Learning with the Fang

That Giant Squid is watching me..

I just had one of those creepy old style horror film moments – you know the ones where the eyes of a painting follow the unsuspecting victims around the room.

According to: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid
Giant squid possess the largest eyes of any living creature—with thepossible exception of those of the colossal squid—the eye being over 1ft (30 cm) in diameter

Not only that, but my vanity search this morning led me to this rather peculiar site [splog or astroturf??] that pointed to my earlier post on the Giant Squid at the SAMuseum. How wierd is that?

Anyway, the point of this post is to begin a little research into the accuracy of wikipedia’s claim about the size of the giant squid eye. I’m trying to convey a little bit of information literacy here. The first thing to do is to examine wikipedia’s claim of the ‘one foot diameter’ eye. So I did a little hunt for at least two alternative sources:

http://www.unmuseum.org/squid.htm ‘Eyes that are the largest in the animal kingdom, getting
as big as eighteen inches across.’

http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/ps_roper.html ‘
The mesmerizing eyes of the giant squid, with a prominent dark iris,
are the largest in the animal kingdom, as big as hubcaps‘

And finally, a look inside the State Library of South Australia: This took about an hour to actually find some information (interesting). Here is a trail of breadcrumbs to the more interesting stuff…

Architeuthis .. a giant squid

http://www.marine.csiro.au/caabsearch/caab_search.caab_report?spcode=23629001

http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/squid_Architeuthis.html

Eyes: largest in the animal kingdom. They can grow to 25 cm (10 in.) in diameter–about the size of a volleyball.

GiantSquidEye.JPG

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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