Wish I could go see this exhibit! Creatures of the Abyss is on display at the Royal Alberta Museum,
The exhibition’s focal point is a fibreglass model of an eight-metre long colossal squid caught in the Antarctic water in 2007. Weighing about 495 kilograms, it uses its two waving tentacles and eight arms for propulsion. Its main predator is the sperm whale.
And it's hands-on! How cool is that:
The St. Albert Gazette points out that the deep-sea exhibit is a real trip for landlocked Albertans:
As landlubbers used to the flat, open vistas of grain fields, the diversity of creatures living at depths as far down as 11,000 metres in the deepest part of the Marianas Trench is almost unimaginable. . . . Even their names are intriguing — jellyfish, Dumbo octopus, sea cucumbers, viperfish and nudibranches (members of the starfish family).
Whoops! Nudibranchs are actually molluscs, not related to starfish at all (well, not unless you go waaaaay back). Their molluscan membership makes squid and nudibranchs cousins, in fact, in all their glorious squishiness!
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