Last -minute news: Colossal Lula is … beautiful?

We know that Colossal Lula has existed for 100 years, but this is the first time someone has been seen alive in the background. Best of all, it’s a beautiful baby.

The most popular exhibition of Te Papa is not known for its beauty. The colossal squid is placed in a sealed bed with discolored liquid. She is soft, a little wrinkled and very, very dead. Its meat is a gray washed with orange skin and sewn damage. We are not seeing her under her best light (the darkness of the bottom of the sea), but she is the only full colossal Lula on display in the world. This can cross the minds of the most sensitive visitors that may be better for humans not to know what is down there.

Like two arm wreaths (the arms and tentacle found around the mouth of a squid) with a strange combination of suckers and hooks were found in a sperm stomach on the Falklands islands in 1925, we know that colossal squids (not to be confused with gigant squids) exist in the deep sea. However, for 100 years, we only saw them as it remains in the stomach of whales and sea birds, or on the surface, dying or sliding back into the depths after following the fish captured in long lines.

All of this changed on March 9 and this morning the embargo raises the filming of the first confirmed sighting of a colossal squid in its deep sea habitat. It’s a baby. Filming was captured by an ocean census expedition in the remote Sandwich Sandwich islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.

“This animal is so beautiful – In fact, quite impressive,”Says Kat Bolstad, a world-renowned Lula expert based on Auckland’s University of Technology, who was called to identify Lula Baby. She thinks it looks like a“ small glass sculpture. ”In fact, Lula Colossal is one of the people who are almost 36 people who are in over 60 species of over 30 feature-like species, almost a visible glass sheet. iridescent and can “probably” change to be opaque.

Bolstad is satisfied with our first official glimpse of a colossal squid at the bottom of a baby. “It’s such a good contrast to the monster hype or nightmares that are thrown in search of high -sea animals,” she says. “Our first look at a colossal squid shows us this stage of life instead of the big version, which, when we see it, will inevitably have a little of this hype.”

She seems to be suggesting that adult colossal squid resembles monsters and nightmare material. The beloved exposition of Te Pope comes to mind. Science is still not sure what adult colossal squid is when they are alive and right in the sea, as we have not seen them. Bolstad says the specimen in Te Papa was probably not as transparent as the baby because the cloak and fin fabric is “very thick” as they grow. Colossal squid can probably reach lengths of 6 to 7m and can probably weigh over 500 kg. On the surface, the adult colossal squid is opaque and a dark red or dark purple color, like the skin that is coming out of that Pope.

In an educational video of the CGI on the Tea Papa website, an adult colossal squid is portrayed as a large red spot. Although they don’t look like small glass sculptures, Bolstad thinks adults will probably have more details than the bubble. She expects them to control these colored cells to have some transparency and make different patterns on their skin.

Anyway, they will not be as ugly as the award -winning corpse of Te Papa in that glass tank. “What we can see dead is a very poor approach to the magnificence of these animals in life,” she says. Bolstad helped prepare this Lula for the exhibition in 2008 and she says that “given the consistency of the muscle on that animal, it seems very good, all things considered.” She says that when we look at Lula, we should consider what is involved in getting a large gelatinous animal from the sea surface on the deck of a ship, storing it, freezing it, defrosting it then put it on a preservative. Meat loses structural integrity throughout the process.

For Bolstad, the glass squid, including colossal squid, are some of the most beautiful animals – when alive. Now that we have seen the small glass sculpture, we can try to erase previous monstrous images of them from our heads and agree. The baby is beautiful.