Dissection of giant squid

The dissection of the giant squid  – Steve O’Shea and Tsunemi Kubodera using the endoscope to examine the stomach to see if there are any contents before the specimen is cut open.

This is the gill – we are injecting ink into the blood vessels to show them more clearly:

Nidamental gland (arrow):

This specimen is a female, but is not fully mature – the nidamental glands are not fully developed. These glands produce the gelatinous material that holds the egg mass together.

The stomach (above), as with most giant squids caught, is completely empty apart from a few nematode parasites. One theory is that the giant squid are coming into New Zealand waters to breed and do not feed during this period.

The branchial heart can be seen at the center of this next image. The white globular tissue either side are the ovaries, and the large inflated structure at the bottom left is the caecum.

 

 

 

11 Comments

  1. Ken Proud
    Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.13pm | Permalink

    Good work kids, it’s a pity the poor thing had to die though.

  2. Marg
    Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.13pm | Permalink

    message for Admin

    Could you please fix the time stamping please – you’re an hour out!

    Cheers :)

  3. chrispaulin
    Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.21pm | Permalink

    Thanks Marg, I’ll see what we can do about the time stamp.

  4. Marg
    Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.42pm | Permalink

    The feeds are great and the blog being updated so frequently (and with photos) is fantastic. :)

  5. Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.21pm | Permalink

    The timestamps should be better now… hopefully :)

  6. Posted 29 April 2008 at 1.23pm | Permalink

    But preexisting timestamps are not being updated. This might mess up a bit the order in which the posts appear.

  7. Posted 12 December 2008 at 8.24pm | Permalink

    hi every one pitty the poor squid had to die but yeah thats just how life goes

  8. Posted 12 December 2008 at 8.26pm | Permalink

    hi every one that poor squid didnt have to be killed but yeah thats just how life goes

  9. Posted 12 December 2008 at 8.27pm | Permalink

    pitty tne squid had to die

  10. Posted 12 December 2008 at 8.27pm | Permalink

    hi

  11. neri kyle
    Posted 15 March 2010 at 8.16pm | Permalink

    GOD give as a wonderful world we need to keep it just like how to keep our self

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