Pharyngula

PZ Myers. 2006 Jan 07. Squid, it's what's for dinner. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/squid_its_whats_for_dinner/>. Accessed 2006 Feb 13.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, January 07, 2006

Squid, it's what's for dinner

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.

(via Squidblog)

Posted by PZ Myers on 01/07 at 12:46 PM
Science • Organisms • 0 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink

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

#: Posted by ekzept on 01/07 at 01:19 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
#: Posted by Mikko Sandt on 01/07 at 01:39 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...
#: Posted by on 01/07 at 04:14 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.
#: Posted by on 01/07 at 04:28 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.
#: Posted by on 01/07 at 05:59 PM
The squid is a perfect example of why Intelligent Design must be true.
#: Posted by noell on 01/07 at 09:49 PM
Noell,

Are you serious?
#: Posted by on 01/07 at 10:49 PM
Sorry Noell,

I just checked your website.(I like it.) Disregard my question to you.
#: Posted by on 01/07 at 10:51 PM
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?
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/08 at 12:55 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.
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/08 at 04:10 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.
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 04:47 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.
#: Posted by John Emerson on 01/08 at 09:39 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.
#: Posted by Matt McIrvin on 01/08 at 10:34 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
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 11:00 AM
Are you sure the squid dictum doesn't apply to certain members of genus Homo as well?
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 11:03 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.
#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 01/08 at 11:05 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?
#: Posted by PZ Myers on 01/08 at 11:06 AM
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.
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 12:55 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.
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 03:21 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.
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 04:07 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.
#: Posted by ekzept on 01/08 at 04:24 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-
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 09:19 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.
#: Posted by on 01/08 at 10:53 PM
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.
#: Posted by Rahel on 01/09 at 06:12 AM
Harry, "anything that predates the Internet doesn't exist for young people. Sigh."

Knock it off Gramps, or I'll steal the rubber tips off your walker.

That's right, give a title that doesn't exist with no author name or any other reference... then jet away in an ink-cloud of egregious insults and anecdotes when your audience refuses to psychicly intuit what the hell you were talking about.

In my gloriously mis-spent youth I had more tolerance for that kind of horseshit.

PS: I'm neither young, nor American.
#: Posted by on 01/09 at 03:32 PM
Dear Harry,

I might be PC but I do believe my father's stories about canibalism he witnessed in Papua. But I humbly admit that this second hand knowledge does not make me any kind of expert on the subject.
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/09 at 04:00 PM
Skepticism is good, although, around here, there is a political off switch a lot of the time.
#: Posted by on 01/09 at 04:59 PM
I have heard several versions of stories about people eating human parts that have been accidentally severed, including Papuans. It is true that in some places they wouldn't let these pieces go to waste and they'd get eaten. However, in general the versions I have heard are very unlikely to be true. A sort of old urban myth, or an empire myth perhaps, as I live in part of the former British Empire. This makes me suspicious whenever I hear a similar story. But I must admit I've never taken the simple step of taking out my father's old photos and counting how many missing fingers are evident on the Papuans.
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/09 at 07:36 PM
Harry: "Skepticism is good, although, around here, there is a political off switch a lot of the time.

Oh, codswallop. What is political about this discussion? Are you sure you aren't channelling Allan-fricking-Bloom?

Here's why your second (or perhaps third) hand story doesn't make sense. Where cannibalism has existed in a culture it has always been a solemn ritual, not a gastronomic frenzy. (Gastronomic cannibalism is reserved for downed aircraft and criminals.)

I suggest you read up on how the Fore got unfairly tagged as cannibals as an example of how culture myths are embedded even in our oh-so-enlightened times.
#: Posted by on 01/09 at 10:21 PM
Gee, what's political about reflexive anticolonialist rhetoric?

Well, everything.

I know the debate about Fore cannibalism, and the exoneration of the Fore was 1) wholly ideological; 2) mistaken.

No more ideological, political screed was ever written than Walter Ahrens' 'Man-eating Myth.' Plausible, but, as it turned out, wrong.

Ronald, I wouldn't be surprised if fingers were missing among the Papuans, but that wouldn't reveal anything about cannibalism.

