Giant Squid Caught on Film, World's Oldest Noodles

• Giant squid caught on film
• World's oldest noodles

Giant squid caught on film

Architeuthis, the giant squid, is the Greta Garbo of the deep-legendary, mysterious, with saucerlike eyes certain to transfix anyone caught in their gaze. Of course, while Garbo stunned people with her beauty, the giant squid would probably just paralyze one with fear.

Slate.com's Grady Hendrix said it best: "Most of us first caught a glimpse of this denizen of the deep trying to kill Kirk Douglas in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' and we all had the same question: How angry do you have to be to try to kill the recipient of an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement? The answer was instantly branded onto all of our brains: as angry as a giant squid."

Last month two Tokyo-based scientists published the first images of the giant squid taken in its natural environment (Proc. R. Soc. B, published online Sept. 27, dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2005.3158). The report is a milestone in giant squid research. Despite its reputation, Architeuthis, like Garbo, would prefer to be left alone. Some giant squid have been snagged in fishing trawlers or washed ashore either dying or dead, but until now, they had managed to cagily avoid cameras in the wild, thereby vexing curious scientists.

Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan's National Science Museum and Kyoichi Mori of Ogasawara Whale Watching Association took the photos more than a year ago. By following sperm whales, the cephalopod's most effective hunters, Kubodera and Mori tracked the squid to the Bonin Islands, about 500 miles south of Tokyo. There the researchers deployed a digital camera, timer, strobe, depth sensor, and lures of Japanese common squid and freshly mashed euphausiid shrimps into the deep.

On Sept. 30, 2004, a giant squid attacked the bait and unexpectedly became snagged in Kubodera and Mori's apparatus. The camera took more than 550 pictures while, for the next four hours, the squid tried to free itself, escaping, finally, when its ensnared tentacle broke off. "The recovered section of tentacle was still functioning, with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers," the researchers noted.

Kubodera and Mori estimate that the squid was more than 26 feet long-actually a bit small for Architeuthis, which tend to be closer to 40 feet long. The photos indicate that giant squid are more active predators than scientists have presumed. "“It appears that the tentacles coil into an irregular ball in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey with coils of their body immediately after striking," the authors write.

World's oldest noodles

Think that container of week-old Lomein festering at the back of your fridge is old? Think again. A 4,000-year-old bowl of noodles has been unearthed at the archaeological site of Lajia in northwest China (Nature 2005, 437, 967).

A team led by Houyuan Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, uncovered the lost supper beneath 10 feet of floodplain sediment. Archaeologists think the settlement at Lajia was destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake and flood about 4,000 years ago.

"The bowl was found upside-down and embedded in brownish-yellow, fine clay," Lu and colleagues report. "When we lifted off the bowl, the remains of the noodles were found inside, on top of the cone of sediment that had filled the inverted earthenware container."

The noodles were yellow, 20 inches long, and about as thick as spaghetti. Modern Italian and Asian noodles are generally made from wheat, but grain analysis showed that the ancient noodles were made from millet. In fact, Lu notes there is "no evidence that wheat, barley, or other nongrass plants were used to supply their ingredients."

The discovery establishes noodle production in China a couple of thousand years earlier than previously thought and could end the debate over whether the Italians, the Arabs, or the Chinese were the first pasta makers.

This week's column was written by Bethany Halford. Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.