Squid in Review: Shoddy Research, Bad Sportsmanship, Questionable Hair Style

I'm usually solicited to review new work in giant squid-graphic design crossover studies. It gets tiring, and I try to slough them off to my better graduate students, but such is the life of a giant squid-graphic designer crossover expert. With "Animals of the Ocean, In Particular The Giant Squid" -- the third Volume, this one's No. 164 of 307 in the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance Series -- I've had the misfortune of yet another run-in with that cagey Doris Haggis-on-Whey. I'm not the first.

Readers of this site will recall our previous infamous run-ins (here, here, here, here, and here). I've argued elsewhere that Haggis-on-Whey's work is misinformed and poorly conceptualized. She completely misinterprets key passages in Hannah Arendt, for example, and often forgets to carry the one in long division. Benny, with his Frank Perdue good-looks, is more on the ball, but I fear, as ever, that his voice is mostly silenced in the research process.

Doris Haggis-on-Whey and Benny tackle issues too large for their own boats, I know it. The errors show. We've traveled many the same paths, snorkeled many the same pools. I was once on the same racquetball team as Benny. Doris and my wife use the same amount of lime in their gin. So don't tell me.

In this brief review, I can only rebut a few of the flaws in the Haggis-on-Whey research (editors note: we restrict all marine reviews to 500 words or 400, whichever come first). The first is the most obvious, and I realize others -- both in the Science review and the Nature review -- have already tackled it. But since it's so close to home, I too have to make note of it. In the data about being eaten by a giant squid, they erroneously claim that Bill McClatters ("D" in the figure above) has in fact been bitten by a sea creature. This is emphatically false. My research (Mitsy 2002b) showed that McClatters was only nibbled on, not bitten. There were barely teeth marks. Not even two. Perhaps three. But the data was inconclusive. And it couldn't be falsified!

Even worse, I think, is the discrepancy between their chart showing the dietary habits of squid and the established literature on such things. Simmons and Mickelson (1999a; 2004a; 2004b) have documented that the craisin trend was long ago surpassed by teeth whitener. They are simply showing out-of-date data. Sure, maybe work from the early 1990s is good enough for their publisher, but for the marine community, this is an embarrassment.

The last point worth remarking upon deals with the relative size of squids. The figure, shown below, which compares relative sizes was most certainly constructed by Doris and not Benny. How do I know this? Because Ed Asner was also on our racquetball team. Me, Ed, Benny. We'd grab pizza after each game. And we'd play Pac-Man in the lobby of the Y. Ed Asner, yes, my very good friend and former research and screenwriting collaborator, is 7 feet tall. The world's tallest novelty screwdriver is a mere 6 feet 11 inches tall. It resides in Sheboygan, MI, and is guarded by a team of security personnel. The screwdriver is insured to a great but unspecified amount. The guards all wear orange hats. They are of average intelligence but impressive metabolism. One is named Stan.

It's surprising that, given publishing demands and the security of the peer review system, these errors managed to make it to the final manuscript. Given Doris's shoddy work in the past, I suspect the errors were all hers.

Overall then, while there are some high points in the work, including the width of the binding and the quite accurately portrayed popular baby names, the work overall suffers from too many flaws to hold up over time. It's a shame too, as studies in giant squids are more important now than ever before. We still lack a coherent theory that makes sense of the relative sizes of giant squids and novelty hardware items. We still lack a compelling explanatory mechanism for the dietary trends and appetties of the squid. Why cobbler? Is it peach? Apple? Is it an apple-peach cobbler? Until now, we can only observe. We can't yet predict.