The Monterey Bay Aquarium — or really whoever is running the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s social-media team — is a messy bitch who lives for drama. The same folks who brought you a livestream of its jellyfish tank captioned, “The world is filled with heartless, brainless, and spineless animals — and jellies are some of the best.” Which doesn’t seem that shady until you consider it was January 2017 and somebody had just edited the invertebrate Wikipedia page to include Paul Ryan. (Get it … because he’s spineless.) This week, the aquarium has its sights set on a new target: the squid emoji. Which, according to the MBA, has it all wrong.
Squid have something called a siphon, a body part used to breath and remove waste. It’s on the opposite side of their head from their eyes, but you wouldn’t know this looking at the emoji. Instead, as noted in a series of tweets from the MBA on Wednesday, it’s on the front of the squid’s head where it “just looks like a weirdo nose.”
There’s some precedent when it comes to inaccurate emoji getting updated. Back in February, a bunch of folks in Maine complained the lobster emoji did not have the appropriate number of legs. It had eight instead of ten, which has since been corrected. The skateboard emoji also got a facelift after Tony Hawk expressed disappointment in the original design. Unclear if Apple, given that those complaints were lodged immediately after those emoji were released or designed and the squid emoji is years old at this point, will do the same for our pal the squid. But hey, the more you know.
