What’s happening with the colossal squid? Why haven’t we put it on display yet? Well the short answer is that good things take time – and money.
While the specimen is happily sitting in its storage tank, slowly preserving in the formalin, the squid team is planning for the next stage – how to put it on display at Te Papa.
There are a few things for us to consider – not least is how to build a tank to store it in that also lets visitors get a really good look at the specimen. We need quite a big tank to hold our 4.2 metre long colossal squid, weighing 495 kilograms.
And when you combine the weight of the squid, with the weight of the tank and the liquid, that’s quite a floor loading. So there are only a few places within the Te Papa building that we can put the tank and the squid in.
What are we going to tell you about the colossal squid? What would you like to see in the exhibition? These are all questions that we are now exploring as we develop the exhibition.
We’ll keep you posted through the blog on how we’re going, and give you a bit of an insight into the crazy world of exhibition development at Te Papa.
If you do have any questions for us, let us know!
The large colossal squid is thawing . . . meanwhile, we are currently setting up for the dissection this afternoon. The scientists will be dissecting the smaller, damaged colossal squid.
The dissection table has had to be changed because the colossal squid is a lot wider than the giant squid we were looking at earlier. We’ve also had to change the angle of our cameras to handle the longer specimen!
Peter Batson from Dunedin, NZ is going to commentate the dissection. He’ll have a mike and will be right there with the scientists. We hope this way you will get clearer audio.
Let us know if there are any specific questions you have about this afternoon.
We have just weighed the anterior mantle of the smaller colossal squid: 71 kg; the tail fin and part mantle section weighed 63 kg and the head and arms (brachial crown)section weighed 27 kg – a total weight of 161 kg!
The three sections of the smaller specimen take up the entire width and length of our three dissection tables.
The tentacles are 2.45 metres long – much shorter than the giant squid tentacles, but the total body length of this specimen is longer than the giant squid.
3.30 pm: the squid is now sitting in the thawing tank while we remove the tarpaulin and ropes around it. It will now be left overnight to thaw slowly. To keep the temperature even we will place the lid on the tank overnight, so there will not be a lot to see until tomorrow morning.
Two overhead hoists were used to lower the 490 kg block into the saline solution.
Once the specimen was lowered into the tank the strops were carefully removed and the thawing process begun.
