Pharyngula::Squid, it's what's for dinner

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Saturday, January 07, 2006

Squid, it's what's for dinner

PZ Myers • 39 Comments (last page)

In addition to having a wild sex life, the giant squid has interesting table manners. In an article on the Gut contents of a giant squid Architeuthis dux (Cephalopoda: Oegopsida) from New Zealand waters, investigators popped open the caecum of a captured giant squid and went rummaging about to see what they'd been eating. The toothsome contents are shown below.

Architeuthis is a deep water carnivore, so most of what was found is no surprise: remnants of fish and squid. A few other interesting tidbits emerged, though.

One of the quirks of the invertebrate body plan is that having both a ventral nerve cord and a ventral mouth means that at some point the gut has to pass through its nervous system on the way out. Having your brain wrapped in a ring around your esophagus limits the size of what can be swallowed. This squid's esophagus had a maximum relaxed diameter of 10mm, while one of the chunks in its gut could be compressed to a minimum diameter of 19mm. The squid dictum, "Never eat anything bigger than the esophageal perforation through your brain" seems to have been ignored by Architeuthis.
Some of the squid fragments in the gut could be identified by species…and they belonged to Architeuthis dux. Cannibals!!! Cool.
It's possible that some of the Architeuthis fragments got there by accidental self-ingestion—you know, in the frenzy of eating, shoving things down your beak, you accidentally gnaw off an arm…and well, waste not, want not.

I know, it all sounds so horrific: great beasts in a feeding frenzy, ripping off hunks of friend, foe, and self alike, wolfing them all down without regard for safety or decorum. But then, I've sat down to dinner with two teenaged boys, so it all seems like business as usual to me.

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Comments:

#56841: — 01/07 at 12:49 PM
So does the brain stretch to fit larger chunks? I wonder what that feels like.

#56847: ekzept — 01/07 at 01:19 PM
speaking of "waste not, want not", why not skin?

i recall studying Wallace Stevens in high school. he became and is my favorite poet. i have many favorites but two are "Sunday Morning" and "The Emperor of Ice Cream". the latter is about a Protestant New England wake, held as was the custom, in the parlor or living room of the house of the deceased or close relatives. food is of course served. and noone is put off by having an open casket nearby. dressing the dead for burial is considered a personal responsibility.

i don't intend to be morbid, but with the commercialization of death and with our success at keeping it tidily at bay, i think we're insulated from it until it is too late. when disease and war was rampant, everyone knew people who died, and many saw them die. it's as much a part of life as birth, sex, and sickness. i wonder if we aren't the worse for sanitizing it so. and i wonder if our revulsion over books with human skin covers and evidence for extensive cannibalism in a human past isn't in part due to our hiding from it.

incidently, Stevens was a thorough atheist and served as a critical antidote to my Catholic upbringing. consider the excerpt from "Sunday Morning":

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

there is also this quote from the Opus Posthumous "Adagia", so appropriate for the creationists:

A poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have.

#56850: Mikko Sandt — 01/07 at 01:39 PM
Off-topic but here's a link to a new Weekly Standard (quality magazine but should focus on non-religious issues since any pro-ID, anti-evolution dude gives any magazine a bad reputation - at least in my opinion) article on Evolution/ID debate, in case you guys missed it:

Survival of the Evolution Debate:
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/562zfezu.asp

#56867: — 01/07 at 04:14 PM
The thing weighs several hundred pounds, and it can only swallow inch-wide portions? Poor bastard.

Actually, poor whatever-it-is that's getting eaten that way...

#56869: — 01/07 at 04:28 PM
Many years ago, I read a memoir called 'An American Doctor in the Philippines,' and he had a description of a Negrito feast in which the diners in a frenzy hacked a live water buffalo with their machetes and gobbled the pieces including, from time to time, pieces of the diners.

