2004-09-24
Giant squid: Monsters of the sea
Peabody exhibit captures most elusive of sea creatures
By Robert Miller
THE NEWS-TIMES
' The frightful animal!' he cried. I looked in my turn and could not restrain a movement of repulsion. Before my eyes was a monster worthy to figure in squid legends.' '
— from "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,'' by Jules Verne.
How lucky to be a fictional character and see what no mundane real-life human has — a giant squid.
Giant squid are the largest creature no one has ever seen alive. Squid are huge, weighing as much as half-a-ton, their tentacles stretching out to 30 or 40 feet. But they dwell deep in the ocean, far past our limits to see.
Which only adds to their pull on human imagination. Along with the science, there are the ancient tales of sea monsters, the sailor's stories of mammoth battles between squid and whales.
"It's one of the most fascinating creatures in the world to study,'' said Henry Townsend who spent three years in the 1960s helping the Peabody Museum of Natural History build its life-size model of a giant squid.
That handsome, 10-tentacled plastic and foam beast — after being removed to Yale University's biology department — is hanging again in the lobby of the Peabody, in part to celebrate the museum's new show "In Search of Giant Squid.'' It opens Saturday Sept. 25 and will be at the museum through December.
The exhibit has been organized by the Smithsonian Institution and will travel throughout the United States after it leaves New Haven. But the Peabody itself has a long involvement with the squid — its first curator of zoology, Addison Verrill was the first person to describe giant squid scientifically. Along with sheaves of Verrilliana in its archives, it has many squid and octopus specimens in its massive invertebrate collection.
Dr. Clyde Roper, a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian and one of the world's authorities on giant squid, visited Yale in the 1960s. He came to study their invertebrate collection and to act as a consultant in the construction of the giant squid model.
"This is so appropriate,'' said Jennifer Bine, the Smithsonian's project director for traveling exhibitions. "It's a cycling back for Clyde, and to bring the exhibit back to the Peabody and Verrill — it's good karma.''
The exhibit was also a thrill for Eric Lazo-Wasem, the Peabody's senior collections manager in invertebrate zoology, and for Barbara Narendra, the Peabody's archivist. They had a general idea of how rich the Peabody' collection was in giant squid paraphernalia; finding things for the exhibit gave them a chance to explore it in detail.
"We have so much,'' Narendra said. "We were making a discovery a day.''
Lazo-Wasem, who lives in Redding, said the museum's director, Michael Donoghue, had been enthralled by the invertebrate collection and wanted to get more out where people can see it.
"Now, we finally get to do that,'' Lazo-Wasem said.
The exhibit includes early descriptions of Kraken — huge sea monsters that were probably giant squid. It also has Howard Pyle illustrations from boys' adventure books and Marvel Comic covers, both showing men valiantly warding off attacks by giant squid. Two constants in these drawings, Lazo-Wasem said, are that the drawings are anatomically incorrect, squid-wise and that the men always have axes on hand to lop off a tentacle or two.
"No matter where they are, they have an ax,'' he said.
While other 19th century zoologists began to understand that there actually might be a living creature that fit the myth, it was Yale's Verrill who actually tried to study it.
Verrill's work came about because of an oceanographic quirk — there are occasional decades when dead giant squid washed ashore in Newfoundland and the other Maritime provinces of Canada. One occurred from 1871 to 1881; another was in the 1960s.
It was nearly impossible to get specimens shipped to New Haven, in part because Newfoundland fishermen generally cut up the squid they found for dog food or bait, in part because there were no jets to rush fragile squid parts hither and yon.
"Imagine what Newfoundland must have been like in the 1880s,'' Lazo-Wasem said.
Nevertheless, Verrill did got enough giant squid parts, preserved in ethyl alcohol and shipped south, to make the first valid scientific observations about the species, Architeuthis dux. cqOf the 75 scientific papers Verrill wrote in his lifetime, about a dozen concern the giant squid.
