by David Grann
There were twenty-one people in Robison’s squad, among them computer scientists, marine biologists, chemists, and engineers. To my surprise, there seemed to be no one on deck when I stepped on board. As I opened the main door, though, I was greeted by a clatter of men and machines. In the center of the cavernous room, surrounded by crewmen communicating through headsets, was the remotely operated vehicle, or R.O.V. It was hanging from a cable attached to a crane; it was the size of a Volkswagen and weighed some eight thousand pounds. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a jumble of wires. The front of the machine, or at least what I presumed was the front, had two large spotlights, which could be rotated. On the top of the machine was an outer shell with a single word painted on it: “TIBURÓN,” Spanish for “shark.”
“Welcome aboard,” Robison said.
Robison was standing near the R.O.V., coordinating much of the activity. He resembled an eighteenth-century whaling captain, with white hair and a white beard; even his eyebrows were inordinately thick and wild. He began to explain how the robot operated: a coated fibre-optic wire connected the ship to the R.O.V., sending signals back and forth. The machine was propelled by electric thrusters and had flotation devices that allowed it to hover with neutral buoyancy, much like a giant squid, despite weighing four tons. What’s more, the R.O.V. was outfitted with eight cameras, providing, as Robison put it, “a complete portrait of a three-dimensional universe.” He added, “Our mandate is to go and see what no one else can.”
He led me around the rest of the ship, which had a dining room, a computer room, a laboratory, and a freezer for preserving specimens. On the upper deck, along with the bridge, were quarters equipped with televisions, which displayed the Tiburon’s live feed. “The dirty secret is that you never have to get out of bed,” he said. He left me to settle in my own private room. I soon realized that the boat had already set sail: it cut so smoothly through the water that I hadn’t noticed it moving.
That afternoon, we drifted over the Monterey Canyon, and stopped to make our first probe. A team of half a dozen engineers and technicians prepared the Tiburon.
“How do we look on the starboard camera?” one asked.
“Good to go.”
“Do you have thrust?”
“Roger that.”
The crew stepped back and the lights on the Tiburon began to blink. A trapdoor slowly opened, revealing the ocean beneath, and the Tiburon hovered above it like a spaceship. The crane then lowered the R.O.V. into the turbulent water, its snubbed head pitching forward, its fibre-optic cable trailing behind it, like an endless tail.
I walked toward the stern and into the control room, where I expected to find Robison. It was dark, except for nearly two dozen glowing monitors, which broadcast color images from the Tiburon’s myriad cameras, each one capturing a different angle. Robison sat beside the pilot, who steered the R.O.V. with a joystick.
Strange gelatinous creatures began to appear, which gave off dazzling displays of bioluminescence. There was a crustacean that walked through the water like a daddy-longlegs spider, and fish with jaws that were unhinged. There was a Tiburonia granrojo, a red balloon-like jellyfish that Robison and his squad had discovered and named for the R.O.V., and that was one of hundreds of new species that the squad had uncovered. There was a diaphanous animal, which they still hadn’t identified, and called simply “the mystery mollusk.” And there was, when the Tiburon reached the soft, craggy bottom of the ocean, a constant snowfall of decomposing skeletons and microscopic organisms.
Over the next several days, as the Tiburon descended as deep as two miles, we saw hundreds of squid: blue-eyed ones, translucent ones, polka-dotted ones. Observing these squid in their natural habitat, Robison said, provided clues to the behavior of their giant relative. When a camera zoomed in on an individual squid, we could see water entering the muscular sac, or mantle, that contains the squid’s internal organs; it then inflated and contracted, shooting the water out through a funnel and propelling the squid like a bullet through the ocean. Watching the animals outrace the robot, I had a sense of why Clyde Roper once said of squid, “The only ones you catch are the slow, the sick, and the stupid.”
Another reason for their elusiveness is their unusually large eyes, which enable them to discern predators in places where light is nearly absent. (The giant squid’s eyes are thought to be the largest of any animal.) Squid also have highly developed brains for an invertebrate, and have nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those in human beings—allowing them to react in an instant. (For many decades, neuroscientists have relied on squid neurons for their research.) “By observing squid in their natural habitat, we have discovered that they are much more intelligent, much more complex than anything we suspected,” Robison said.
