Hi This is Bruce Marshall, Collection Manager Mollusca, from Te Papa.
When we turned the specimen we confirmed that the eyes were oriented antero-laterally. In other words the animal looks pretty well straight forward rather than from either side if its head.
Other squid have eyes on the side of their head but they can swivel their eyes so they can see forwards and sideways.
Before we looked at our colossal squid, no one was quite sure how its eyes were placed. Luckily this squid has one intact eye. The other one got damaged when it was pulled onto the ship. However we were able to remove the lenses from this damaged eye and eye-ball tissue was also able to be removed.
Prof. Eric Warrant and Prof. Dan Nilsson from the University of Lund took this tissue and are analysing it to understand how it sees.
