First, jumbo squid in California beached themselves.

Now, whales around Cape Cod have too.

What does this mean? Could it possibly mean that MEG is actually happening?

Carcharodon megalodon is the extinct (or is it???) ancestor of the great white shark. Imagine if the shark in Jaws was about 10 times bigger. You'd have a meg. A predator programmed only to eat. With a bite radius of about 10 feet wide and sharp surrated teeth bigger than your hand, Meg could easily swallow a human whole.

In the story, a scientist (that would be played by Bruce Willis if I made a movie out of it) theorizes that it could be possible for this predator to still be alive today. He believes that when whatever killed the dinosaurs happened, megalodons could have survived it by diving to the incredibly deep waters of the Marianna Trench in the Pacific Ocean. They could have survived in the surprisingly warm waters of the trench (the volcanic action there keeps the bottom water warm). However, because the deeper in the ocean you go the colder it gets until you reach the magma-warmed layers of the 2 mile deep trench, such a beast could not have survived the icy trip back up. So for millions of years, meg could have survived and evolved without the human race ever noticing.

Of course, the story revovles around the scientist, Jonas (interesting name...wanna, going to the Marianna Trench and freaking out at the site of a 70 foot glowing white shark. In a bizarre accident, one meg gets tangled up in the 2 miles wiring attached to a bathosphere (I think that's the deep sea ship) while another shark lunges upward for a feeding frenzy on the tangled one. This female meg is apparently able to survive the icy trip up swimming in the trail of warm blood from her meal that's being pulled up to the surface. Once in the warm top layers of ocean, the femal megalodon wrecks havoc "jaws-style."

What I find interesting about these sea animal beaching themselves, not to mention the recent rash of shark attacks, is that is kind of what started happening in this book. Sea creatures were getting spooked by this eating-machine and changed their migration patterns and swam too close to the shore. They started beaching themselves to avoid a worse fate of being chomped to death.

So, stuff like a mass whale beaching peaks my interest because I think what if there really is a megalodon out there. How would we know if there was one out there (aside from the 10 foot dorsal fin)? And why in the heck do I think that a present-day megalodon would be kinda cool? Such is my fascination with sharks.

Is it safe to go back out in the water?