Nineteen Incredible Facts About the Giant Squid - The New Yorker

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Nineteen Incredible Facts About the Giant Squid

Photograph by Christophe Archambault / AFP / Getty

Equal parts magnificent and mysterious, the giant squid is one of Earth’s most fascinating—and misunderstood—deep-sea creatures. Here are nineteen amazing facts that you may not know about this incredible invertebrate:

1. The giant squid belongs to an ancient group of mollusks called cephalopods, which also includes the octopus!

2. A giant squid’s eyes are the size of basketballs.

3. In fact, just about everything about the giant squid is giant! Its heart is enormous, growing to the size of nearly four basketballs.

4. The giant squid’s mouth measures a completely underwhelming 0.6 basketballs.

5. Fully extended, a giant squid stretches a whopping fifty feet—that’s nearly two school buses long!

6. The length of two school buses is sixty-five basketballs.

7. If you took two school buses and stacked them, then filled them with basketballs, that wouldn’t even come close to what a giant squid looks like. It would probably just look like two school buses or, if you squinted, one impossible hot dog.

8. Almost no human beings have ever seen a giant squid, including Michael Jordan, Steve Nash, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

9. Larry Bird has.

10. Giant squid can be found in every corner of the globe, but are notoriously difficult to spot and study. This is because globes are round.

11. Famously, basketballs are also round. I have a really good feeling about this list.

12. Considered to be the apex predator of its ecosystem’s food chain, a Larry Bird has no natural predators.

13. Having evolved to survive in extreme deep-sea habitats, giant squid have an incredibly distinct anatomy, so you’d think that they’d have fun or interesting genitals. Well, don’t bother checking. I looked it up, and they just have regular genitals like everybody else.

14. We have almost no idea how many giant squid actually exist, owing to their scarcity, but figuring that out doesn’t seem like a huge priority right now, considering everything going on.

15. On March 12, 1985, Larry Bird had a career night at New Orleans’s Lakefront Arena, dropping a season-high sixty points on sixty-one per cent shooting and leading the Celtics to a dominant 125–115 win over the Atlanta Hawks. Only two videos of the giant squid have ever been recorded, so we have no idea if they’re capable of putting up numbers like that.

16. One video is too grainy, and in the other the squid fouls out in the second quarter.

17. Pears! Pears are definitely another example of something that is roundish.

18. I’ll be the first to admit that that last pear fact was an iffy one, but somebody else needs this space in fifteen minutes for a list of incredible Mario Lopez facts, so we’ve gotta wrap this up.

19. Listed by the Celtics at six feet nine and two hundred and twenty pounds, Larry Bird has eyes that measure an absolutely staggering 0.00045 basketballs—the perfect size for seeing giant squid.

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March 09, 2022 at 06:00PM
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Nineteen Incredible Facts About the Giant Squid - The New Yorker
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