While I get caught up on my squid craze, you can learn more about these prodigious creatures of the deep and their red-carpet premiere.
The newscasters ask, "We're doing a story about a giant squid because...why?" What's the point? This is the point: The creature believed to have inspired stories of the Kraken, measuring the length of a school bus, and inhabiting the vast ocean wastelands 20,000 leagues under the sea, that we only know existed through sparse parts of even sparser carcases washed up on shore or in the stomachs of whales that wasn't photographed in its natural habitat until September 30, 2004, has finally been captured on film nearly half of a century after Apollo 11's moon-landing. | |
| Lastly, this story ends where it began—with an amazing discovery. Edith Widder, a member of the team of marine biologists that filmed the squid, chalks it up to a new ocean discovery method of silent observation rather than noisy intrusion, a method she presented at the April 2010 TED Conference. The method holds promise in light of this latest discovery. |