"He was the first zoologist to describe it, to characterize it for the scientific community,'' Lazo-Wasem said.
Yale still has those Newfoundland specimens, which are part of the exhibit. Lazo-Wasem said he was surprised himself at some of the preserved squid parts of hand, including the beak of a squid Verrill described in one of his papers.
"I didn't know we had it,'' he said. "But we had a student writing a paper on giant squid and she was very persistent about seeing this squid beak. I finally went down into the collection, looked on the shelves and found it.''
The exhibit also pays tribute to one of the first women professors of zoology, Grace Pickford. Working at Yale in the 1930s, she discovered an intermediate group, called the vampire squid, which fit between the eight-armed octopuses and the 10-tentacled squid. She also used the Yale collection to study the giant octopus, which, while at 35 pounds is big for an invertebrate, is not in the giant squid class.
"She was one of the most unsung women scientists in American history,'' Lazo-Wasem said. "But I know scientists who are now doing molecular analyses of the specimens she studied. They think even DNA will confirm the differences she observed.''
The 20th century scientific study of giant squid makes them more fabulous that the old myths. They jet-propel themselves through the water by a system of interior body structures which can gather water and then eject it; those tubes also allow giant squid to travel from 5,000 feet deep to the ocean's surface and down again without being damaged by water pressure.
They can also change color in an instant to blend into their surroundings, to swim undetected by predators.
"It's stealth technology in invertebrates,'' Lazo-Wasem said.
Giant squid have eyes as large as soccer balls — the largest eyes of any creature in the world. They have a large, hard beak, eight shorter tentacles and two tentacles that in the larger females, can be 35 to 40 feet long — scientists theorize they use those tentacles to grab passing fish for food.
And although none have been seen alive, enough specimens have been found on the shore or in fishermen's nets to lead scientists to believe the giant squid lives in all the oceans of the world.
Marine biologists have also studied whales enough to know that those stories of deep-sea battles between squid and whales are probably true. They know whales feed on squid because they've found giant squid beaks in whale stomachs; they've also seen whales scarred with the round pattern of squid suckers.
And for those who think of squid only in terms of fried calamari, two scientists did try to fry and eat a bit of giant squid. They found it so bitter as to be inedible — giant squid flesh, like that from a lot of deep-sea dwellers, is high in ammonia.
In recent years, zoologists have tried in vain to see a giant squid in its natural surroundings. The Smithsonian's Roper led an expedition that attached a waterproof camera to the back of a sperm whale, in hopes it would catch an image of the squid in passing.
"We got some fascinating images of sperm whale behavior,'' Bine, of the Smithsonian said. "But no giant squid.''
Although the exhibit will leave the Peabody by year's end, the model of the giant squid will stay put, cruising the air above the museum's lobby. The model — one of the first of a giant squid that was true to science — had hung in the lobby for years, then was shifted to a nearby biology building. It does not travel lightly.
"Every time it gets moved, it's a bigger challenge,'' Lazo-Wasem said. "When we brought it back here, we had to get it through a revolving door in the biology department. How do you get a giant squid through a revolving door?''
In search of...
Giant Squid
On Sunday at 12:15 p.m., Smithsonian research zoologist Dr. Clyde Roper, curator of “In Search of Giant Squid,” will give a talk about current efforts to find giant squid.
From noon to 4 p.m., the Museum will offer squid-related activities, including crafts, storytelling, live animal displays, and games on how squid and octopus suckers work!
A gigantic participatory sidewalk drawing of a giant squid is also planned, weather permitting.
All activities are free with admission.
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"The Search for Giant Squid'' will be at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven from Saturday, Sept. 25 to Sunday. January 2, 2005.
The museum is open Mondays through Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. It will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas and New Year's Day.
Admission is for adults; for children 3 to 18; and for seniors, 65 and over. Admission is free Thursday afternoons from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
For more information, call the museum at (203) 432-6342 or go to its Web site at
http://www.peabody.yale.edu