Long before there was any creepy Jaws-like background music to trigger instant fears of the deep, the ancients scared themselves out of their wits with tales of sea serpents. They were likely inspired by carcasses of giant squids that occasionally washed ashore.
In more modern times, the super-sized cephalopod has surfaced in literature and movies–if not in reality–most famously as the monster trying to strangle Captain Nemo’s Nautilus in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
As monsters go, giant squids have probably gotten a bad rap. Not that they’re not big and fierce and scary. But they aren’t exactly man-eaters, and they aren’t lurking just beneath the surface waiting to wrap their enormous tentacles around a passing vessel and drag it to its doom.
In truth, giant squids have proved incredibly reclusive for a fearsome-looking creature that can stretch up to 60 feet long, has eyes a foot wide and tentacles covered with menacing sucker pads. They live so deep in the ocean that until recently no human had ever seen one in the wild, and the quest to do so was something of a marine biologist’s Holy Grail.
The mystery has finally been solved by a pair of Japanese scientists who pursued the elusive squid as doggedly as Captain Ahab sought Moby Dick, an analogy that isn’t as exaggerated as it seems. The key was to follow huge sperm whales, which feed on the squids and often display the body scars to prove it.
As reported in a recent British biological journal, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori tracked sperm whale herds for years before successfully teasing a giant squid into a photo shoot 3,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles south Tokyo. They backed up the claim with hundreds of pictures taken by a robotic camera tethered to a very long line baited with mashed shrimp on a big hook.
The pictures surprised experts, who had presumed the beast was relatively lethargic despite its girth. Instead, it proved one vicious hunk of calamari. The squid aggressively pounced on the bait, coiling its tentacles in an attempt to crush it. Then, when caught, the squid thrashed and pulled so ferociously that it freed itself after a four-hour struggle by severing an 18-foot long tentacle that was hauled to the surface. The injury was not considered life-threatening.
In a world where we can peer into atoms, it may seem strange that it took so long and required such determination to find the planet’s largest invertebrate. But now that it has been done, perhaps Kubodera and Mori might want to turn their talents to an equally daunting challenge. There’s this murky loch in Scotland. …
