But the tentacle can be a sign of absolute alterity, the creature feature that man cannot translate into allegory or object lesson. This is what I call “tentacular pedagogy”: the teachable moment is that some things we encounter completely resist being translated into teachable moments.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/tentacles-the-new-fangs/2013987.article
Despite its status as the largest invertebrate on the planet, no one had ever seen, much less photographed, a live giant squid in its habitat until 2004. On September 30, at precisely 9:15 A.M., near Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, a 26-foot-long giant squid attacked a baitline that Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and his research team had rigged with a strobe and a digital camera, timed to snap an image every 30 seconds. Within days, cephalogeeks all over the Web were posting links to astonishing photographs of the animal vrooming up out of the deep and grabbing the bait “in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey within [their] coils…immediately after striking,” as the researchers put it.
http://boingboing.net/2013/01/28/the-kraken-awakes-what-ar.html