Are the oceans hiding monsters of epic proportions? And will they survive long enough for us to track them down?
Hemmed in on all sides by two metre-long, tentacled sea demons, Scott Cassell must have thought he’d breathed his last...
30 minutes later he emerged from what would have been his watery grave, just off the coast of Mexico, saved only by his armour-plated diving suit.
A veteran deep sea film maker, Cassell was on a mission to get an image on camera of the Mexican Rojo Diablo, the 'red demon' or Humboldt squid. At up to 50 kilograms, these vicious sea beasts can throw enough weight to do some serious damage to an unprotected diver. Cassell was anything but unscathed after his own terrifying encounter. “I later discovered bruises on me the size of oranges, as well as several scratches in my anti-squid armour suit,” he says.
Undeterred, Cassell has returned to squid-infested waters on numerous occasions since his lucky escape. Most recently, in November 2007, the History Channel aired his new documentary in which he and his team manage to saddle a Humboldt squid with an underwater camera. The images they return hint at something much, much larger lurking in the deep. A squid, perhaps, of such epic proportions that it would dwarf anything previously hauled in by squid hunters.
What haunts the deepest, darkest recesses of the ocean has alternatively fascinated and terrified our sea-faring ancestors for centuries. Writing in 1755, the bishop of Bergen in Norway, painted a picture of a monster a mile long, which he called a ‘Kraken’. And in 1770, the Royal Society heard Charles Douglas’ account of “an animal of 25 fathoms long”, related to him by a Norwegian sea captain. Among the fables and fabrications, however, there may just lie an inkling of the truth.
The one that got away
Cassell’s giant, which he claims may have measured anything up to 30 metres in length – as big as a blue whale – was most likely a cousin to his old enemy, the Humboldt. So-called giant and colossal squid belong to the same family of backboneless sea creatures, falling under the general umbrella of cephalopods. It is only relatively recently, however, that scientists have begun to understand anything about the lives of these much larger cephalopods, which are notoriously elusive. “With giant squid, we catch so few - it’s not like working on something like an earthworm where you can dig up a million and compare them all,” says Louise Allcock, a cephalopod expert at the University of Aberdeen. “We’re getting a couple a year if we’re lucky.”
It may not be so difficult to appreciate why such enormous entities should be so difficult to run into. Firstly, they dwell far below the water’s surface, sometimes as deep as a kilometre. And secondly, they don’t easily fall for our tricks. “They are very smart, very fast, they hunt, they live in mid-water and they rarely come to you,” says Alan Jamieson, a researcher developing deep sea observation systems at the University of Aberdeen.
Jamieson spent part of last year with the Japanese Marine Science and Technology Center (JAMSTEC) in Tokyo, where researchers shot the first ever footage of a live giant squid in its home environment in 2005. But they had to try every trick in the book to get it, eventually resorting to an elaborate system of buoys, cables and hooks, dangling a camera and some shrimp bait. Squid like their prey alive and tend not to be drawn by the static observation vehicles often deployed by scientists. “Short of catching a live fish and strapping some poor guy in front of a camera like a sacrificial lamb, they are only seen as chance encounters,” says Jamieson.
These encounters have been so rare that even basic information about larger species of squid is missing from the marine biologist’s manual. “There is much we have to learn about these animals,” says Steve O’Shea, Director of Auckland University of Technology’s Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute in New Zealand. “Life cycle, growth rate, distribution and abundance all have yet to be determined.” According to O’Shea thereis enough work to be done to occupy squid specialists for generations.
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