Squid!

Slimey, icky, fishy smell. Its got tentacles and a beak? Is it the Craken from tales of the acient mariners? Its a just a really really big squid. In science we disected Crawfish and Squid about a month ago and since then I haven't really been interested in eating fish. So today I can across an article about a crew that saw and boarded a SUPER GAINT SQUID unto their ship and brought it to land.

John Bennett is used to the monotony. As captain of a New Zealand commercial fishing boat, he's accustomed to spending months at a time afloat in the Antarctic Ocean, staring at—well, nothing. "Just ice really, lots and lots of ice," says Bennett. "Sometimes, not even a seabird." On a particularly calm day in late January, Bennett was tending to his deep-sea fishing lines—each one 2,000 meters long (nearly a mile and a quarter), and sporting up to 10,000 baited hooks—in hopes of a major toothfish haul. Suddenly, the calm was shattered—by the sight of a colossal squid surfacing near the stern. The beast, a 33-foot-long adult male weighing half a ton, had wrapped itself around one of Bennett's lines. "It was just this great big brown shape," recalls Bennett, who was watching from the bridge. "It came up right alongside us. Everyone was yelling and screaming."
Bennett hurried to the deck to confer with Geoff Dolan, an observer from the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries who was on board. International law requires that anything caught in Antarctic waters must be kept onboard and documented to guard against overfishing. So Bennett really didn't have a choice but to haul in the squid. "We decided to get him onboard in as good a condition as we could," says Bennett. "If we'd released him, he wouldn't have survived." By then the crew had gaffed the creature in an attempt to get it off the line. But its grip was tight, both on the line and on the five-foot-long toothfish he was eating. "He wasn't giving up that fish," says Bennett. "When we finally pulled him in, the fish was half-eaten."
What Bennett and his crew pulled in that day turned out to be the largest colossal squid ever recovered—cause for considerable excitement aboard his ship, the San Aspiring, and around the world. As word of the catch spread late last month, the news wires buzzed with squidmania. WORLD'S LARGEST INVERTEBRATE CAPTURED read the headlines. If cut up for calamari, the stories said, the squid would produce rings the size of tractor tires. As word got out that the catch had actually been recorded on video, Bennett found himself in the middle of an international bidding war.

The colossal squid, it seems, is one of those creatures that captures our imagination, largely because it is so rarely captured. Including Bennett's catch—and a 20-foot female he found floating dead in 2003—only a handful have ever been recovered. Most of them were just damaged fragments—a tentacle here, a dorsal fin there. The species wasn't even identified until 1925, when pieces of one were found inside the stomach of a sperm whale. More than a century after Jules Verne popularized the creature as a mythic, ship-wrecking monster in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," the colossal squid remains very much a scientific mystery.
"We know relatively nothing about them," admits Steve O'Shea, director of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute at the Auckland University of Technology and one of the world's leading squid experts. O'Shea says they are as long as their cousins, the giant squid, but much heavier—and, O'Shea believes, more aggressive predators. Bennett's first catch helped fill in some blanks; his latest catch, at 990 pounds, is nearly three times the weight of his last. Which verifies what many scientists have suspected for years but never had the evidence to prove: these creatures get much, much larger than previously believed.
It's a point that O'Shea has been arguing for some time. He often examines the stomach contents of whales stranded off the coast of New Zealand and says that he's found a large number of colossal squid beaks that were clearly from specimens considerably larger than anything ever caught. Three years ago he proposed that a colossal squid could grow as big as half a ton. The reaction of his colleagues? "The scientific community laughed at me," he says.

There is more to this article but I just thought it was really cool. Imagen trying to disect this huge squid!