A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. Ironically, the first colossal squid caught on camera was anything but colossal.
Adult colossal squid have been estimated to have a maximum total length between 10 meters (33 ft) and 14 meters (46 ft). The squid on video was not colossal, despite its species designation. It was a juvenile of only about 1 foot in length.
The young colossal squid in the video was swimming around 600 meters down, Dr. Kat Bolstad, a deep-sea cephalopod biologist, said, not in the deeper waters where adults likely dwell. Other deep-sea squids spend their early lives in shallower waters, she said. Having a transparent body may help the baby swim undetected by predators before it descends as an opaque, reddish adult to the darker ocean.
As noted by the New Scientist, for decades, the Kraken-like colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was more myth than reality: scientists had only a vague sense of its appearance from fragments of its remains found in the stomachs of the whales that eat the molluscs. In fact, it was through those remains that the species was officially described by zoologists in 1925.
Finally, in 1981, fishers in Antarctica accidentally reeled up a live colossal squid in their fishing nets. Since then, the animals have sometimes been killed as fishing bycatch, or have washed ashore dead.
Last month, a vessel from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a US-based non-profit organisation, was surveying the Southern Ocean near the South Sandwich Islands and live-streaming the footage from their remotely controlled deep-sea cameras, when an online viewer flagged that they might have just filmed a colossal squid.
Acting on the tip, the researchers sent the high-resolution footage to independent squid experts. The experts confirmed that the online viewer’s hunch was correct: the squid had distinctive hooks along the suckers on its eight arms, which are a hallmark of the colossal squid. It was roaming at 600 meters under the water’s surface.
A colossal squid has been filmed alive in its wild habitat for the first time