Years ago, Eric Hofer, the longshoreman-philosopher, entered the debate about the significance of the hand patterns in Cro-Magnon caves like Altamira. The anthropologists were having a merry debate about why so many digits were missing from the prints, which were made by placing the palm on the wall and blowing pigment over the hand: tribal identifiers? religious sacrifices?

Go down to the docks, Hofer sniffed, and you'll find many digits missing.

True enough. College professors probably average pretty close to 10 fingers, farmers and carpenters and other people who use their hands in rough work considerably fewer.
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 11:06 AM
Well Harry, there certainly was canibalism in Papua. When my father whet to arrest two men for killing another they offered him the victim's hand. The question is what type of canibalism. In my non-expert opinion, most stories of friend's and relative's pieces being hacked off in a frenzy and eaten are probably either false or exagerations. Although I am sure that such things have happened at some point, I am confident such events would be very rare.
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/10 at 12:29 PM
Harry

Gee, what's political about reflexive anticolonialist rhetoric?

Uh, where?

I know the debate about Fore cannibalism, and the exoneration of the Fore was 1) wholly ideological; 2) mistaken.

Prove it. Bring some evidence that the Fore practiced cannibalism to the table.

Prove that the identification that the Fore were cannibals wasn't ideological and mistaken.

I'll give you a hint of where to start... Dr Gajdusek's early notes, before the cannibalism story got started. And the fact that it is almost impossible to induce kuru in the lab by ingestion.

Let's also look at the anthropological facts. The stories told was that cannibalism was a practice only recently introduced to the Fore, that is, the Fore were not originally a cannibal culture and they "borrowed" it from their cannibal neighbours in the 1920's. In fact, the claim of those that insist on sticking with the "kuru = cannibalism" tale is that kuru started at exactly the same time that the Fore took up cannibalism. That's really unlikely, and sounds far too much like a morality tale. Not only that, but it expects us to believe that one of the most traditional parts of any society's traditions, the funeral ritual, in a very unchanged society, was entirely replaced almost overnight throughout the entire population.

Not. Bloody. Likely.

No more ideological, political screed was ever written than Walter Ahrens' 'Man-eating Myth.' Plausible, but, as it turned out, wrong.

There you go with those egregious assumptions. I have not read the book, nor any excerpts from it. I am only vaguely aware of it's existance.

Ronald It's classic goalpost shifting. The presence of cannibalism in PNG doesn't demonstrate that every tribe in PNG engaged in cannibalism, and I am speaking specifically about the Fore.
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 08:16 PM
PS, Harry, I find your use of the word "exonerated" telling.

I have no dog in this fight. The concept of funeral cannibalism doesn't strike me as repulsive. It strikes me as repulsive that reality gets ignored when something salicious is in view.
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 08:23 PM
Man, I'm really, really glad to learn that it's hard to induce kuru in the lab by ingestion. Who were the subjects?

You said: 'Not only that, but it expects us to believe that one of the most traditional parts of any society's traditions, the funeral ritual, in a very unchanged society, was entirely replaced almost overnight throughout the entire population.'

Tell that to the Hawaiians. They gave up their tabu against 'free eating' overnight. And it was part of their funeral ritual, and they were a very unchanged society.

I introduced the concept of feeding frenzy cannibalism in a mood of mild irony. Perhaps the evolutionary distance between humans and squids is not so great as it might seem, at least for some behaviors.

But I was also aware that I would probably catch a moral relativist or two. Bingo.
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 09:46 PM
Harry Who is being a moral relativist?

I think that would be you, who are judging everything relative to your own Gilded Age mores, without regard for morals.

Millions of Christians practice ritual cannibalism every day. That you choose some questionable traveller's tale about those far-off dusky folk is very telling... cannibalism is always something those other, not-really-human folks do, elsewhere. This is pretty much universal in cannibal tales. Where the rubber hits the road is where there is actual evidence.

You have yet to produce any evidence that the Fore were cannibals.

The kuru subjects were IIRC, chimps (might have been rhesus, it has been some time since I read the material). They could induce kuru by innoculation, but not ingestion.

Funnily enough, the Fore funeral rituals that were actually, you know, witnessed and even recorded on film involved plenty of opportunity for innoculation. They practiced bone breaking. Originally Dr Gajdusek noted this as the most probably route of infection.

