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Tuesday, November 16
 



Lot of cocaine; lot of squid




The legendary squid


I get Google News Alerts in my Inbox for a variety of subjects, including Peru. The emails have article title, source, and description. When I saw:

Google Alert for: peru

Peru drugs hidden in giant squid
BBC News - London,England,UK
Police in Peru have seized about 700kg of cocaine hidden in frozen giant squid bound for Mexico and the US. The drugs - worth about ...

in my Inbox this morning, I was amazed and hoping for a picture of a giant squid that was big enough to put 700kg of cocaine into. There was no picture of squid in the article (just the drug bust pic on the left), but there was this: "Police seized the drugs hidden in a container of 25 tons of giant squid about to leave Paita (Piura) for Mexico." My first thought was: How out of it would the police have to be to see a 25 ton giant squid and be like 'Yeah that seems about right, carry on'.

I was curious, so I did some searching and found The Search for the Giant Squid at Amazon. According to the book, giant squid are exceedingly rare and no man has ever seen a healthy one, but they can grow up to sixty feet in length and up to a ton in weight. They finally find some and they stuff them full of cocaine?

But then I found a book review of The Search for the Giant Squid, which says the giant squid in the book "is not the delicious Loligo opalescens that graces the tables of San Francisco restaurants as fried calamari. Nor is it the 'giant' (1-2 meters long) voracious Humboldt squid, Dosidicus giagas, that lives off Peru."

Disappointing - 1 to 2 meters long is big for a squid but hardly the stuff of legend. Maybe you can get lucky and find the real legendary squid in the virtual ocean; I don't really care that much.



:: Posted by salas
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