A viewer could forget that they were in the presence of something rare. That far down, the equipment either freezes or implodes from the pressure.Īn appearance like that deserves some fanfare, it seems to me, but the dissection set was decidedly mundane: just a simple silver table, a single cameraman, and an awkwardly PowerPointed slideshow. Giant squids live so deep in the ocean that they’re almost never seen, not even with cameras. They found it washed up on the beach somewhere, a rare appearance from a deep-sea depth. To prepare myself, I watched another dissection - of a giant squid by a research team in Australia. I don’t think it’s unfair to ask: How can you expect to really look at an animal like that? That they are at least as imaginary as real. That they move like legends and live like shadows.
If pressed, I might have said that they belong to dark places - that they are prehistory, deep-sea depths, a sailor’s nightmare. The air turns aseptic and your eyes, you hope, are new.īefore the dissection, I’d never thought much about squids. There and here and look: You tick off organs, muscles, bones. It is the science of an arrow, the epistemology of a list.
ANATOMY OF SQUIDS SKIN
You peel back the skin and take stock of its guts. When a body is mysterious, you cut it open. I will be systematic, sterile, and observant - the most careful dissector I can manage to be.Īnd if, at the end, I still don’t know what to say, I suppose I’ll have to admit my failure. I’m going to set the pieces out on a table, label each in intelligible script. I’m going to take a scalpel to its organs and remove them one by one. I’m going to draw a slit down my dissection and put my fingers in its innards. So I want to take another look, as a matter of pride. If, at its conclusion, the squid is still foreign - and the encounter an unanswered question - then I must have done something wrong. It is commonsense inquiry and there’s no reason to be confused. It is a procedure, a way of looking, an act of investigation. What, exactly, was I doing?īut we all know what it means to dissect something. A few months ago, I cut open a gelatinous sea creature to take a look inside. I’m not sure what went awry, but I am unsettled. I poked around in the squid with a flagging sense of purpose and the nagging feeling that I was missing something important.
The longer I dissected, the less clear my agenda seemed to be. The squid was unsurprisingly strange: all tentacles and ooze and sets of sharp hidden teeth. Illustration extracted from Dutch botanist and anantomist Frederic Ruysch’s Thesaurus animalium primus, 1710, viaĪ few months ago, I dissected a squid.
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