Kraken how many arms

Sir Richard Owen, the man who invented the word 'dinosaur,' argued that they saw a seal, which led to a longstanding argument between Owen and the captain of the Daedalus , who pointed out that they knew full well what a seal looked like. There were similar observations in that Owen similarly dismissed—until , when a fisherman caught a giant squid. In Systema Naturae , he describes the Kraken as an actual organism.

There is no solid evidence of mile-long monsters swimming in our oceans, but we do have giant squids. These deep-sea dwellers can weigh anywhere from to pounds. Ichthyosaur bones have been discovered in patterns similar to the way that octopuses place the bones of their meals.

Even more interestingly, one discovered ribcage shows signs of constriction, as if a large tentacle was wrapped around it. Ichthyosaurs were pretty hefty creatures some were as long 30 feet , so it would take a very large cephalopod to catch and eat it.

Zoologist Pierre Denys de Montfort was studying giant cephalopods in the s after hearing accounts from captains of giant tentacles being discovered.

He cited old pieces of artwork and ship disappearances as evidence of these beasts. After 10 ships went missing in , de Montfort made the bold assumption that the Kraken was to blame. The boats were truthfully lost in a hurricane and his reputation was ruined. Legend says that the sea monster enjoys solitude and resides deep on the ocean floor.

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Still have questions? Find more answers. Figure 1 : The Kraken, depicted with a more octopus-like appearance, attacking a ship Author unknown. Naturally, a monster would not be regarded as such if it did not have a certain taste for human flesh. Despite its fearsome reputation, the Kraken could also bring some benefits for people. Putting their fear aside, some fishermen risked going near the monster in order to secure a more bounteous catch.

Besides the myth, the Kraken was also immortalized in art, and two of its appearances deserve special attention. The poetry of Tennyson. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Figure 2 : The original monster from Twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Riou []. The Greek philosopher Aristotle fourth century BC , in his work The history of animals , had already distinguished the common squid teuthis from its larger and rarer cousin teuthus or, in some translations, teuthos , which could reach 2.

Still, both Aristotle and Pliny treated the giant squid as a common animal and did not link it to myths of their own age and Greek and Roman myths were plenty! However, some later authors e. Manual of conchology: v. In any case, this confusion is so recurrent that it is worth citing some of these Greco-Roman monsters here. Monsters of the sea. But that is not such a big surprise: Gesner only deals with marine animals in the last volume from , published more than 20 years after his death, and many believe that the author was not certain enough about the material to publish it.

Nevertheless, the Kraken can still be found in Historiae animalium under another guise: a sea serpent described by Magnus some years earlier.

The reason for the confusion between the Kraken and sea serpents is explained below. The bishop reports that the Kraken, when rising from the sea, could easily be mistaken for a mountain; its colossal size made it more similar to an island than to an organized being. However, some authors still defended Pontoppidan much later e. The Kraken was so strong an influence in Nordic folklore that most naturalists could not escape its allure.

Systema Naturae. The name he chose was Microcosmus marinus , later understood as Sepia microcosmos. Curiously, the cuttlefish, another kind of cephalopod, was and still is classified under the genus Sepia , and the Kraken itself was deemed a cuttlefish on some occasions. Fauna Svecica. However, Linnaeus later regretted describing an imaginary beast in his scientific works and removed the Kraken from further editions of Systema naturae reprint in In any case, after this event, everyone naturalists or not adopted once and for all the image of a giant squid for the Kraken; i.

Meddelese om tvende kiaempestore Blaeksprutter opdrevne og ved Islands Kyst, og om nogle andre nordiske Dyr. At approximately the same time, whalers began to realize that the sperm whales they hunted regurgitated fragments of huge arms when killed, and the sailors did not take long to relate these pieces to the Kraken Nordhoff, NORDHOFF, Charles.

Whaling and fishing. In December , a giant cephalopod was found stranded on Raabjerg beach, Denmark, but was completely cut into pieces for bait. Oplysninger om Atlanterhavets colossale Blaeksprutter. Still in , Steenstrup seemed to use another name Architeuthis dux for the same animal, creating a taxonomic problem that would only be solved many years later see below.

This was the point at which the Kraken officially and permanently entered the annals of science. Nevertheless, perhaps the most famous record of a giant squid is that of the French vessel Alecton, whose crew, on 30 November , harpooned a squid of about 7.

However, when the crew tried to drag the animal on board, its body broke up and they only managed to retrieve the top of the mantle Ellis, ELLIS, Richard. Figure 3 : The crew of the Alecton try to bring the captured squid on board Author unknown. The next place where giant squids appeared was Newfoundland Island, Canada, with the discovery of many specimens from onwards. Of the first animals found, nothing remained, but two fishermen recovered a piece of a tentacle from an animal that supposedly had attacked them Ellis, ELLIS, Richard.

Some aspects of the systematics and biology of squid of the genus Architeuthis based on a study of specimens from Newfoundland waters. Bulletin of Marine Science, v. Later, in , Harvey managed to secure a complete specimen that was still alive the moment it was captured; this resulted in one of the most celebrated photos in the history of Architeuthis studies Figure 4. Harvey was an amateur, but knew of the great value that his specimens had to science and called on the assistance of professional malacologist Addison E.

Based on that first tentacle fragment, Verrill described the species Architeuthis princeps Figure 5. Harvey []. Figure 5 : Illustration of A. Verrill []. Verrill identified the first specimens as A. The reason for this lies in one of the rules of taxonomy: since the original mention of A.

On Architeuthis clarkei, a new species of giant squid, with observations on the genus. Journal of Zoology, v. As such, the official name for the species became A.