Claiming that the Hawaiian ritual changed overnight without any other cultural shift is... wrong. The *entire* kapu system was overthrown on the death of Kamehameha. It was overthrown by political "machinations" in a strong, centralized authority and in a culture that had been exposed to powerful outside influences.

There are absolutely no such parallels amongst the scattered Fore. No other culture shifts are evident, and they are assumed to have just suddenly adopted the funerary practices of disliked neighbours that they had been familiar with for millenia. I refuse to accept this narrative without evidence. Extra-ordinary claims, and all that.

Please, before you ask someone to swallow something, ask yourself, "Would I put that in my mouth".
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 10:19 PM
It occurs to me that you are the one that is politicizing this....

The "old white guy" intepretation of history (pre and proto, too) has been proven demonstrably wrong on many, many things. Apparently (some) old white males regard this, not as an expansion of knowledge, but as a challenge to their feelings of entitlement, an encroachment upon their supreme social position.

Thus the enemy must be slandered, and put in it's place. Truth be damned.

Bad science leads to bad science. The discovery of prion resistance genes throughout the human population has been loudly touted as evidence of widespread prehistoric cannibalism. The only support for this claim is the highly questionable and probably false "kuru = cannibalism" story. By accepting this narrative and ignoring the other possible ways that such a gene could have entered the population we are throttling off potentially interesting knowledge.
#: Posted by on 01/10 at 10:37 PM
I have to admit I find this thread pretty confusing. I think a lot of discussion is happening on a level that is way above my head. But that's okay, maybe I'll learn something that will help me later. Anyway, I began this discussion I seem to have sparked off simply because I wanted to point out that my own limited knowledge suggests that a particular form of cannibalism was probably very rare and not nearly as common as many traveler's stories suggest. But then politics and political correctness were mentioned and I got the impression that someone thought I didn't think any canibalism ever took place, which I didn't like because my father witnessed some. I have to admit that I don't know what the term politcal correctness means. I honestly don't know the definition. As for politics, cannibalism isn't associated with either end of the political spectrum in my country. It's a bit of a dead issue. It never comes up in elections.

Anyway, this thread has been an interesting exchange, although hard for me to understand.
#: Posted by Ronald Brak on 01/11 at 08:35 AM
Ah, I see. And what odd practices -- I seem to have missed them -- are leading English people to inoculate themselves with variant CJD? Some weird funerary rite of old white men?

I may have misunderstood you, Ronald. Your initial post led me to believe that you were objecting to ANY white man saying anything bad about any brown person. The Ward Churchill/Haunani-Kay Trask tack.

Now I understand you to simply have cautioned me against believing travelers' tales. Well, blanket unbelief is no more thoughtful than blanket belief.

Graculus obviously does not know much about Hawaii. Neither its early postcontact history nor its present 'politically correct' interpretation.

Here is a practical example of how I define political correctness.

The ancient legends of Hawaii are full of tales about Koko O Na Moku ('Blood of the Islands') and Kepaniwai ('stream clogged with the blood of slain soldiers'). The missionaries, who never observed any Hawaiian warfare, pretty much accepted the legendary accounts as veracious.

The politically correct version -- what a friend of mine who does contract archaeology calls 'instant tradition' -- is that precontact Hawaiian warfare was largely a ritual with hardly any bloodshed. (Akin to the Mainland U.S. myth that Indians did not fight to kill but merely went through an elaborate but harmless game called 'counting coup.')

The PC version is taught at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, although, weirdly, one of the professors there is also on record as saying that when the legends contradict the physical evidence, the legends must be taken as superior evidence.

Reasonable people will probably adopt a viewpoint between the extremes. The chapter on 'Warfare' in Douglas Oliver's 'Oceania' is a good summary of the evidence.

What PC boils down to is, nobody can say anything negative about anybody but white men, or they are racists. Evidence be damned.

PC people seldom hesitate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When it comes to cannibalism, Ahrens is the principal and I believe earliest complete statement of the PC and antiwestern view: it never existed.

I now understand your view about cannibalism to be on the middle ground, where I stand also.
#: Posted by on 01/11 at 10:20 AM