The giant squid was mostly found in sailors’ fantasies and on the edges of ancient maps for the majority of recorded history. Never on a research vessel, but the kind of creature you heard about in a tavern in port town. Even now, when you walk through a museum’s natural history section and stand in front of a preserved specimen behind glass, there’s an odd disconnect: the animal itself is still associated with folklore, even though the body and suckers are real.
When researchers lowered bait from a vessel off the Ogasawara Islands in Japan in 2006 and waited, that gap started to close. It was successful. After taking the line, a 24-foot squid was pulled to the surface alive. A Japanese-American team captured one in its natural habitat for the first time six years later. The way it happened is a little ironic. It took patience, a camera, and a piece of bait hanging in the dark to make the breakthrough after centuries of conjecture.
It’s really hard to imagine the animal itself without embellishing. The longest one ever measured by scientists was almost 43 feet long and nearly one ton in weight. The largest eyes in the animal kingdom, they are roughly a foot across and the size of dinner plates. Tipped with hundreds of toothed suckers, the two feeding tentacles can reach a distance of 33 feet and seize prey. It seems almost engineered, as though evolution continued to add features until it ran out of space.
Despite this, the giant squid continues to be one of the world’s most poorly observed large animals. The majority of scientific knowledge is still derived from carcasses that were removed from sperm whale stomachs or washed up on beaches. We should take a moment to consider that. Whales are far more adept than humans at locating these squid. There are entire studies that are essentially based on the scars that squid tentacles leave on whale skin. We are operating at that level.
For this reason, it’s difficult to overstate how important the more recent footage is. A remotely operated vehicle was broadcasting live from a location that most people would never visit while on a Schmidt Ocean Institute and Ocean Census expedition in the far south Atlantic. The goal of the mission was to find novel deep-sea species. It nearly unintentionally caught a young giant squid floating through the water column. It wasn’t until they later examined the high-definition video that the team even verified what they were seeing. A serendipitous discovery.
Our perception of the hunting grounds seems to be changing as well. For a very long time, it was assumed that these creatures lived deep, stayed deep, and consumed whatever drifted by. However, the new sightings indicate that the image is more disorganized. The squid seem to use the mid-water column more frequently than one might anticipate, using their massive eyes to detect even the smallest glow from below and ambushing bioluminescent prey from the shadows. Compared to the thrashing battles portrayed in ancient engravings, this type of hunting is more subdued. Be more patient. More accurate.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of this still depends on chance. One trip with a bait line. Another is a live stream. The secrets of the deep ocean are not revealed on a set timetable. Some biologists have studied giant and colossal squid for their entire careers without ever seeing one alive, and for the majority of them, that may not change.
However, something has changed. The giant squid is no longer an absence-based creature. For the first time, we are beginning to comprehend where it actually hunts, watches, and travels through a layer of the planet that we hardly touch.