As we watched, the squid seemed to be using light patterns, colors, and postures as a means of communication. They didn’t just turn red or pink or yellow; ripples of color would wash across their bodies. And they would contort their arms into elaborate arrangements—sometimes balling them together, or holding them above their heads, like flamenco dancers. Robison explained that they use these movements and color changes to warn other squid of predators, to perform mating rituals, to attract prey, and to conceal themselves.
Several times, when the Tiburon got too close to them, the squid ejected streams of black ink. In the past, scientists assumed that it served solely as camouflage or a decoy. Robison told me that he and other scientists now believe the ink contains chemicals that disable predators; this would explain why he has seen deep-sea squid release black nimbuses in depths where there is no light. “As much as we know about squid, we still don’t know that much,” he said.
Robison noted that the behavior of giant squid, in particular, was poorly understood. No one knows just how aggressive giant squid are, whether they hunt alone or in packs, or whether, as legend has it, they will attack people as well as fish. After Robison caught the tentacle and descended in a submersible to the same spot, he said, “It occurred to me that there was a pissed-off squid out there with a grudge against me.” (Other scientists suspect that the giant squid’s violent reputation is undeserved; O’Shea, for one, contends that Architeuthis is probably a “gentle beast.”)
The expedition ended without a glimpse of Architeuthis, but, at one point, several jumbo squid did appear on the ship’s screens. They were only a fraction of the size of a giant squid—between five and eight feet in length and a hundred or so pounds—but they looked frighteningly strong. One night, several of the ship’s scientists dropped a jig, a device specially designed to lure squid, over the side of the boat. They caught two jumbo squid. As they reeled each squid in, screaming, “Pump him up!,” the weight and strength of the animals nearly pulled the men overboard. Several minutes later, Robison and I went to the ship’s laboratory, where a scientist held up one of the jumbo squid. The creature was nearly as long as Robison is tall, and its tentacles were still lashing and writhing. “Now imagine a giant squid with a tentacle thirty feet long,” he said.
After the squid was dissected, part of it was given to the cook. The next day, it appeared on a silver platter. “From beast to feast,” the chef said, as we sat down for supper.
“Shall we take a peek?” O’Shea said, leaning over the stern of the boat. It was after midnight, several hours since we had dropped the traps in the water; the rain had stopped, but a cold wind swirled around us. As the boat rocked in the waves, O’Shea pulled in the line, hand over hand, because the boat didn’t have winches. The traps weighed at least fifty pounds, and he climbed up on the side of the boat to get a better grip, his bare feet spread apart. As the first net emerged from the water, O’Shea shouted for Conway and me to haul it in, and we laid it on the deck, as icy water spilled around our feet. “Hurry, chappies,” O’Shea said. “Get the torch.”
Conway shined the flashlight into the net. There were no squid, but there were swarms of krill, and O’Shea seemed buoyed by
the discovery. “We’re definitely in squid eating country,” he said.
He dropped the nets overboard again, anchoring them in place, and began the next phase of the hunt—towing a third, larger net behind the boat. “We’ll trawl for fifteen minutes at about one and a half knots,” O’Shea said. The maneuver was a delicate one, he explained: if he trawled too deep or not deep enough, the paralarvae would escape the net; if he trawled for too long, the net would suffocate what he caught. We drove the boat around for precisely fifteen minutes, then pulled in the net and dumped its contents—a thick, granular goop—into a cylindrical tank filled with seawater. The tank instantly lit up from all the bioluminescence. “There’s plenty of life in there, that’s for sure,” O’Shea said.
He found no Architeuthis in the tank, but he was undaunted. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” he said.
By all accounts, O’Shea is tireless and single-minded: he works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and he no longer watches TV or reads newspapers. He never attends parties. “I’m not antisocial,” he said. “I just don’t socialize.” His sister told me, “We’d love him even if he chased mushrooms, but we just wish he’d spend the same emotion on people as he did on squid.” Shoba, his wife, who often calls him to remind him to eat lunch, said, “I don’t want him to stop. I just wish he could temper it a little bit and see that there are other things out there.”
