers aren’t really this blog’s schtick, but could you dredge up some stupid YEC story about the existence of real horned horses and make an exception?
Seriously, PZ. They’re only pretty on the inside metaphorically.
It was gross x a gross!
muhahahaha!
I think it’s almost a requirement to take a perverse pleasure in grossing out your compatriots if you’re an organismal biologist of any kind.
at least on occasion.
;)
At unnamed university, my unnamed supervising professor was working on gar systematics. He went to a lake where fishermen were catching alligator gar and came back with a pickup load of heads and skins. These were unloaded in an old barracks building with the intention of working them up, freezing them, whatever. Well, some three weeks later there was enough complaint about smell from the adjacent music building that two grounds guys and I went to investigate. We finally got them loaded up in plastic bags and off to the landfill, got the floor scrubbed with clorox and the place sprayed with deodorant. Not a whole lot of fun.
Not only are invertebrates better-looking than we are, but even their innards are prettier than ours. I feel humbled.
Not a whole lot of fun.
your adviser just wanted to give you something to remember.
;)
I have to say, I’ve pulled similar things on some of the students I’ve taught before.
ah, memories…
looking forward to the next batch of students I end up teaching.
lets see…
hagfish slime?
boiling fish heads for skulls?
so many fun possibilities…
ah, exploding sea cucumber guts.
that’s a good one, and I haven’t used it in quite a while.