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Australian fishermen net 500-pound squid 4 hours agoMELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian fishermen have hauled up a 20-foot-long giant squid off the country's southeastern coast.Skipper Rangi Pene said Monday that the 500-pound squid was already dead when it was caught in a trawler's nets Sunday night in waters more than 1,640 feet deep.Paul McCoy, a fisheries research biologist, said it took 10 men to lift the squid onto a stretcher and place it in a storage freezer in the city of Portland. A museum will collect it this week.McCoy said an analysis by the museum would determine the type...

BALI, Indonesia -- More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps. While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve. "A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble," said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook...

It sounds like something out of a monster movie. A mysterious sea creature, up to 7 feet long, weighing up to 100 pounds, with 40,000 sharp teeth. It hunts in packs of hundreds, flying through the water at 25 mph, changing color. With a parrot-like beak and strong arms, it attacks and tries to eat nearly anything it sees, including fish, scuba divers, even its own kind. But it's not a creature of Hollywood. It's real. And it's reached Monterey Bay. The Humboldt Squid, also known as the Giant Squid or Jumbo Squid, traditionally has lived in warm waters off...

The squid that washed up on an Australian beach weights 550 pounds and is 26 feet long from the tip of its body to the end of its tentacles.---AFP/Getty Images HOBART, Australia — A squid as long as a bus and weighing 550 pounds washed up on an Australian beach, officials said today."It is a whopper," said Genefor Walker-Smith, a zoologist who studies invertebrates at the Tasmanian Museum.Giant squid live in waters off southern Australia and New Zealand — where a half-ton colossus, believed to be the world's largest, was caught in February. They attract the sperm whales that...

In the summer of 2004, Beth and Ken Cone boarded their Sundeer 60 Eagles Wings in their home port of Waukegan, Illinois, sailed across the Great Lakes and out the St. Lawrence Seaway, and have been cruising the world ever since. The latest post on their website, Vancones.org, concerns an episode of underbody sabotage attributed to one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep, the giant squid. While visiting Papeete, Tahiti, the Cones met up with their old cruising pal, Shigeo Kitano, whose progress on a recent passage from the Galopagos to the Marquesas had been impeded by an...

December 22, 2006—Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures. Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo (see Japan map). His team snared the animal using a line baited with small squid and shot video of the russet-colored giant as it was hauled to the surface. The squid, a young female, "put up quite a fight"...

TOKYO, Dec 22 (AFP) Japanese scientists Friday released what they say could be the first live video footage of the elusive giant squid, exposing some of the creature's underwater secrets. Scientists of the National Science Museum said they succeeded in catching a deep-sea giant squid at a depth of 640 meters (2,112 feet) on December 6 in the North Pacific Ocean, some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of Tokyo. "As the video movie shows, the giant squid struggled furiously to escape the catch by spouting water from its funnel. This means they can actually swim pretty fast, in addition to...

SANTA BARBARA (AP) - A tentacle and two arms of a giant squid about 20 feet long were snagged by a sport fisherman off Santa Cruz Island. "We just saw something odd floating. We were just kind of stunned, but I saw it and thought, 'We better bring this thing in,'" said Bennett Salvay. The squid parts were found by Salvay, his son and nephew about eight miles off the island on Aug. 11. Salvay, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, said they grabbed and pulled at it and it kept "coming and coming.... We kind of...

Using a digital camera dangling from a line nearly 3,300 feet long, scientists for the first time have photographed a live giant squid, the tentacled deep-sea monster that is the largest invertebrate on Earth. *SNIP* "the recovered section of tentacle was still functioning," they continued, "with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers."

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- Hundreds of giant squid are washing up on Orange County beaches, creating a scene more akin to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" than "The O.C." The bug-eyed sea creatures, believed to be Humboldt squid, normally reside in deep water and only come to the surface at night. Why approximately 500 of them began washing up on the sands of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach on Tuesday isn't clear. Authorities said the squid - the biggest weighing 17 pounds - might have been pursuing bait fish and gotten too close to shore, or the tides might...

-- When hundreds of giant squid washed up dead on the Long Beach Peninsula last weekend, Dean Marsh knew exactly what to do: He stocked his freezer. "No sense letting them go to waste," said the 57-year-old bait salesman, who planned to cut them up and sell them to fishermen. An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Humboldt jumbo flying squid -- typically found off the coast of Mexico -- have washed up on southwest Washington beaches in the past few days, said Greg Bargmann, a marine fish manager with the state Fish and Wildlife Department. What's killing them isn't clear. "They're...

They came from the deep They're big, they're slithery, they're terrifying, they've never been seen alive – and now, it's reported, they're taking over the world, with a greater total weight as a species than the entire human race. Richard Askwith reports on the mysteries of the giant squid, a profoundly elusive creature that suddenly seems to be popping up everywhere 07 August 2002 If you were looking for a suitable place to begin the last chapter in the story of mankind's dominance of this planet, you might do worst than choose Seven Mile Beach, Tasmania. Ten miles east of...

HOBART, Australia (AP) - A giant squid that washed up on an Australian beach could be a previously unknown species, scientists said Monday. The 550-pound creature was found dead Saturday on a beach in Hobart in Tasmania state and was transported Monday to the Tasmanian Museum. Experts were studying its unusual characteristics, which include long, thin flaps of muscle attached to each of its eight arms. "What we've seen on this animal we haven't seen on other squid, and it's a significant feature," said zoologist David Pemberton. "It's basically like having a pile of muscles on your own body that...