Inside Nature's Giants: Giant Squid. My lord, that may have been the single most interesting hour of of education I've ever experienced. I hope Bullet Magnet saw it, and would recommend it to anybody else. It has lots of cool footage (Including the obligatory Octopus-Suddenly-Shedding-Algae-Clump-Camoflauge clip), I especially liked the slow-mo of a squid grappling a fish with its tentacles, and a close-up of a cuttlefish's shin changing texture. Seriously, you have smooth white skin, which suddenly tightens as a barbed shark-fin emerges and stretches out, while the skin turns a murky green.
Squid are just the most alien thing on this planet, a completely different approach to survival. They have three hearts, two just to pump blood from the gills back into the main one. The have arms that can tighten like steel cables by squeezing fluid into them. They have tentacles that flip out like chameleon's tongues. They have club hands that attatch together like press-studs, holding prey tight. Their brain is tiny, shaped like a donut, and has the oesophagus going straight through the hole in the middle, but they have two enormous optic lobes attatched to the sides. They have a squidgy jelly body, but a bone-hard parrot beak in the middle. Their tongue has shark teeth on it. They have a tubular breathing system, sucking water in at the sides and shooting it out the back. Their eye lenses are the size of your entire eyes. They can squirt sticky, mucusy ink. All of their organs are in their head. Their sperm is contained inside a dart, which is then shot into the arm of the female like a tranquiliser (Best. Reproductive system. Ever.). Hell, they've even got blue blood, because it's copper based. You couldn't invent a better alien than that.
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