FE Giant Head Script
But after years of searching, in 2012 a group of scientists from Japan's National Science Museum along with colleagues from Japanese public broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel filmed a giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time. The species was first recorded live in 2006, after researchers suspended bait beneath a research vessel off the Ogasawara Islands to try and hook a giant squid. As the camera whirred, the research team pulled a 24-foot (7-meter) squid to the surface alive enabling people around the world to finally see a living, breathing giant squid.
FE Giant Head Script
FEEDING TENTACLESGiant squid can snatch prey up to 33 feet (10 meters) away by shooting out their two feeding tentacles, which are tipped with hundreds of powerful sharp-toothed suckers. These feeding tentacles are very long, often doubling the total length of the giant squid on their own.
Unfortunately, the reports of their size are often exaggerated since finding a live giant squid is an extremely rare event. Almost everything people know about giant squid comes from specimens washed up on beaches. Sometimes their tentacles or arms have fallen off, or have been eaten by other animals while afloat in the ocean. On the other hand, when they wash ashore, the squids can be bloated with water, appearing bigger than they really are.
Because tentacles and arms fall off or, alternatively, can be stretched out, scientists often use mantle length as the best measure of a squid's actual size. The longest mantle length on record is 7.4 feet (2.25 meters); the length from the tip of the top fin to the end of the arms rarely exceeds 16 feet (5 meters), and the longest total length (including tentacles) of a squid on record is 43 feet (13 meters). A new method for figuring out how big a squid can get includes using beak size to estimate total body length, a helpful tool considering the hard beaks are often found in the stomachs of sperm whales. Based on this new method scientists believe the giant squid could reach lengths up to 66 feet (20 meters) long, making it potentially larger than the colossal squid, however, a real-life squid of this size has never been documented.
But does a big giant squid necessarily mean a strong one? If they were proportionally as strong as their smaller cousins, the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), giant squid would be VERY strong, says Smithsonian squid expert Clyde Roper. "However, their muscular structure, density and fluid composition indicate that they are not nearly that strong," he says. However, that doesn't make them sluggish weaklings. They have thousands of suckers working in unison on eight arms and two tentacles, with a rapidly-contracting mantle, to help capture and kill prey.
The giant squid is not just a single species -- or is it? Some researchers think there are as many as 8 species in the genus Architeuthis (Greek for "chief squid"), each a different kind of giant squid. But other researchers think there is just one Architeuthis that swims in the world's ocean. There is no consensus because the squid are so hard to track and there are so few specimens available for study.
How long does it take to grow so big? Unlike mammals, including people, and many fish species, cephalopods grow very quickly and die after a short life. Evidence from statoliths (a small mineralized mass that helps squid balance), which accumulate "growth rings" and can be used to measure age, suggests that giant squid live no more than five years -- which means each squid must grow incredibly quickly to reach 30 feet in just a few years! To grow at such a rate, giant squid must live in areas of the ocean where there is an abundant supply of food to provide enough energy.
Smaller than the head of a pin, this arrow squid (Doryteuthis plei) embryo looks like a miniature adult and is almost ready to hatch! Depending on the squid species, the development from a fertilized egg to a nearly-hatched larva can take one or several weeks.
Females then release millions of tiny, transparent fertilized eggs into the water in a jellied clump called an egg mass. Most are quickly snatched up as food by other marine animals. But a few survive -- and within a few years, they become giant marine predators.
Who wins in these battles? It's hard to know, since these duels have never been seen by people, but most likely the sperm whales emerge victorious. The small sampling of giant squid stomachs have never contained any recognizable sperm whale parts, but many sperm whale stomachs have contained giant squid. And the only way a whale develops a battle scar is if it survives the battle.
This specimen and a smaller male are on loan to the Smithsonian from the Coordinadora para el Estudio y la Protección de last Especies Marinas, which preserves giant squid specimens from the waters of northern Spain.
So far, no luck for Dr. Roper. But researchers in Japan were able to film a giant squid in its natural habitat in 2012 using flashing lights to imitate bioluminescent jellies (Watch the footage at the Discovery Channel). In 2019 the giant squid made an appearance again, this time off the coast of Louisiana. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded project lured the squid with a special probe and caught the squid on camera.
