We got to talking about weird and bizarre animals in the Discord and there is not enough space in the world to describe my love of squid. Both fried, and swimming around in the ocean.
Squid are so freaking awesome, yo.
Listen, when you say a squid's got tentacles, they don't. Well, they do, but what you think are tentacles are actually arms. Squid got eight arms and two tentacles and octopuses only have eight arms, so squid are automatically better by like a fifth. Or something.
You know what their head is called? A mantle. It's not just a head, it houses all their squishy important bits. At the bottom of the mantle is their big nasty beak, surrounded by their arms and two tentacles, and it's not very good for playing the clarinet.
And inside the mantle is a little tube called a siphon, and squids slurp up water and spit it out very fast through the siphon to make themselves move, with their little arms and tentacles flailing behind them. Sometimes, the smaller species can siphon-shoot so fast they can literally fly out of the water, majestically, like an eagle piloting a blimp.
The siphon is controlled by a "giant axon", and yes, that is the name they gave it because it's an axon and it's giant. And they don't really have a proper nervous system, just a giant axon system with a giant axon controlling most of it. Axons normally make up nerves, but with squids, they just skip the nerves part and just use axons. Efficient little buggers.
Squids' brains are honestly the coolest thing about them, and I'm not talking about their intelligence (though dear god are these Cthulhu-beings terrifyingly clever). No, I'm talking about the shape. Squids have brains shaped like a donut, and the best part about it is their esophagus runs right through the brain, so every time they swallow, food literally passes through their brain on the way to the stomach. Brain food!
Also if they swallow too large a bite they'll get brain damage and die. This is why your parents told you to not wolf down your food, kids.
NSFW ahead!
Did you know squid have penises? Because they do. And now you know far more about squid than you ever wanted to know, but I'm not done yet. Barnacles have the largest penis-to-body-size ratio in the entire animal kingdom, and of mobile animals, squids have the largest, putting them in second place in the animal kingdom. They put it inside the female's mantle to reproduce.
It literally just looks like two squids bumping heads together for a bit.
How lewd.
End NSFW
The smallest squid is the pygmy squid, and this cute little bugger doesn't even reach one whole gram of weight as an adult. The females are nearly twice as large as the males, reaching a length of 10.4mm/0.41in and 5.9mm/0.23in respectively. That's, like, smaller than my fingernail.
So tiny and smol. Delicate little beans.
Also, forget everything you know about giant squid, because I'm here to tell you about COLOSSAL SQUID.
WHICH IS EVEN BIGGER THAN GIANT SQUID.
AND THEY HAVE HOOKED ARMS.
These guys regularly eff up sperm whales that try to make a meal out of them, and just as often as not end up eating the whale instead. Some of the hooks on their tentacles swivel, others are three-pronged, but the short of it is, Moby-Dick's not all scarred from the harpoon assassination attempts on his life. You can bet that big white bastard had a tussle with a colossal squid or two and they did not go down without a fight.
And now, to give you a bit of perspective, the largest octopus ever recorded was a Giant Pacific Octopus that weighed 600 pounds and was thirty feet across; the species as a whole tend to hover around 110 pounds and measure 16 feet across.
The largest colossal squid (push off, giant!) ever found was a female that weighed a whopping 1,091 pounds and measured 4.2m/14ft in length. And that's honestly an underestimate for how freaking enormous this beast of a cephalopod is, because the scientists who measured her dorked it up and they think she shrunk after death.
Now take into account that we've only had a very, very tiny snapshot of the colossal squid as a species and what they found was honestly probably on the small end of the scale since it was so close to the surface. Based on that, the current speculation places this beast of the deep averaging at 14 meters—not feet like the largest species ever found, I mean meters, which is 46 feet in freedom units, and a scale-breaking 1,650 pounds.
You wanna know why they're so big? It's called abyssal gigantism, which is a totally awesome name for "things that live really deep get bigger and bigger the farther down you go". The eyeball alone of the tiny biggest recorded specimen was likely 16 inches across when the squiddle was still alive. And then the entire squid shrunk because them scientists couldn't preserve the find of the century properly. Boo. The beast honestly very likely measured closer to 6 meters/20 feet in length when it was still alive, but I guess we have no way of knowing now, do we? >:(
Colossal squid are freaking epic and that is why squids, and colossal squids in particular, are my favorite marine animal of all time.
*mic drop*