Mystery In The Deep Sea

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If you haven't all ready heard...
National Geographic News

From AOL : SANTIAGO, Chile (July 2) - Scientists said on Wednesday a huge mass of slimy flesh that washed up on a Chilean beach last week may be a rare type of giant octopus or just discarded whale blubber.

European zoologists contacted by the Chileans to help identify the 40-foot-long (12-meter) piece of gelatinous tissue said it closely resembled descriptions of a bizarre specimen found in Florida in 1896 that was named ''octopus giganteus'' and has confounded experts ever since.

Other informal sightings of similar deep-sea creatures by fishermen and divers from the Bahamas to Tasmania are the stuff of folklore on the ''Bermuda Blob'' as well as academic study.

''We've been in touch with zoologists from different countries. We've had responses from France and Italy from people who say, based on the preliminary data we sent them, it could be a gigantic octopus,'' said Elsa Cabrera, director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago.

The center plans to send tissue samples abroad to be examined.

''I don't dare say what it is. I'm hoping the experts can tell us,'' she added.

James Mead, a zoologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, thinks it is whale blubber.

''I don't have enough data to say, yes it's an octopus or its a whale but I would hazard a bet that when it gets firmly identified, it'll be a whale,'' he told Reuters by telephone.

He said a whale could have died of old age, decayed and a big piece of it could have drifted to shore.

Photographs of the carcass showed a pinkish-gray blob on the beach resembling a squashed elephant.

The largest of the over 100 officially recognized species of octopus can measure up to 20 feet.

Cabrera went to see the carcass last weekend after the Navy alerted her center to what it thought were two beached whales. One carcass was a humpback and the other a complete surprise.

''We'd never seen such a strange specimen,'' Cabrera said.

Its characteristics match those given by 19th Century scientists that examined the creature found in 1896, who described pulling at the 60-foot (18-meter) animal with a team of horses and hacking at it with an axe without making a dent.

Reuters 17:14 07-02-03

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A search turned up this:

Globsters

I want to know what you think. I'm not sure what it is but I have my thoughts.

 

Here we are, trying to explore the entire universe, while we don't even fully explored our own planet.

That's a pretty freaky creature, but not as freaky as this one.

 

I really wouldn't be surprised when it turns out to be a giant octopus. There have been a lot more of these sightings and there is no reason a giant octopus couldn't exist, somewhere deep down. With creatures like Big Foot we would have been able to find more evidence by now, but a giant octopus would live in a world we know almost nothing about. So my guess is that they exist.

 

I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel and they said that scientists absolutly know that giant squid and/or octopus exist

 

They certainly have descovered gaint squids. The other day on the news they showed the first... IIRC it was some kind of gaint gaint squid. The first whole one they've found. 12 metres long. Its barbs on its tenticles where 30cm long. It was gaigantic. And they say they think they live over 200 years, although i don't know how true this is.

 

I remember hearing about that giant squid. But this thing is odd. I was reading about simmilar sightings to this and there where some "convient" times where it was "lost" or info of different people cancled out the other. I think that we might never know truely. We hardly know what we are, our world and such thats close to us. Yet when something happens that isnt quite explanible what are we to do execpt search for an answer?

 

I saw this gaint gaint squid thing live. Well not really live but on "live TV". They had just found it south of New Zealand (well north of Antartica really ). But there have been pleanty of other gaint squids/octopi (sp?) sightings all around the world. This was just the first one of the gaint gaint kind. Can't remember its really name.

 

You hear about strange sightings all the time, I heard they got lots of these in the middle ages. All those myths would'nt get started without some basis in truth.

 

Well, it appears they were wrong after all.

 

I have to read slower. I thought the article said it was a giant sperm. That would have been scarier than any squid.

 

If that were true, than the person in question could become a wealthy man by making donations to a spermbank.