At the same time that the specimens appeared in Newfoundland, many others were found in New Zealand, Norway Figure 6 and other places, transforming the study of giant squids into a worldwide enterprise.

Besides, such reports seemed to indicate that the Kraken also lurked in the Pacific Ocean, in waters very distant from its Nordic home. Therefore, Tryon revised all references to these creatures in the literature, attributing them to known species, either in the genus Architeuthis or in other genera including some octopuses. Tryon acknowledged the genus Architeuthis as a separate entity from other squids, but preferred to treat it as a subgenus of the genus Ommastrephea.

Manual of conchology was for a long time the greatest authority in molluscan studies, and it remains so for some groups even to this day. Besides the initial confusion of shapes mentioned above squid, octopus, sea serpent, crustacean etc. Such confusion was not only present in art and fiction, but also in the popular knowledge of the real animals, i. But, after all, what is the difference between an octopus and a squid? Both are mollusks and belong to the class Cephalopoda, together with cuttlefish, nautiluses, and fossil belemnites and ammonites.

Maybe the most striking feature of mollusks is their marvelous shells. However, contrary to the rest of the phylum, most living cephalopods do not have shells nautiluses being the exception.

Octopuses have completely lost their shells during their evolutionary history. At first sight, squids and octopuses may look rather similar in their overall shape, but squids generally have a more bullet-like shape and hydrodynamic body, with a pair of fins on their extremity, while octopuses have a more globose body that can greatly change in shape Figure 7.

This is due to their way of life: squids are active swimmers, while octopuses live on the sea floor and hide under rocks or in burrows they also have the greatest camouflage ability in the animal kingdom , although there are some exceptions, such as paper nautiluses Argonauta spp. However, the most striking difference lies somewhere else: while an octopus has only eight arms, a squid has eight arms and two tentacles, which can be readily identified, for they are more slender and usually much longer than the arms.

The arms of both octopus and squid are covered on their inner surface by suction cups or suckers , but those of an octopus are sessile while squids have stalked mobile cups.

Figure 7 : Diagrams of a squid, in this case Architeuthis above , and an octopus below , accompanied by the proper scientific terminology B. In all other respects, squids and octopuses are very similar, but there are still some features of general cephalopod anatomy and ecology that are worth mentioning.

Beaks are often cited in taxonomy, as a genus and sometimes even a species can be identified by its beak alone Ogden et al. The role of beak shape in octopodid taxonomy. South African Journal of Marine Science, v. Giant squid beaks: implications for systematics.

Inside the mouth lies the radula, a rasping tongue-shaped structure equipped with many rows of small chitinous teeth, giving it the capacity to pluck small portions of food. The radula is a feature common to all mollusks except bivalves, which are filter feeders and have lost the radula in the course of their evolution. Cephalopods breathe through gills located inside the mantle cavity: water enters this cavity through apertures on the mantle edge close to the head, bringing oxygen to the gills, and is expelled by a structure called funnel.

The funnel is also capable of expelling a powerful gush of water, responsible for the fast jet-propulsion movement of cephalopods. An ink sac can also be found inside the mantle cavity, which enables the animal to expel a dark cloud of ink through the funnel to disorient a predator and escape.

Cephalopods have specialized cells in their skin called cromatophores, which enable them to instantly change color and camouflage themselves either to escape predators or to ambush prey or to communicate with conspecifics. Finally, cephalopods have a complex nervous system, and are highly intelligent. Other terrible monsters that lurked in the sea and terrorized sailors were sea serpents, reptile-like sometimes even dragon-like beasts capable of sinking ships and devouring their crew.

According to these authors, the description of such sea serpents commonly includes: 1 an elongated and sinuous serpentiform body squids swim with their arms and tentacles held close together and can give the impression of being a serpent ; 2 an eyeless and mouthless head the sailors may only have seen the club of a tentacle or the tip of the mantle above the water level; Figure 8 ; 3 a water gush that the serpent expelled from its mouth squids usually use such water jets, expelled through the funnel, to escape and, in this case, to ward off harassing fishermen; Figure 9.

As such, when more closely examined, another common legendary creature, the sea serpent, also becomes a giant squid or, more specifically, Architeuthis. Figure 8 : Above supposed sea serpent sighted by the crew of the Daedalus in near the Cape of Good Hope. Lee [ LEE, Henry. Figure 9 : Above sea serpent squirting water from its mouth, as reported by Bishop Hans Edge of Greenland in Artistic exaggerations aside, a gush of water from a squid could easily be seen above the water level Author unknown.

As seen above, all Architeuthis specimens recovered until the beginning of the twentieth century were almost exclusively stranded on beaches. Subsequent marine research began using new methods to capture animals, including trawling nets, but few were the giant squids captured at sea. The giant squid. Scientific American, v. In any case, all the recovered animals were dying or already dead and in a bad state of preservation ; in the worst cases, only parts of the animal, like a tentacle fragment, were recovered.

He says he managed to secure many specimens this way. With all these data, it is clear that Architeuthis is a cosmopolitan genus, i. Depth of occurrence and partial chemical composition of a giant squid, Architeuthis, off Southern California.

The Veliger, v. First record of the giant squid Architeuthis sp. Architeuthidae in the Mediterranean Sea. Some authors Roper, Young, ; Nesis et al. Zoologicheskiy Zhurnal, v. The giant squidArchiteuthis in southern African waters. Architeuthis , the single genus of the family Architeuthidae, has about 20 species, many precariously described, usually based only on tentacle fragments Figure 10 , beaks Figure 11 or other body parts Clarke, CLARKE, Malcom R. A review of the systematics and ecology of oceanic squids.

Advances in Marine Biology, v. The distribution of giant squids Cephalopoda, Architeuthidae in the North Atlantic and particularly about the shores of newfoundland.