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Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo!\n\nThis week we visit the weirdest squid in the deep sea!\n\nI was a guest on Tim Mendees's After Hours that's now up on YouTube! It's mostly about my writing but we talk about all kinds of stuff, including cephalopods! There is some bad language but it's not all that bad and it's mostly toward the end.\n\nFurther reading/watching:\n\nElusive Long-Tailed Squid Captured on Film for First time\n\nSee Strange Squid Filmed in the Wild for the First Time (ram's horn squid)\n\nMultiple observations of Bigfin Squid (Magnapinna sp.) in the Great Australian Bight reveal distribution patterns, morphological characteristics, and rarely seen behaviour\n\nUntangling the Long-Armed Mystery of the Bigfin Squid\n\nDrawing of a long-arm squid and an actual long-arm squid:\n\n \n\nAsperoteuthis mangoldae, which really should be called the long-tailed squid:\n\n\xa0\n\nVerany's long-armed squid, with its tentacles mostly retracted (so not looking very long-armed):\n\n\n\nVerany's long-armed squid with tentacles extended:\n\n\n\nDrawing of a paralarval Verany's long-armed squid:\n\n\n\nThe ram's horn squid, floating along doop doop doop:\n\n\n\nDrawing of the coiled internal shell of the ram's horn squid:\n\n\n\nA clawed armhook squid mama with her egg cluster:\n\n\n\nBigfin squid!\n\n \n\nAnother bigfin squid! Good grief look at that!\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nBefore we get started, a quick announcement that I was a guest on a YouTube show called After Hours recently! I was there mostly to talk about my writing, but naturally animals came up too, especially cephalopods. There\u2019s a link in the show notes if you want to watch the show. There is a little bad language, but not too bad and it\u2019s more toward the end.\n\nAnyway, in a not-exactly coincidence, this week we\u2019re going to look at some of the weirdest deep-sea squids known. Yes, weirder than the flying squid we talked about in episode 101. We don\u2019t know much about any of them, but they\u2019re definitely not what you expect when you think about squid.\n\nLet\u2019s talk first about Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, the long-arm squid. It\u2019s also sometimes called the thorny whiplash squid because it has little pointy tubercules in its skin and long, whiplike feeding tentacles. It lives in the deep sea and has been found in both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, although very rarely. Despite its name, its feeding tentacles are much longer than its arms, although its arms are pretty long too. A squid\u2019s body is generally more or less torpedo-shaped and is called a mantle. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles that are usually longer than the arms. Many squid species have relatively short arms compared to mantle length.\n\nThe feeding tentacles in long-arm squid are very slender and delicate, and they\u2019re easily broken off after the animal dies and has washed around in the water for a while. One intact specimen has been found and measured, though. It had a mantle length of almost a foot and a half long, or 45 cm, but its total length, including the tentacles, was 18 feet, or 5.5 meters. The tentacles were 12 times the mantle length.\n\nUsing that ratio, one large specimen found in 2007, which was 6 1/2 feet long, or 2 meters, including both mantle and arms, is estimated to have measured up to 24 feet long when it was alive, or over 7 meters. Most of its length is due to its incredibly long, thin feeding tentacles.\n\nSo what does the long-arm squid eat with those long, delicate tentacles? We don\u2019t know. We don\u2019t know most things about the long-arm squid.\n\nAnother species of Asperoteuthis is Asperoteuthis mangoldae. So little is known about it that it doesn\u2019t even have an informal name. It was only described in 2007 and has only been found around the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific Ocean. It looks similar to the closely-related long-arm squid but without the incredibl...