Not a bird! Not a plane! A … squid?
If you saw something red in the sand on the beach — and then you looked again and saw tentacles — and then you saw that the thing was more than three feet long — what would you do?
I would trot away very quickly in the other direction, but then I’m not a scientist with an expertise in marine life.
Bar Sternbach is. He coordinates marine projects at the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, so he walked over to the thing, verified that it was dead, and started digging.
It turned out to be an unusually long neon flying squid — at 3.3 feet it was in fact more than twice as long as a standard-issue neon flying squid, which on average is 1.6 feet, according to Sternbach, as quoted in the Times of Israel.
“The species Ommastrephes bartramii is common in most of the world’s seas and oceans, but it is relatively rare in the Mediterranean,” TOI went on.
The squids, which usually live for about a year, eat small things that live in the ocean, including other squid. (Cannibals!) Larger marine mammals and fish eat it; it tries to confuse them by shooting ink at them. (Hate when that happens…) Diners who do not keep kosher can find themselves eating it in their sushi. And it can shoot out of the water like a flying fish — that’s where the “flying” in its name comes from.
And then sometimes its last act can be to die on an Israeli beach right in front of a researcher who would be amazed by it.
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