#56877: — 01/07 at 05:59 PM

It's possible that some of the Architeuthis fragments got there by accidental self-ingestion

Surely some slightly more accurate genetic analysis could settle that one. It might be worse - patricide or fratricide etc.

#56895: noell — 01/07 at 09:49 PM
The squid is a perfect example of why Intelligent Design must be true.

#56899: — 01/07 at 10:49 PM
Noell,

Are you serious?

#56900: — 01/07 at 10:51 PM
Sorry Noell,

I just checked your website.(I like it.) Disregard my question to you.

#56903: Ronald Brak — 01/08 at 12:55 AM
Dear Harry,

I'm afraid the Negrito feast you read about sounds very similar to myths that people in civilised countries such as Britian and Nazi Germany often told each other about primitive peoples. Often the it's the same story but with details such as the name of the country changed. It is possible that the doctor did witness a gang of lunatics engaged in such a feast, but just how many of these feasts would you have to attend and how many fingers would you have to have had lopped off and eaten before you realized your better off staying at home and having a bowl of rice instead?

#56910: Ronald Brak — 01/08 at 04:10 AM
Dear Harry again,

While I'm sure that the good doctor whose memoirs you read may well have witnessed the feast you mentioned (I'm sure he wouldn't lie to us). I'm confident that the stuff about feasters eating bits lopped off each other was just a story he was told, perhaps by locals who wanted to see what they could get him to believe, and not something that was engaged in frequently.

#56917: — 01/08 at 04:47 AM
How do they explain the 19mm through a 10mm hole? It's not quite as impressive as getting a camel through the eye of a needle, but still doesn't seem possible.

#56928: John Emerson — 01/08 at 09:39 AM
A Muslim ambassador told a similiar story about a Viking horse-sacrifice and orgy at a funeral, in Bulgar (~Kazan) circa 900 AD. The Nazis probably bragged about this one.

I've been told that dragonflies are so voracious that they if their tails are bent over to their mouths, they will eat them.

#56930: Matt McIrvin — 01/08 at 10:34 AM
About the 10/19 mm difference: Octopuses can squeeze through tiny holes too, without apparent injury. I get the impression that the bodies of cephalopods are soft and stretchy enough to deform pretty spectacularly without hurting them.

#56933: — 01/08 at 11:00 AM
Perhaps PZ is baiting us with such a blatant anthropomorphism - one would think the squid found the food beaksome instead.

I am not sure why compressing and/or stretching parts of the brain 4-5 mm (assuming symmetry) would be a noticeable problem. Humans seems to survive and mostly do well after such stresses caused by falls, infections, fluid overpressures, bleedings, tumors and brain surgery. Here is an article saying that dural opening for surgery shifts the cortex on average 4.1 mm which becomes 6.7 mm postcompletion (tumor removal): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db;=PubMed&list;_uids=9525711&dopt;=Abstract

#56934: — 01/08 at 11:03 AM
Are you sure the squid dictum doesn't apply to certain members of genus Homo as well?

#56935: Keith Douglas — 01/08 at 11:05 AM
Darn. And I thought this thread would explain how to prepare those delicious fried calamari I had at dim sum a few weeks ago.

#56936: PZ Myers — 01/08 at 11:06 AM
Yes, brains are a little bit stretchy. Distortions of the physical state of the brain can do strange things to what's going on inside them; I wonder if the squid brains blank out as the bigger lumps pass through, or better yet, if they experience religious ecstasy and see fireworks?

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris

#56948: — 01/08 at 12:55 PM
Ronald, I'm sure you are politically correct, but I doubt you know what you are talking about.

It is strange, on a blog largely devoted to railing against the crazy, often self-destructive behavior of people addicted to religion, to pick out one example and decide that this one couldn't happen.

Oh, yeah, the Negritos weren't Republicans, so we mustn't believe anything bad about them.

If I had written that mountaineers in Kentucky continued to fool around with poisonous snakes, even though time and again other members of the congregation had died from bites, you would not have batted an eye. At least, I'll bet next week's paycheck you wouldn't have expended the energy to try to re-educate me.

