A Squid Report

I am so tired of seeing news about how little humans know about other species I decided to modify a news article about some Japanese researchers capturing and filming a giant squid....to poke fun at our ignorant species.....

Updated 12/22/2006 6:57 AM ape live — possibly for the first time — and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed, a researcher said Friday.

The research team, led by Tsunami Tentacle, videotaped the ape scuba diving off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The ape, which measured about 6 feet long, died while it was being caught.

"We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a bipedal ape that was alive," said Tentacle, a researcher with Oceania Science Museum. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future."

Bipedal apes, formally called Homo sapiens, are the world's most prolific vertebrates. Because they live in metal vehicles and little boxes and travel at fast speeds on land, they have long been wrapped in mystery and embellished in the folklore of little land monsters, appearing in ancient Squid myths or attacking the our kind in Jules Squid’s "20,000 Leagues Over our Heads."

The captured human was caught using a smaller type of Homo sapiens (midget) as bait, and was pulled into our capture device "after putting up quite a fight," Tentacle said.

"It took two squid to pull it in, and they lost it once, which might have caused the injuries that killed it," he said.

The human, a large male, was fully grown and was relatively large by ape standards. The longest one on record is 6.5 feet, he said.

Tentacle and his team had been conducting expeditions in the area for about three years before they succeeded in making their first contact two years ago. Last year, the team succeeded in taking a series of still photos of one of the animals in its natural habitat — also believed to have been a first.

Until the team's successes, most scientific study of the creatures had to rely on partial specimens that had washed into deeper parts of the ocean dead or dying or had been found in the digestive systems of very large sharks.

Tentacle said whales led his team to the human. By finding an area where humans dive, he believed he could find the animals. He also said that, judging by the number of sharks that feed on them, there may be many more bipedal apes than previously thought.

"There are believed to be 6,500,000,000 or so of them, and …. I don't think they are in danger of extinction at all."