Boffins turning giant squid into plastic displays

Steve O'Shea and Cat Bolstad with a colossal squid caught in the Ross Sea. Picture / Mark Mitchell

New Zealand squid expert Steve O'Shea says his treasured specimens of giant squid can sometimes be a bit of a flop.

Out of its natural habitat, the giant squid Architeuthis dux tends to be limp and smelly.

"They're so heavy, they collapse under their own weight," he said.

"You lose the lovely cylindrical mantle and arms," said Dr O'Shea, who is based at Auckland University of Technology.

So he is making use of a technology normally employed for preserving human tissue: corpses are impregnated with polymers so that they are dry, can be handled safely, are odourless and last indefinitely.

Plastination technology was developed in Germany in 1977 and the technique has become popular in universities, museums, veterinary science, food technology, palaeontology and in the preservation of archaeological artefacts.

Dr O'Shea is now using it to prepare two huge giant squid specimens for display, New Scientist magazine reports.

The preparation is being done by controversial German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who will use the same plastination technique that he uses to display human bodies.

Dr von Hagens launched his Body Worlds exhibits in 1997 and has shown them to nearly 14 million internationally.

The displays feature healthy and diseased body parts as well as skinned, whole corpses in assorted poses, such as a rider atop a horse and a pregnant woman reclining, that show off the preservation technique.

Plastination replaces bodily fluids and fat with epoxy and silicone, allowing the corpse to be displayed in life-like poses.

But a giant squid, with its lack of internal skeleton for support, and relatively poorly understood circulatory system, poses some novel challenges, the magazine reported.

To research the project, Dr von Hagens visited Dr O'Shea in October to study some much smaller species such as arrowsquid.

"We dissected a number of 'sacrificial' squid," said Dr O'Shea.

This week, he sent a mature female giant squid, measuring about 10m including tentacles, and a mature male, just under 7m, to Heidelberg.

The plastination process could take up to a year, and the squid will need a rigid framework for support, but Dr O'Shea is confident that Dr von Hagens will be able to display the animals.

When used on human specimens, the body's fluids are slowly replaced with acetone in three or four bath-changes until the acetone is virtually free of water from the tissue.

This process - called freeze substitution - is a crucial step and is usually carried out in a freezer at cold temperatures to prevent tissue shrinkage.

The body is usually then transferred to another freezer to be submerged in a polymer, and whole organs or body regions are submerged in silicone which gives a flexible but firm feel to the final.

The acetone molecules are sucked out in gaseous form to be replaced with the polymer over a four-week period.

Finally, the specimen is cured either by gas, light or heat, depending on the type of polymer used.

- NZPA