I confess it: I expected this sort of response. I'm sticking with my eyewitness.

#56963: — 01/08 at 03:21 PM
A Muslim ambassador told a similiar story about a Viking horse-sacrifice and orgy at a funeral, in Bulgar (~Kazan) circa 900 AD.

Ibn Fadlan. I wouldn't have called what was described in the original as an "orgy" (and that part looks like he wasn't an eye-witness). He was an eye-witness to the funeral itself, which involved horse, dog and human sacrifice, all of which are attested to in the archeological/literary record (for instance, horses and dogs in the Gokstader, possible human sacrifice in the Osberger). The "orgy" part seems out of keeping with Scandinavian culture of the time. It may have been a hold over or a borrowing, but it is reasonable to question that part. Ibn Fadlan reported a fair bit of "hearsay", mangled through a translator.

Oh, and it was the Rus, not Vikings.

Harry, I can't find any references to this text at all. I also reject it's veracity until you can come up with some more support.

#56967: — 01/08 at 04:07 PM
I gave the wrong title. It's been over 40 years since I read it.

'An American Doctor's Odyssey,' by Victor Heiser. The No. 2 non-fiction bestseller in 1937.

I run into this a lot: anything that predates the Internet doesn't exist for young people. Sigh.

#56968: ekzept — 01/08 at 04:24 PM

I run into this a lot: anything that predates the Internet doesn't exist for young people.

surely, Mr Eagar, you cannot be correct. check out the classics, there since 1994.

#56997: — 01/08 at 09:19 PM
replying to #56847: ekzept
A touch off topic, but sex and sickness are way more a part of life than birth or death--at least for modern humans. (This is a pet peeve of mine) I feel that entertainment has our gut feelings about this very skewed--typical night of TV will show multiple deaths/killings and <i<no</i> sex::typical night in anytown will have lots of sex and comparatively few deaths. Moreover, I do not expect to kill anyone in my lifetime, but I have quite a lot of sex in my past, and expect to have much in my future (but if I spend any more time online, my wife has made some threats. . .)
Again, I know this isn't your point, and has ~~nothing~~ little to do with squid, but I just couldn't let it lie.
uh, gotta go-

#57003: — 01/08 at 10:53 PM
I could have been more precise and said 'anything that does not turn up in the first 20 Google hits does not exist for young people.'

And I can typify that with a story from, as it happens, MIT.

A friend, a professor of engineering, volunteered to take over from an anthropologist a course on technology. He had never taught liberal arts students before and was used to engineering, where 'research' means building something and testing it.

He assigned a term paper on the history of the technology of chocolate. The first paper he read seemed OK, but the second was very similar, and the third was like the first.

It quickly dawned on him that to a student of anthropology, 'research' meant entering 'chocolate technology' in Google and stopping right there.

It would be a rare youngster who would encounter Heiser. I found him when I was around 15, in my father's bookshelf.

Considering the history of self-flagellation and self-destruction in virtually all societies, including ours, I find Ronald's objection to be nothing more than PC prejudice, without a shred of evidence or even a good analogy to support it.

John and Graculus both knew of a similar story from another culture, suggesting not that it never happened but that it may have been 'normal' over a range of societies.

While I cannot offer independent proof of Heiser's story about the buffalo feast, there were other things in his book I do know about (the Rockefeller Foundation's work against pellagra, for example), and they match received opinion.

Few Americans know much history, of any kind, and it shows.

#57016: Rahel — 01/09 at 06:12 AM
Telling stories about the savages and how savage they are is a much more common human trait than self-flaglation, and self flaglation is usually a very interntional act, not an accident in the midst of frenzied dining. I won't say it's certainly untrue before I check the sources myself, but I think there are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical.

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Saturday, January 07, 2006

Squid, it's what's for dinner

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