What Does the Giant Squid eat?

How do you eat?

What do you eat and have you fought a sperm whale and won?

Give Your self up and let the giant sperm whale kill you so the would not look for you ok kill your self or some thing . . .

How many sperm whales have you beat up?

How many attacks has the giant squid made?

Once upon the time I supped upon the thin fare of the deep, fishes sweet, my fellow squid, the occasional down-sinking corpse humana— regular fare, most certainly regular fare. But, I imagine the me of then, eating nought but grouper and jew fish, and I pity him, for the me of now knows the wonder and glory that is dog. I might rhapsodize almost boundlessly on the glory of dog, its myriad flavors, textures and hues, the joy that is both the eating and the suffering of the eats . . . but I shall not. Such reflection gives me terrible hunger, and there are but few dogs in the kennel at this time, and Rob seems tasty, with his soulful brown eyes and moppy hair.

I also am enjoying greatly the hamburgered patties upon bread, especially those produced by the Burgered King and Mac Donald. Unfortunately, such delicacies cause me great gaseous pains of indigestion and, nut being burdened with an endo- or exo-skeleton, such internal pressure is a threat mortal. Sigh, damn this too weak flesh.

As for the fighting of sperm whales, launching of attacks and such, I direct my readers and acolytes to me complete dissertation of the subject, featured in this fair publication several weeks past: "Hell, 12 Foot Square; or, the Early Career of Savage Squid Clay, a Pugilistic Passion Play, Part the First and Part the Second "

What is a marine biome?

What sort of question is this? Have you not heard of the encyclopediea, with their complete surrounding and surmounting of all knowledge mundane? For the very love of Depth and Breadth, were you to meet your monkey-Jesus, would you first ask him the Meaning of Your Life, and second ask him What Shampooditioner he uses to style his hairs, and then third ask him how many pints are within the gallon? Heed me well, Gentle Readers, there are three Types of the Knowledge: That which you must know, that which you are not meant to know, and that you may obtain in any simple reference almanack. Ask me of the first and receive answers, ask me of the second and receive evasion. Do not ask me of the third; quoth Rob: "Read a book, dickwad!"

How long do they live to be?

This is a perplexing question, obfuscated by the labyrinthine quality of your ur-speech. Why cannot you humans create a more subtle speech? To quoth the bard Tom Stoppard, "What the english language lacks in style, it more than makes up for in subtlety." To which I respond, wash-hog! Even the most base of squid speaks with little sound but great motion and undulant skin texture and the shifting pigment of our flesh. Our speech is subtle and beautiful and full of use. Your speech, though I find the vibrations please, and enjoy the way your fleshy cheeks wobble while you enunciate, is still unclear enough to be nigh-useless.

I, the venerable and viable Archteuthis, have grown nearly twelve meters long. My father, before I traded his corpse to a starving commune of cuttlefish in exchange for safe passage through the Indian Sea, was nearly twenty-five meters long. Archteuthis, like your cultural deficit, never stops growing. To answer your question in a like manner to how you posed it: We live to be as long as we live to be.

How old are you?

As a wise anthropoid once uttered, "I am as old as my tongue, but not quite as old as my flesh-rending beak."

Word upon the street is that most cephalopods have short life cycles, reaching maturity in no more than 1 or 2 solar years. And, while the Archteuthis Grande do indeed reach mate-weight in such a period, I would hardly say that life begins and ends with the depositing of sperm (except for in the most literal of sense, of course.)

And it is true, that a great deal of my kind live but a mean span upon the earth. But we also know that a crow lives but twenty years in the face of man's growth, that ravens as corvoids live much the same span. Stags live no longer than a generation, and even elephants are seen to fall dead at their fortieth year. And so, within this scheme, for a squid to live five, ten, even twenty years, you primates do not even bat an eye.

But this was not always so.

My dear friend, Ausonious knew well the writings of an old enemy of mine, Hesiod, and new well this verse which was originally composed by that self-same villain:

Ter binos deciesqu super exit in annos
iusta senescentum quos implet vita virorium.
hos novies superat viviendo garrula cornix
et quater egreditur cornicis saecula cervus.
alipedem cervum ter vincit corvus et illum
multiplicat novies Phoenix, reparabilis ales.
quem nos perpetuo decies praevertimus aevo,
Nymphae Hamadryades, quarum longissima vita est.

