Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The Perils of Beachcombing

You know, one place I'd never want to visit is a beach in Victorian/Edwardian England in a fiction story. Weird, giant, and most importantly deadly sea animals are apparently always showing up there.

For instance, in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Lion's Mane, the lion's mane jellyfish, the biggest darned jellyfish in the world, just washes into a tidal pool and randomly kills somebody. (Sherlock Holmes takes care of it [with a rock], thankfully, but still...)

Worse than that is the case of The Sea-Raiders. In this H. G. Wells short story, a bunch of huge (well, huge by some standards) squid (of a fictional species) attack a bunch of people vacationing. It was stated they were deep-sea creatures, but Haploteuthis ferox (this fictional species name could be taken to mean "single ferocious squid" or "simple ferocious squid") was not only able to survive the shallows, but was highly mobile on land. It also hunted in packs, and it seemed they could somehow signal each other.

Yikes. Remind me never to go to any Victorian/Edwardian English beaches anytime soon.

-Signing off.

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