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What's Inside The Squid Cube? - Defector

What's Inside The Squid Cube? - Defector

What's Inside The Squid Cube? - Defector
Jun 22, 2022 1 min, 29 secs

In a containment lab in Wellington, New Zealand, Kat Bolstad considered the squid cube.

“It’s not the first squid cube,” said Bolstad, who has seen many cubes of varying sizes and species in her line of work.

But it certainly was a very special squid cube, comprising the carefully pleated body of an entire giant squid, meaning a species of deep-sea squid in the family Architeuthidae.

But this giant squid, a young female, was just small enough to fit inside the fish bin and become a cube of her own.

About twice a year, Bolstad’s lab sojourns to Wellington to thaw squid cubes and other squidsicles (frozen squids that bear somewhat less resemblance to regular geometric shapes).

Although a single, finger-sized squid might defrost in a half-hour, larger squids can take an entire day.

And a squid compacted into a cube also does not defrost evenly, running the risk that the outside of the cube could rot while the inside is still frozen solid.

A few years ago, Bolstad had to thaw a squid cube of a colossal squid—a different species altogether, and the largest invertebrate on the planet—weighing more than a thousand pounds.

Colossal squid tissue is more delicate than giant squid tissue, so Bolstad’s team defrosted that colossal cube in a bath of sea ice to keep the dead squid in relatively pristine condition.

Still, it’s rare to come across a giant squid that has yet to reach full size, Bolstad said.

“It’s very difficult to cut into a frozen giant squid head,” Bolstad said.

Although the squid cube was perhaps the grandest squid of the frozen bunch, Bolstad’s lab thawed another significantly-sized squidsicle that turned out to be the head and arms of a truly big giant squid.

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