October 11 – Kraken Day

Posted October 11, 2018


Zeus, in Clash of the Titans, gave this order to unleash the gigantic sea monster known as the Kraken. The Kraken also appeared in the movie The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead 
Man's Chest, and it swallowed Captain Jack Sparrow and his entire ship whole!


For as long as there have been humans living near oceans, probably, there has been fear of gigantic tentacled monsters. That's probably because every once in a while a giant squid washes ashore...



By the way, if you ever see a photo like the one below, it's likely fake (this one is definitely fake):


You see, people will take a real photo of a giant squid, like the first one below, of a gigantic 30-foot squid, and they will drop it into a crowd scene (the second one below), maybe from a sand castle building event, and they then proudly proclaim that a 160-foot squid washed up!




The longest giant squid ever measured is 43 feet long, but of course humans can imagine bigger. And scarier: a giant cephalopod that hunts us, that wants revenge or that loves to attack anything from ships and people to buildings and bridges.



Today we celebrate the tentacled creatures or cephalopods of myth and legend, of story and movie. It's all a part of Cephalopod Awareness Week, which is celebrated every October 8 to 12. 

The Kraken is joined by other mythical cephalopods: There's the enormous octopus Akkorokamui, from Ainu (Japanese) folklore. There's Kanaloa, an enormous squid (or octopus) in Hawaiian stories. And there's the Cecaelia, the octopus woman from Native American peoples such as the Tligit and the Nootka, who live in the Pacific Northwest, what is now Alaska or Western Canada.




Also on this date:

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