Chuck over at Ya Like Dags? just posted a compelling piece called 101 Uses for Shark Puke. His list may not have reached (anywhere near) 101 uses, but obviously the most important use is determining the range of the giant squid.

Apparently, blue sharks caught off Ensenada, Mexico, were found to have giant squid beaks in their tummies. As Chuck points out,

The presence of giant squid beaks, aside from raising the question of whether blue sharks are a regular predator of Architeuthis dux, represents the southernmost appearance by giant squid in the California Current ecosystem and is also the first record of one in Mexican waters. And this discovery was only made because blue sharks decided to eat a couple juveniles (back calculation showed a mantle length of about 74 cm or a little less than 30 inches, which, once you stretched out the tentacles, would still be a pretty big squid).

I insist that stretching out the tentacles is cheating--it's like stretching my arms over my head to claim that I'm actually seven feet tall. Or, it would be like that if my arms were elastic, and could be stretched to twice that length.

Anyway, the first record of giant squid in Mexico is pretty cool--and all from sorting through shark vomit. Hooray for science!