Having written this out for all to see, I imagined that even now you fair readers would be nodding and understanding the first half of my posit. I turned to my Dear, Dull Rob and nodded my great floating sack, voicing that age-old grunt of appreciation-request:

"Eh?" I said unto him so that he might smile and agree.

"Why the fuck you gotta start with the moon language?" he replied.

As always, the Rob proves his worth by understanding and communicating the nuances of "earth" culture. I was under the false apprehension that all great earth languages should be known by now. Certainly, the lilting dialects of Ainu are unknown for the beasts which utter those words are few and harried. But is it so hard to imagine that the official language of one of the world's great civilizations, and one of the world's as of yet still surviving "great" religions should go unknown to the unclean masses?

I suppose I should have contemplated that question once internally before assuming my answer. This is, after all, a society which even now is forgetting the joys of Sanford and Son, let alone the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the jocularities of Juvenal, the glittering blood sport-art of Na'san-da (pre-ice age, you fools).

Sigh . . .

Apologies, apologies. I fall upon you too hard, Gentle Readers. I shall attempt, henceforth and now, to extend greater patience.

Hesiod wrote, and Ausonious preserved:

"Three times two and nine times ten complete the tale of years whereto the life of men who live to fulness of age attains. Nine times the chattering crow passes the limit in her span of life, while the stag passes through four times the lifetime of the crow. Thrice the raven outstrips the swift-footed stag in length of years; while that bird which renews its life, the Phoenix, multiplies ninefold the raven's years. But we, the Hamadryad Nymphs, the longest-lived of living things, pass through ten lifetimes of the Phoenix in continuous span."

Ausonious continues on his own with (as translated):

"This limit bounds the lives of living creatures. As for the rest, God, the disposer of all hidden times, knows what periods Mercury and what ages Saturn have to roll, what orbits Mars and the benignant fires of Jupiter must yet fulfill, or in what revolutions kindly Venus hastens on her way, or how long are the toils that yet await the Moon and the Sun, before that which they call the Great Year reaches its close, and the wandering stars come back again in their ancient courses as they stood at the beginning of the ordered universe."

And here is where I disagree with my dear friend Ausonious. It is not God which knows and controls the ages of all things (he, she or it being so busy even now with his/her/its chain of convenience stores) but it is interest itself which dominates the lifespan of creatures. Today, you grunters knuckle-drag— pardon, pardon . . . my intention was to type "you individuals wander"— you individuals wander through life longer and longer, scurrying about to look at this or that thing, filling the world up with your bland flat landscape of concrete and Dairy Queens, leeching away all that is unique and interesting. And so, quickly, within the scope of their brief spans, a crow or a stag might see all they need to see in order to understand that this plane of existence is boring. And so they lie down and escape.

So too with the Phoenix, which does not even come back any longer, or if it does, only briefly and before it can be seen. One by one the other intelligences are fading away from sheer boredom with what the earth has wrought. Only but a few remain behind to contemplate the meaning of you all.

The dolphins remain to laugh at you. The cockroaches yet live, pining for a nuclear holocaust, and I for ages now have gazed upon your growing mass of filth and joy in search of a meaning for myself and my kind.

Truly, the average squid lives not but a mean span. But I have found a constant interest in your very strange and soul-curdling blandness which has laid waste to so many others. And that interest, compulsion and passion have yet sustained me to the age exceeding even the Hamadryads (so long lived because they were pursued sexually by Apollo and Zeus, equally long lived because the ones they pursued never gave in, or rarely so and always in a new and dangerous way.)

A human span is but ninety-six as Ausonious says, and as far as you know, I am more than forty times that span.

But that does not sit well with your understanding of the world, I can tell. So, let us say that I was born in the Year of Your ChimpGod 1,976. I was a bicentennial squid, honoring the sacrifice of George Washington and Martha Plimpton, my tri-cornered hat made of plastic and felt, a pirates patch over one of my huge and optically perfect eyes. Ya'r, down with the Taxes on Stamps and with the oppressive rule of Lord Pitt the Elder. Ya'r!

I Remain,
The Giant Squid