It never fails--I take some time off, and a giant squid shows up!

A few years ago, it was a half-eaten carcass found floating in Monterey Bay. Every teuthologist dreams of a giant squid sighting in her backyard, but Fate's wicked sense of humor had me taking a summer course in Friday Harbor when my dream came true. So while I was playing with worms, my labmates back home were eagerly dissecting the largest giant squid ever seen in Monterey Bay.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Anyway, this time I went to camp in the mountains for a week, and missed a massive media flurry over an almost-perfect specimen captured by fishermen off Florida:

Robert Benz, who was fishing with friends Joey Asaro and Paul Peroulakis, said they spotted the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, about 11 a.m. After realizing what it was, the men slid the dying squid onto the back of their 23-foot boat.

Sources are uncertain as to whether the squid was dying or already dead when the fishermen collected it. The confusion is understandable, as Benz said:

"The tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in."

We tend to associate movement with life, but when you stop and think about it, postmortem movement is actually quite common--the famous "chicken with its head cut off" comes to mind as a prime example. It can be quite difficult to determine the exact moment of death.

But even if the squid was still alive, it certainly wasn't healthy, as the natural environment of giant squid is the deep sea, not the surface. Anyway, having been injected with formalin and submerged in more of the same, the giant squid is most certainly dead now.

Preservation with formalin could take weeks for something this size--the chemical has to work its way into all the tissues and cross-link all the molecules--and scientists are waiting until the process is complete before answering even such a seemingly simple question as the squid's sex.

At first I was surprised that they didn't dissect it immediately (INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW) but, given the quality of the specimen, I can understand that the first priority would be to make sure it stays intact.

When they do finally dissect it, they should be able to determine not only whether it's male or female, but also how sexually mature it was. This will be a pretty important piece of evidence for or against the hypothesis everyone's quoting:

Giant squid only reproduce once in their lifetime, and then often die slowly, after becoming lethargic, Slapcinsky said. The animal was likely in that state when the fishermen found it.

That's not a bad idea, but it's not necessarily true either. No one actually knows how giant squid reproduce, so we have to guess based on other species of squid.

A lot of squids do reproduce only once, then fall apart--as in the famous mating aggregations and mass deaths of California market squid. But other species, like Humboldt squid, can spawn several times at the end of their lives, continuing to grow and eat between spawning events.

Giant squid are (slightly) more closely related to Humboldt squid than to market squid, so why not hypothesize that they can spawn more than once?

When they open up the squid, if it turns out to be sexually mature, that's fine for the hypothesis that the animal died a natural death after reproducing. However, if it isn't mature, then the cause must lie elsewhere. What then?

Probably not death by predator, or there would be bites missing. Could it be disease? A change in the environment, like temperature or acidity? Every question answered only spawns new questions . . . oh, the many-headed hydra of science!