Collision detection mentioned this story about a Humboldt squid being caught alive in northern waters (don't bother clicking that last link unless you have a subscription to the Globe & Mail; they have the most annoying access scheme of any newspaper), and in particular mentioned the enthusiastically purple prose people use about squid.

Some descriptions from witnesses sound like the plot to a horror movie -- water roiling with tentacles; otherworldly creatures suddenly launching into the air from beneath the surface; nightfall bringing to the surface vicious predators that slip back into the depths at daybreak, like vampires of the sea.

A Humboldt squid can grow to the size and weight of a hockey player. So, imagine Todd Bertuzzi with bulging eyes, eight arms, two tentacles, three hearts, a beak for a mouth, a brain wrapped around his esophagus and gullet with a willingness -- nay, eagerness -- to dine on his own kind every other meal, and you get a sense of how the squid has earned such a fearsome reputation.

So I went looking for more accessible accounts of this new squid capture, and instead found Scary Squid Stories.

Although they look flaccidly impotent when laid out dead on the deck, when alive in the water, Humboldt squid are powerful, vicious, meat-eating predators, and they are very dangerous to swim near. Around Baja, more gruesome stories^* are told about people getting killed by squid than by any other sea creature. Imagine a swarm of 50-pound animals capable of swimming more than 20 miles-per-hour, equipped with voracious appetites and over 1,000 suckers, each containing about 20 gripping teeth strong enough to tear human skin (correct, that's 20,000 teeth!). And, surrounded by that cluster of four-foot long arms is a powerful parrot's beak the size of a small tangerine, snapping and cutting at anything pulled within its reach.

In Baja, the typical "diablo" squid story involves a hapless fisherman who is suddenly caught and pulled overboard while night fishing commercially with lights. Within a couple of seconds, his entire body is literally covered with clinging, biting squid that quickly pull him down into the dark and tear him to pieces before anybody can help.

Oooh, now I want to go squidding. There's a weird twist to this, though: the article was published in Western Outdoor News and it's got pictures of happy fishermen reeling in squid and boat decks covered with their catch, but then it mentions that sport fishing for squid is illegal…it's just not enforced. That sucks all the fun out of it. I enjoy fishing, but I operate under the assumption that the laws are intended to maintain sustainability (and usually are inadequate to do that). I guess I won't book that trip to Baja just yet.

^*And as we all know, all fishing stories are true.