Architeuthis (“Archie” to his friends) is extremely polite, as cephalopods go. He hardly ever hogs the popcorn at the movies, or fails to return his library books on time. One afternoon, Archie stumbled upon an article in Doomed Voyages Quarterly about a horrific sea monster named Krakken, who dragged an entire whaling ship and its crew to the bottom of the ocean as a late-night snack. Fearing an unfair public relations backlash, Archie immediately wrote to me, using some of his finest ink.

“On behalf of all the ocean’s well-behaved mollusks,” wrote Archie, “I’d like to point out that only a rare few of us are murderous beasts. On the contrary, most of us do no harm to anyone, keeping a notoriously low profile. How else can you account for the fact that no one observed one of us in our own habitat until 2013?” Archie further asserted, “It’s the ignorant folklore of the surface-dwellers that has impugned our character, not our actions or our eating habits. While I’m on the subject of meals, I’d like to remind everyone that it’s the sperm whale who preys upon the giant squid, not the other way around. Accounts of whales with sucker scars and beak lacerations are widely exaggerated. To those who spread such libelous rumors, I’d like to respond: You should see the other guy!”

I couldn’t have put it any better myself. Here’s to Archie, striking a blow for mild-mannered decency, beneath the waves and above.