mighty hearts pump blood not only into its stalwart gills, but into its large and complex brain as well? The average King Squid brain receives three gallons of blood more each day than the average resident — fed a lunch of dried-out fish strips, curdled yogurt, and a disappointed-looking green bean — receives in a week. The only animal with a larger brain, the Odecca Bichoral White Whale, is said to list to one side from the weight of its cranium.
The King Squid — like some lesser squid but unlike the Spastic Alarming Squid — also maintains direct control over its coloration and patterns, which appears to provide further evidence of craftiness.
Phosphorescent displays over the river at night bring to mind the strange lights seen over the ruined town ofAlfar ten years ago and attributed to an unknown intelligence. (The careful reader will begin to catch a glimpse of the context for my unique theories, imparted to you in Part IV of this monograph.) From a base of translucent silver, the King Squid can strobe to green, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, black, or any combination thereof. They can camouflage themselves against any background, with lightning-fast color changes. Although such changes may originally have “evolved”—to use the much-abused Xaver Daffed’s over-analyzed word— to interrupt predator attack sequences or to assist in mating rituals, the skill now appears to form a sophisticated communication system, more effective than sound or the tentacle sign language Maxwell Brod once hallucinated he observed on a deep river dive.
FURNESS AND LEEPIN’S REVELATORY DISCOVERY
If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy, the joint research of the under-appreciated Raymond Furness and Paulina Leepin would have long ago replaced the buffoonish efforts of ludicrines like Brod.
Furness and Leepin’s first stroke of inspiration was to bypass the Silt Problem by setting up a blind much like those used for birding. Made of glass and located in the hollowed out bottom of a houseboat tethered to a sandbank in the middle of an otherwise deep part of the Moth, this device represented a classic advancement in the tools available to the squidologist.
In time, various King Squid overcame their wariness and peered curiously into the glass while Furness and Leepin, motionless and somewhat terrified, stared back. It took several months of study, according to their journals, but they eventually recorded evidence of squid “flash communication” as they called it.
Later, these two pioneers were able to glean meaning from the “flash communication”—and actually communicate back! Thus was the barrier between squidologist and squid broken, if only for a moment, altering forever the relationship between scientist and tidal pool, observer and observed.
To start with, Furness and Leepin sketched out some basic communication patterns, reproduced on page 20.
As even a mythomaniac can see, such communication operates at a much higher level than that of a dog, a cat, or a pig, even considering recent experiments in that area.
But Furness and Leepin’s research had not yet reached its full potential. With the help of a lamp and crepe paper, they projected letters into the water alongside their squid equivalents, first in random strings such as RIEKHITMLALFEYD and then as words and phrases such as I AM A SQUID. HOW ARE YOU TODAY?
At first, the squid did not reply. After a week of such stimuli, however, Furness and Leepin were astonished to find that the squid would display the letters on their glowing skin — and not only display the letters but send them in motion, circling their bodies, so that dual messages of I AM A SQUID and HOW ARE YOU TODAY might collide like ghostly alphabet trains.
Such findings should have led to further revelations, with fame and fortune awaiting Furness and Leepin once they had documented all of their observations. However, an odd incident then occurred to discredit them utterly in the eyes of other scientists. This incident hints at a higher level of squid intelligence than previously reported in even such optimistic publications as
Today Furness and I decided to abandon our research. It is too dangerous. The squid make it so. I never thought that the squid themselves could dissuade us from our love of squidology, but, alas, it has happened. To explain—
After an uneventful morning, a series of huge bubbles breached the water’s surface near our houseboat around noon. A slow, ponderous wave, as of something enormous coming toward us below the surface, buffeted the boat. We immediately donned our emergency animal skin flotation devices, our globular fishbowl masks, and our seal fins and, thus safe (or so we thought), descended into the glass blind at the bottom of the houseboat. Flashing red and orange, the King Squid we had nicknamed Squid #8, Squid
#5, Squid #12, Squid #16, and Squid #135 hovered in front of the blind for a moment, receded into the middle distance, and then sped away into the murk. At first, we thought our odd attire had startled them.
Even so, their reaction unnerved us. Yet we stayed in the houseboat because of our devotion to the Cause… only to scream in terror as a tentacle the size of our entire boat slid through the water beneath the glass. Across its vast greenish surface, as Truff is our witness, we read, in gold letters: LEAVE NOW OR I WILL DEVOUR YOU, SUCK OUT YOUR MARROWS, AND USE THE BONES TO MAKE A NEST FOR MY YOUNG.
For a moment, we sat there in terror. We could not move. It was only a sharp slap of tentacle tip against the boat, a sudden stench of ammonia, and an added squidular message of HURRY UP! that unparalyzed us.
It is difficult to reconstruct what happened next, but we remember running onto the deck and jumping onto the sandbar, screaming all the while, and then, behind us, the houseboat crunching into bits from tentacle lashings. We threw ourselves into the waters opposite in a state of utter hysteria and scrambled for shore, bits of broken planks slicing through the air all around us, our masks obscured by silt, our seal fins impeding our progress and, most annoying of all, our animal skins filling with water because we had clutched them so tightly they had begun to leak from puncture marks. When at last we reached the safety of the shore, only a few floating timbers remained of the houseboat. A sudden lunging wave of water convinced us to seek more permanent shelter far, far inland — where we have remained to this day.
Alas, muddleheads with all-powerful spectacles pushed up on their brows, doltish jury lumps with puddings for brains — what constituted Established Squidology — swept Furness and Leepin’s findings aside as easily as their houseboat and they were lucky to escape
SQUID CROSS-COUNTRY ADVENTURES
Reliable scientific study aside, at least two pieces of anecdotal evidence also point to squid intelligence
The first evidence concerns reports of squid perambulations on solid ground! On six separate occasions, individuals reported seeing groups of giant squid come up out of the water and “walk around” using shimmering globes of water encased around their gills and eyes to protect them from the villainous air. In all cases, the globe of water, tension unbroken, was held in place by four arms wound above the head, while the remaining four arms and two tentacles sufficed for the King Squid to drag itself over the grass.
As they gafflocked along (a term I myself coined while experimenting with the squidly means of transportation out in the yard), intense communication shimmered like heat lightning across their skin, strobing from silver to red to blue to green to purple to black and back again within a matter of seconds.
Where these adventurous squid were headed, the eyewitnesses could not say, being too shocked at the
