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Cape TownWashed up 4-meter giant squid keeps the Twitter community busy
A dead giant squid washed up on the South African coast. The photos of the find are actively commented on. The animal, which otherwise lives at great depths, may have been killed by a ship’s propeller while looking for food.
He is over four meters long. The cause of death is unclear.
Twitter/@TimDee4
The eyes of the giant squid are among the largest in the animal kingdom.
Twitter/@TimDee4
When the British naturalist, BBC producer and author Tim Dee recently visited Scarborough Beach near Cape Town in South Africa, he came across a dead giant squid that had washed up on the beach. «His parrot’s beak in the first picture, his eye in the second. Special deep-sea jellyfish. Where did you go, you Moby Dick? », he wrote poetically to the pictures he posted on Twitter. The animal is said to be 14 feet (4.20 meters) long.
“Although there are other large squids, I’m pretty sure it’s a real giant squid,” zoologist Mike Vecchione tells me Metro.uk to the pictures. It refers to the species Architeuthis dux, which lives at depths of 300 to 1000 meters and can grow to be over 10 meters long including its ten arms. They hunt primarily with the help of their very good eyes, which are among the largest in the entire animal kingdom.
The cause of the squid’s death is unclear. According to marine biologist Dylan Clarke, squid would emerge to shallower depths in the evening to forage and then descend deeper again during the day. When surfacing, the animal may have been injured by a ship’s propeller. Not much is known about the animals, which are native to many waters of the Pacific and Atlantic, and all sorts of legends surround them. Only in 2002 could a living specimen be photographed. The cadaver is now to be examined by researchers.
(trx)