Ancient, translucent, and held together by pressure and vibes. On the first page of the new sketchbook I drew the snot today.
Sketching and Coffee, Live! is streamed every morning at 5:30am, Texas Time, at the YouTubes
I broke in the new sketchbook with something cool, a glass squid from Safari Ltd. It only has two tentacles and two short arms, which isn’t right for an adult squid, so I’m guessing this toy is modeled on a juvenile. I had to take a photo of the label and blow it up on my phone just to confirm the species. I also have to do that with the signs at Home Depot, so that’s not really saying much.
We talked about how little we actually know about these things. They live between 200 and 2,000 meters deep, and because they fall apart without pressure, there’s no good way to study them. You can’t keep them alive in a pressurized tank. Even if you could you’d also have to pressurize their food chain and the means of feeding them. We do find lots of their beaks in whale stomachs, but the rest is either digested or expands and turns to goo from lack of deep see pressure. Still, we know they’re old. The mitochindrial DNA that HAS been recovered suggests this family of squid diverged around 200 million years ago and they’ve adapted to live with no muscles, no reflective skin, and just enough bioluminescent glow to break up their silhouette in the twilight zone. The general thinking was that they’re transparent to avoid predation. But at those depths, predators don’t hunt by sight.
That led to the question: if their predators don’t rely on vision, what drives the evolution of transparency? My hypothesis: energy conservation. It takes calories to build pigment, structure, and muscle. But if food’s rare and you’re just waiting for it to float by, you strip it all down. Transparency isn’t just hiding, it’s efficiency. They start life in shallower waters where transparency would be a major benefit and the ones that stay transparent conserve energy. This also explains why there are so many other transparent animals at those depths.
James Cameron thought they were cool enough to inspire the deep sea aliens in The Abyss, and I think that’s fitting. The glass squid is a deep-sea ghost held together by pressure and patience. And trying to draw that? Let’s just say it’s snot that hard.
Watch the full episode on
Sketch and Coffee Live at 5:30am Texas time