Giant Squid Filmed In Natural Habitat For the First Time 98
First time accepted submitter Edgewood_Dirk writes that a giant squid has been filmed in its natural habitat for the first time. "Scientists and broadcasters have captured footage of an elusive giant squid, up to eight meters (26 feet) long that roams the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Japan's National Science Museum succeeded in filming the deep-sea creature in its natural habitat for the first time, working with Japanese public broadcaster NHK and the U.S. Discovery Channel. The massive invertebrate is the stuff of legend, with sightings of a huge ocean-dwelling beast reported by sailors for centuries.'" The first live footage of a giant squid was captured in 2006 by Japan's National Science Museum researcher, Tsunemi Kubodera, after it was hooked and brought to the surface.
Air dates (for those asking where the vid is) (Score:5, Informative)
It appears that we'll have to wait for the shows to air before we'll see the footage.
January 27th on Discovery Channel [cbsnews.com] for most of us.
January 13th on NHK [asahi.com] if you're in Japan.
Re:No Video at the link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Video at the link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The question that's itching to be asked.. (Score:5, Informative)
This question has already been answered....and the answer is...bad...
From wiki: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid [wikipedia.org] )
Re:The question that's itching to be asked.. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you sure their first impulse was to EAT it? I mean...it's Japan.
Japan is widely reviled for using its permitted "research whaling" activities as a cover for what essentially amounts to hunting for food. They kill whales (mostly minke, I think, which are at least fairly common) in the hundreds or thousands every year, I believe in the Antarctic, supposedly for research purposes, but since there is no prohibition on using the leftovers after the "research" is done, the meat ends up being sold in Japan. The problem is that most Japanese don't even know what whale meat tastes like, and from what I've read it's not very appealing, so it's not like there's any wide demand for the product - in fact the government has tried to promote its consumption to gain support for their policies. Obviously certain interests have great interest in the government, but it's never been clear to me whether this was a "protect our livelihoods" thing, or traditionalists and reactionaries trying to preserve a custom in the face of Western imperialism. (There's a lot of this in the US and Canada too, but it's the Indian tribes, not the central governments. Norway is one of the few other governments that pushes the practice, and you can buy whale meat there too.)
The Japanese are also notorious for their dolphin killing - there was a documentary called The Cove [imdb.com] from a few years ago that captured the whole mess on film.
Re:The decline of Discovery Channel. (Score:5, Informative)
They're still government properties, their frequencies, brands, copyrights and studios belong to the taxpayers, who paid to develop all of it. They'll be on the block soon, just like many municipal water utilities and public power utilities already are. More of the neo-liberal hogwash about how private industry is always more 'efficient' somehow will be used as the justification, or maybe "deficit reduction".
You are dead wrong. According to PBS [pbs.org] themselves, they are not and never have been part of any government:
PBS is a private, nonprofit corporation, founded in 1969, whose members are America’s public TV stations -- noncommercial, educational licensees that operate more than 350 PBS member stations and serve all 50 states, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.
.
NPR [npr.org] is a "privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization." [wikipedia.org]
Both organizations get a significant minority of funding from the Federal government-funded Corporation For Public Broadcasting [cpb.org] but neither NPR nor PBS is owned by the Federal government any more than the multitude of private organizations which receive some Federal funding. They probably wouldn't exist today if they hadn't been funded by the CPB and if the CPB stopped funding them altogether, they would suffer greatly. However, no part of the Federal government can sell either PBS or NPR and even if all Federal funding were cut off, they'd still have a chance of surviving on their other sources of funding.