The first known record of Architeuthis comes from Denmark in the 1500s, when several "curious fish" were found afloat by the sea. Historians of the time did not associate these "fish" with cephalopods; instead, they conflated their looks with those of humans, describing these creatures as having "a head like a man... and a dress of scarlet like a monk's cloak," and calling them Sea Monks.
Not until the mid-1800s did the leading cephalopod specialist of the day, Professor Japetus Steenstrup of Denmark, conclude that the mythical beasts were, in fact, very large squid. With the two long feeding tentacles arranged just right, they could be mistaken for arms sticking out of the mantle. The rest of the Sea Monk descriptions, however, he ascribed to a combination of astonishment and imagination. "Squids on the whole make a grim impression on all those who are not accustomed to seeing them more frequently," Steenstrup said. "Those animals aroused still greater astonishment in earlier times."
Even before Harvey's giant squid carcass made the news, fiction writers had been incorporating Architeuthis into their stories. Perhaps most famously, French author Jules Vernes's 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea features a monster squid with a hunger for human flesh. A "poulpe" -- French for "octopus" but commonly translated as "giant squid" -- attacks the submarine Nautilus, putting up quite a fight and devouring a crew member. Verne describes the 25-foot squid as "a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures" and, in the process, created a legend himself.
Giant squid have made other book and film appearances. In Doctor No, the sixth novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, a giant squid attacks Bond while he's trapped in a pool. And in the 1991 Peter Benchley novel Beast (made into a film in 1996), researchers and monster hunters go after a 100-foot squid, which is finally killed when a sperm whale bites off its head.
Online: An article written by Clyde Roper at the Tree of Life web projectArchiteuthis history and mythologyProfile of Clyde Roper in Smithsonian MagazineThe giant squid at the National Museum of Natural History: where did it come from, how did it get here, and how is it displayed?
The Iron Giant is a 1999 American animated science fiction film produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation and directed by Brad Bird in his directorial debut. It is based on the 1968 novel The Iron Man by Ted Hughes (which was published in the United States as The Iron Giant), and was written by Tim McCanlies from a story treatment by Bird. The film stars the voices of Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel, James Gammon, Cloris Leachman, John Mahoney, Eli Marienthal, Christopher McDonald, and M. Emmet Walsh. Set during the Cold War in 1957, the film centers on a young boy named Hogarth Hughes, who discovers and befriends a giant alien robot. With the help of a beatnik artist named Dean McCoppin, Hogarth attempts to prevent the U.S. military and Kent Mansley, a paranoid federal agent, from finding and destroying the Giant.
He opted to give the film's animators portions to animate entirely, rather than the standard process of animating one character, in a throwback to the way Disney's first features were created.[23][27] The exception were those responsible for creating the Giant himself, who was created using computer-generated imagery due to the difficulty of creating a metal object "in a fluid-like manner."[17] They had additional trouble with using the computer model to express emotion.[23] The Giant was designed by filmmaker Joe Johnston, which was refined by production designer Mark Whiting and Steve Markowski, head animator for the Giant.[22] Using software, the team would animate the Giant "on twos" (every other frame, or twelve frames per second) when interacting with other characters, to make it less obvious it was a computer model.[22] Bird brought in students from CalArts to assist in minor animation work due to the film's busy schedule. He made sure to spread out the work on scenes between experienced and younger animators, noting, "You overburden your strongest people and underburden the others [if you let your top talent monopolize the best assignments]."[23] Hiroki Itokazu designed all of the film's CGI props and vehicles, which were created in a variety of software, including Alias Systems Corporation's Maya, Alias' PowerAnimator, a modified version of Pixar's RenderMan, Softimage 3D, Cambridge Animation's Animo (now part of Toon Boom Technologies), Avid Elastic Reality, and Adobe Photoshop.[28]
The Cartoon Network series Mad, did a parody of the movie as well as the film The Iron Lady for their Season 3 premiere entitled The Iron Giant Lady. In the sketch, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher is the giant and inspires other gynoids to take positions of political power. 041b061a72