Yes, I am still here! Did you miss me? You totally missed me! Maybe just a little.

I emerge from my thesis-writing cave to spread the word that teuthologists Rui Rosa and Brad Seibel--who, incidentally, are both a hoot to hang out with on a boat in the middle of the Sea of Cortez--have published a new study on squid metabolism. And not just any squid metabolism. COLOSSAL SQUID METABOLISM.

The BBC reports:

"The colossal squid is not a voracious predator capable of high-speed predator-prey interactions," says Dr Rosa. "It is rather, an ambush or sit-and-float predator that uses the hooks on its arms and tentacles to ensnare prey that unwittingly approach."

How did they come to this conclusion? Not by hanging around underwater in a squid blind, waiting and watching for colossal squid. Nope. They used Math!

In the absence of direct measurements for M. hamiltoni [the colossal squid], we used a dataset of routine metabolic rates (RMR) for cranchid species (Seibel et al., 1997; Seibel, 2007), across four orders of magnitude size-range, to estimate daily energy consumption and prey biomass requirements for the colossal squid. The scaling relationship (MO₂ = aM^b) for cranchiid squids was solved for 500 kg.

Translation: colossal squid are hard to find, so they couldn't measure their metabolism directly. Instead, they used measurements that Brad had taken before, on the colossal squid's numerous cousins, to make an Equation. If you feed a size into this equation, it spits out a metabolic rate.

The biggest colossal squid ever reported was 500 kilograms. So they fed 500 into the equation, and it spit out a number: 0.036 µmol O₂ h⁻¹ g⁻¹, to be precise. What's that mean? Well, it's low. So low that

a single 5kg Antarctic toothfish would provide enough nourishment for a 500kg colossal squid to survive for 200 days.

Why so low? Other big squid have racing fast metabolisms! (*cough* I'm looking at you, Dosidicus gigas.)
 
But the colossal squid, enormous size notwithstanding, isn't very closely related to the jumbo squid. Instead, it belongs to a slow, gelatinous squid family--the Cranchiidae, commonly called glass squids. All the colossal squid's cousins that Rui and Brad used to make that equation were other cranchiids. And no one ever used the word "voracious" to describe a cranchiid.

Weird, pretty, and cute are more popular terms. The piglet squid, for example, is a cranchiid.