It’s almost creepy watching this video of a colossal squid slowly thawing out in a giant tub at the Museum of New Zealand. If this were a horror movie, after all, it would suddenly start flailing around with its monstrous tentacles.

Researchers say that the squid, weighing 495 kg (1,090 lb) and caught off Antarctica in 2007, will be unfolded for study on Wednesday after it is defrosted. It is expected to be 6-8 metres long.

That could tell scientists more about colossal squid, rare creatures that are the world’s biggest invertebrates. Sometimes someone wanders into the video frame and you get a sense of how enormous the squid is.

So the video above is not just a curiosity that looks like a poorly stocked fish section in a supermarket with a broken freezer full of water.

“This squid is a really nasty agressive sort of squid…a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the University of Auckland, as saying of a previous colossal squid in 2003.

“Without any doubt if you fell in the water, you could be shredded to bits by a colossal squid. It is the T-Rex of the oceans,” he said.

So if you thought Jaws was bad….

Ask many Japanese about whaling and they explain it’s part of their culture. After all, Japan is surrounded by the ocean and whaling and fishing have been part of Japan for many centuries.

During a recent visit to Japan, several Japanese friends and colleagues were puzzled, indeed annoyed, by Western media coverage of Japan’s scientific whaling in Antarctic waters earlier this year and thought the stories were hostile and uninformed.

To them, stopping whaling would be akin to Australians being forced to stop summer barbecues, Inuits from hunting seals, or Germans from drinking beer during Oktoberfest.

 But to many Westerners, the images of whales being harpooned under the guise of science means the practice should be stopped, particularly since some of the meat ends up for sale in special whale meat shops and restaurants in Japan.

What do you think? Are anti-whaling nations such as Australia being hypocritical when thousands of iconic kangaroos are culled each year, as some in Japan point out?