The Ichthyologist
album by Giant Squid
The Ichthyologist is the third studio album by post-metal band Giant Squid.
It was released on February 3, 2009, independently by the band, limited to 1,000 copies in special packaging.
The first 50 pre-orders also include a real Broadnose sevengill shark tooth collected by singer Aaron Gregory from the large tunnel tanks at Aquarium of the Bay at San Francisco, California, where he worked at the time as a professional scuba diver.
Fans started receiving pre-orders in late January 2009.
The album is a concept album about a man stripped of humanity and left alone with nothing but the sea in front of him. He adapts in inhuman ways to survive the shock of human loss and total emotional tragedy, becoming something else entirely in the process. It has been greatly implied that these adaptations were in the form of transformation into a marine seastar like mutation, adopting their abilities of regeneration, and strange anatomic features, such as possessing two stomachs, and light sensing eye-like organs on the tips of their appendages. This story line was continued in the follow-up 2011 EP, Cenotes, and is hinted at in the 2014 release, Minoans.
The album was re-released on Translation Loss Records featuring four completely re-mixed songs as well as new artwork by Sam Kieth.
Track listing
Panthalassa (Lampetra tridentata) – 5:50
La Brea Tar Pits (Pseudomonas putida) – 7:28
Sutterville (Vibrio cholerae) – 4:08
Dead Man Slough (Pacifastacus leniusculus) – 5:33
Throwing a Donner Party at Sea (Physeter catodon) ft.
“The Ichthyologist” enters the record as album by Giant Squid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ichthyologist, album and Giant can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Ichthyologist” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ichthyologist, album and Giant provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16846876. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2011 and 2014.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Ichthyologist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.