New Deep Sea Squid

texchanchan writes: "Yahoo reports on a newly discovered species of deep-sea squid, quoting scientists as saying the creatures are very different from normal giant squids. 'New species are a dime a dozen. This is fundamentally different' in behavior and appearance -- with 10 identical long skinny arms and a jellyfish-like hunting strategy. 'We don't know of any cephalopod that has arms like that.' --Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. 'I had never seen anything like this creature,' oceanographer William Sager of Texas A&M says."

Nickelodeon...

[diesel_jackass]

So does this mean that SpongeBob will have to go jellyfishing for Squidward now?

SpongeBob [spongebob.com]

Re:Not a squid

[RFC959]

All tentacles are of same size

This would not necessarily be unique to this squid. Vampyroteuthis infernalis [nhm.ac.uk] (OK, not technically a "squid", but a cephalopod) appears to have eight arms of equal length, until you examine it very closely. (As a side note, Vampyroteuthis is ugly [compuserve.com] as sin [nhm.ac.uk].) Then again, we barely know what this thing is yet. Vampyroteuthis was originally thought to be an octopus, and is considered to have rather jellyfish-like behavior, and ended up getting put in its own taxonomic category, so the magnapinnidae could be something in their own class too.

As for "no eyes visible" and "transparent"...we've got one not-very-good photo; the scientists say they videotaped it for up to ten minutes. I think I'll go with their judgement. Besides which eyelessness is not unknown among deep-sea creatures either, like the hagfish. So, an eyeless, mostly symmetric squid that behaves like a jellyfish...it would be a weird squid, but it could still be one.

Re:Propulsion?

[kin_korn_karn]

it could be some kind of cuttlefish - don't they move by fins on their body?