Cephelapod Use #22 - Brain Booster

Depending who you speak with - and we speak with absolutely everyone, rising squid populations are responsible for fisheries collapses worldwide.

The theory goes something like this:

Sharks (who eat squids) are being killed off leaving an open predatory niche in the worlds oceans. Unfortunately squids reproduce at the rate of millions and without sharks to control populations, swarms of these critters are taking over delicate feeding chains decimating fish stocks...or so this theory goes.

We submit to this theory, mainly because the folks behind it are smarter then we are. So it is with little surprise that researchers at the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute in Taipei have found the brain boosting compound PL-DHA (phospholipid docosahexaenoic acid) in squid skins.

Huzzah!

If you want to eradicate anything commercially from the ocean, you need to first come up a with a financial reason to do so, thank you researcher guys in Taipei. Now we can all be a bit smarter while doing the job sharks used to do before we killed them all off...back in our dumber days that is.

Magnapinna Squid-Perhaps, Perhaps

We got the following email this morning about that face hugger critter found at 7800 feet back in November of 2007. We had an ident of Magnapinna perhaps the scariest looking critter you would ever not want to meet free diving at night. The email is from the ROV company who caught this on tape.

Now we're not so sure about the ident, here's the email, anyone out there know what this is?

Gentlemen,

I work as Senior Project Engineer for DOF Subsea Australia. I am on secondment to one of our companies in as you can see from my email signature below. We're an engineering and offshore services contractor to the oil and gas industry. We also perform all kinds of offshore work and recently you may have seen our team and one of our survey vessels was responsible for the locating of the HMAS Sydney. A long lost battleship of the Australian Navy that was sunk in battle in WW2.

We design and fabricate and install all manner of equipment and systems in all corners of the oceans. We have dedicated vessels from which we perform all our work and on these vessels we carry a full survey crew, an ROV crew for each onboard ROV, Saturation Diving crews, marine crew, deck crew and engineering staff. Within the travels we have collected large amounts of digital footage recorded from at least one of the 7 onboard cameras of the ROV(s) (some vessels have two) and share them amongst ourselves. I have attached the footage of the squid????? as described.

You can see from the title that the ROV boys have named it “Creature” you’ll see why. From the video overlay you can see the Eastings and Northings for the location in the Gulf from the onboard survey systems and the depth as recorded by the onboard ROV instruments.

Anyway if you can indent this let me know.

Company website