Nobody Photographed a Live Giant Squid in the Deep Until 2004

The giant squid has inspired sea monster stories for centuries, yet no one had ever photographed a living one in the deep ocean until 30 September 2004. That morning, a camera hanging 900 meters below the surface off Japan's Ogasawara Islands caught an Architeuthis wrapping its tentacles around a bait squid.

The images came from zoologists Tsunemi Kubodera, of Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, and Kyoichi Mori, who had spent three seasons, from 2002 to 2004, making 23 targeted deployments of baited cameras. They chose the spot by following sperm whales, which dive there to hunt squid. Their report appeared in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2005.

The encounter turned into a four hour struggle. One of the squid's long feeding tentacles snagged on a hook, and the camera, firing every 30 seconds, took more than 550 pictures as the animal tried to pull free. At one point it hauled the whole rig up from 900 to 600 meters. After 4 hours and 13 minutes the tentacle tore off. The researchers pulled up a 5.5 meter piece whose suckers still gripped the deck and their fingers, and they estimated the squid at more than 8 meters long.

Until then, many pictured the giant squid as a slow drifter. Kubodera and Mori concluded it is a far more active predator, striking prey with its long tentacles and tangling it up.

Moving pictures took longer. In July 2012, an expedition funded by Japan's NHK and the Discovery Channel returned to Ogasawara. According to Nature, a camera system called Medusa, built by deep sea explorer Edith Widder, met giant squid five times. Its trick was a dim red light that few deep sea animals can see, plus an electronic lure imitating the glow of a jellyfish under attack. About a week later, Kubodera and pilot Jim Harris watched one feed on bait for 18 minutes from a submersible, its skin flashing gold and silver.

Widder's camera struck again in June 2019, this time in the Gulf of Mexico, about 160 kilometers southeast of New Orleans. On only its fifth deployment, Medusa filmed a squid at least 3 to 3.7 meters long attacking the fake jellyfish. A squid expert at the Smithsonian judged it almost certainly a young giant squid. As the team recounted for NOAA, lightning hit their ship about 30 minutes after they first spotted it on screen.

The giant squid sees that dark world with the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, shared only with the colossal squid. A team led by Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University measured an eyeball about 27 centimeters across, with a 9 centimeter pupil. In Current Biology in 2012, they calculated that below 600 meters such eyes could spot a sperm whale more than 120 meters away by the faint glow of plankton disturbed by the whale.

How big does it get? Fisheries scientist Charles Paxton used the largest reliably measured mantle, 2.79 meters, to estimate in the Journal of Zoology in 2016 that a total length of about 20 meters, counting the two feeding tentacles, is plausible. Most animals actually measured are much smaller.

There may also be just one species. When researchers sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of 43 giant squid from around the world, they found almost no genetic variation and no regional groups. Their 2013 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B concluded that all belong to a single global species, Architeuthis dux.

Sources: Kubodera and Mori, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2005); Nature (2013); NOAA Ocean Exploration (2019); Nilsson et al., Current Biology (2012); Paxton, Journal of Zoology (2016); Winkelmann et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2013). Cover: giant squid specimen at Museo Alborania.