>.■ 



Four tooth shells (scaphopods), one with its three- 

 lobed foot extended and two with the foot showing 

 at the larger opening of the tapered shell. These are 

 Dentaliwn from the beach at Roscoff, France. ( Ralph 

 Buchsbaum) 



An X-rav photograph of a 'Nautilus showing the 

 curved partitions separating the gas-filled chambers 

 of the shell, and the living animal occupying the 

 largest, outermost chamber of the spiral. See color 

 plate 74 of this same Nautilus. ( New Caledonia. 

 Rene Catala) 



known invertebrate animals. It must be a formidable 

 adversary. Sperm whales, which feed almost exclu- 

 sively on squids, often bear circular scars near the 

 mouth, showing where the suction cups of a giant 

 squid's arms grasped in the contest to avoid being 

 eaten. Some of these scars are 5 inches across. The 

 indigestible jaws of big squids found in the stomachs 

 of these whales often exceed any from Architeiithis 

 discovered dead, washed ashore. Consequently no 

 one is sure how large the giant squid really grows. 



No one knows either how many squids live in the 

 sea. The number must be enormous, for seals dive to 

 catch them and the toothed whales eat little else. 

 Man's nets are too slow-moving and too obvious to 

 fast-swimming squids for any reasonable sample to 

 be caught from large boats on the ocean's surface. 

 Consequently one is amazed, as were the adventurous 

 scientists aboard the raft Kon-T'tki, when squids 

 pursuing fish at night break through the surface water 

 and tumble aboard a low craft. Or a person remains 

 unconvinced that the echoes of depth-measuring 

 equipment could be reflected back to the ship (indi- 

 cating a phantom bottom about six hundred feet 

 down at midday) largely because of squids congre- 

 gated there — waiting at the edge of twilight in the 

 water until the day above fades and lets them ap- 

 proach the surface to feed. 



The slower squids in the deep sea (and perhaps 

 also the sick and decrepit of faster-moving kinds) do 

 get caught in the nets towed by oceanographic re- 

 search ships. Many of them prove to have curiously 

 gelatinous bodies and large numbers of light-pro- 

 ducing organs along their sides and underneath. 

 Very few of them are blind. Most have large eyes, 

 even with the organs on swiveling turrets that can be 

 aimed in many directions. Apparently they find food 

 and mates by recognizing luminous patterns passing 

 in the black water. 



These depths are home to another "living fossil," 

 one discovered toward the end of the nineteenth 

 century and given the imaginative name Vampyro- 

 teiithis injernalis, the "vampire squid of the infernal 

 regions." This improbable creature reaches a length 

 of 8 inches and a diameter of 3 inches. Its blue-black 

 body is literally pint-sized and wears at one end a 

 group of eight tentacles linked together by a web. 

 Vampyroteitthis is not an octopus, for it has two more 

 arms, slender as feelers, kept curled up and tucked 

 away in pockets outside the ring of webbed, sucker- 

 studded arms. Yet the vampire squid is not a true 

 squid either. 



Deep-sea Vainpyioteiithis may well have the larg- 

 est eyes in proportion to body of any animal in the 

 world. A 6-inch specimen wears a pair of globular 

 visual organs each 1 inch across, more than a third 

 of the body diameter, and as large as those of many 

 full-grown dogs. Toward the other end of the body 



198] 



