"It looked to me like it was rather lonely."
Yoshikazu Tsuno / Getty
It's worth reiterating here that this assessment was based on a few quick seconds of video footage of a squid swimming past. An objective person could look at the footage on a loop for hours, and name every adjective that comes into their mind without landing on lonely. But in his moment in the spotlight, the one thing that Kubodera illuminated was how depressing a life spent looking for squid can be. This was his "giant leap for mankind" moment, and he used it to project his own existential crisis onto a cephalopod with gigantism that was probably thinking about how awesome it was that it gets to hunt whales for a living. Don't get us wrong. We feel for Kubodera. But he'd just made one of the coolest scientific discoveries of the year, and the only thing we learned was that he probably thinks most coat racks look like they could use a hug.
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