The giant squid has the largest eye in the natural world. Although squid’s eyes evolved on a separate branch of the tangle bank of life, they are remarkably like ours, except that they don’t have the blind spot that human eyes have (Hack #16). This picture is from a book ‘Extreme Nature’ by Mark Carwardine (which the Guardian Weekend ran a piece on two weeks ago). This immature female is 17 foot long, but they go up to 49 foot apparently.
Mind Hacks 
This is not a real squid, though many of my friends have had to be convinced otherwise.
The only collosal squid found to date came from the Antarctic waters and looked like this(http://www.uaf.edu/seagrant/NewsMedia/03ASJ/04.25.03ocean-diversity.html).
In this model, the body hangs incorrectly (squid have no internal structure except their beak, so the body hangs in a straight line), it’s mantle is too seperate from it’s body, it’s eye is far too large (though squid do have among the largest eyes of any living animal) and it does not have any tentacles (for those about to say ‘of course it does! I can see them!’, those prehensile suckered appendages are arms, not tentacles).
For me it looks like real…it might be a different species
Yup, Squid’s Right. They don’t have suction cups on their tentacles. To me, it looks like either a rubber toy or a poorly edited picture. and, btw, I found a few things Squid didn’t. For the first thing, there is a rope hanging it up. But, where does the rope lead? A Palm Tree? Suuuuuure… Another thing is, did you notice the shine in the eye? It’s blue. Since when did the sun turn blue? Looks like fleurescant (excuse me if I spelled that wrong) lighting to me. And I looked at the reflection too. It looks like someone’s screen porch!!! Oh, one final thing. I am an VERY experienced picture editor so I know a couple things. This is a file with a .jpg ending. this is usually used in photo images. Let me tell you something. if you take a picture of a white wall, it’ll have at least 100 shades of white on it. No, not due to any shadows on it, it just does that to blend it. It has no Blue Sky. It’s just plain white. Now, who would take their time to color the (Insert Very High Number Here) of colors white? That’s just the blue part. What about the Clouds? they already have hundreds of different shades. Also, the squid looks like it was a .gif first.
My final note is my theory. Someone, not Tom or Mark, took a picture of a squid toy on their screen porch. They Cleaned it up and put it on their site. Mark Cuawhatever was bored so he found a picture of a beach on google image search. He put the two together (Without finding a sky Image) and found it needed something more. He took a picture of his friends and edited it in.
I REPEAT THIS IS A THEORY!!! I don’t want hate mail about this. Oh, one more thing. My little brother (Age 7) knew this was a fake picture.
Okay, you’ve got me convinced. It was in the paper as real (gosh – this means not everything i read in the paper is true!). At does, at least, give you some idea of what a colossal squid looks like (if they fished one up without it bursting due to the pressure change or something).
The Guardian has printed an apology
‘We were misinformed by the publishers of the book from which the image was taken, and have since learned that the squid was in fact a model, built to the dimensions of a submature female specimen.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1575636,00.html
So it wasn’t real, but you could still meet something like this under the sea – i say again Woah!
just thought i’d correct a few things “shadowkloud” mentioned..
ok this was a life-size model created by the discovery channel for a program called “animal face off” – so we KNOW it’s an unedited image –
i suspect it’s hanging from a crane.
the sky has simply been overexposed, causing it to be pretty pure white.
the light reflected in the eye is no-where near as bright, has therefore not been overexposed, and shows the blue colour of the sky.
the image looks like it was a gif at first because it has been scanned in from the original newspaper article.
They are out there…This today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4288772.stm
This is a 1:1 model of mesonychoteuthis AKA the colossal squid, which is not to be confused with the giant squid (architeuthis) or the jumbo squid (humboldt squid). It was created for a TV special. For more info visit http://www.tonmo.com