People inevitably compare O’Shea’s quest to that of Captain Ahab. But, unlike Melville’s character, O’Shea does not think of the creature he pursues in grand symbolic terms. Indeed, he is constantly trying to strip the giant squid of its lore. He considers books like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” to be “rubbish;” his studies of dead specimens have led him to believe that the longest recorded measurement of a giant squid—fifty-seven feet—is apocryphal. “Now, if someone really wanted to prostitute the truth all they have to do is take the tentacle and walk and walk and walk,” he once told me. “The bloody things are like rubber bands, and you can make a forty-foot squid suddenly look sixty feet.” Unlike some other hunters, he thinks it is ridiculous to imagine that a giant squid could kill a sperm whale. He thinks of the giant squid as both majestic and mundane— with a precise weight, diet, length, and life span. He wants it, in short, to be real. “We have to move beyond this mythical monster and see it as it is,” O’Shea said. “Isn’t that enough?”
After a while, he stood and dropped the trawling net back in the water. We worked until after sunrise. When we still hadn’t found any squid, O’Shea said, “An expedition that begins badly usually ends well.”
At the cabin, Conway and I took a brief nap while O’Shea plotted our next course. In the afternoon, we ventured into town for supplies. O’Shea warned us not to use his real name; he had recently campaigned to shut down a nearby fishery in order to protect the wildlife, and he said that he had received several death threats. “This is quite dangerous country for me,” he said.
I wasn’t sure how seriously to take his warning, but, when I accidentally used his name, he became tense. “Careful, mate,” he said. “Careful.”
Later that day, O’Shea was standing on the cabin porch, smoking a cigarette, when a villager approached. “Are you the guy chasing them monsters?” he asked.
O’Shea looked at him hesitantly. “I’m afraid that would be me,” he said.
“I saw you on the telly, talking about them things,” the man said. He reached out his hand. “After I saw you, I named my cat Architeuthis.”
O’Shea brightened. “This mate here has a cat named Archie,” he told Conway and me.
O’Shea invited the man in for “a cuppa,” and soon he and the stranger were bent down over his maps. “They say you can find the big calamari out here,” the man said, pointing to a reef.
Before long, another villager stopped by and was offering his own advice. “I’d try over here,” he said. “Billy Tomlin said he once found a big dead one out in these parts.” O’Shea took in the information. Fishermen sometimes embroider the truth, he said, but they also know the local waters better than anyone else.
That night, we went out again. Although we continued to haul up enormous quantities of shrimp and krill—sometimes there were so many that they could barely move inside the tank—we found not a single squid.
As the night lengthened, O’Shea seemed, for the first time, to grow dispirited. “The weather’s causing havoc with the currents,” he said.
After each haul, he’d study his charts and choose a new spot with renewed hope—“This could be it,” he’d say—only to be disappointed again. When the sun rose, at six-thirty, casting its bright rays upon the sea, O’Shea raced the boat over to the two anchored traps. He said that he had often had the best luck at dawn; the creatures seemed to rear their heads before vanishing deep below. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, hauling the nets on board.
“Anything?” Conway asked.
O’Shea held one of the nets up to his eye, then dropped it in disgust. “Diddly,” he said.
“We have to go farther out,” O’Shea said the following night. We sped far into the Pacific, leaving the safety of the inlet behind. The hauls remained dismal; after each one, he aimed the boat farther out to sea, saying, “We have to go deeper, that’s all.”
Conway, who was looking increasingly pale, said, “Haven’t we gone out enough?”
“I know the squid are out there,” O’Shea said.
The less he found, the harder he seemed to work. He is not a big man, and his childhood illness had left his body somewhat brittle, yet he never slowed down as he pulled the net in with all its weight, then returned it to the water. His fingers were covered in blisters, his clothes were soaked through, and his glasses were stained with salt from the seawater.
“He’s a bit of a fanatic, isn’t he?” Conway said quietly.
As the cold nights wore on, we worked in a kind of fog. We were getting little sleep during the day, and it became harder to pay attention to the mounds of larval fish, shrimp, krill, and jellyfish; not even the sight of dolphins jumping in the waters nearby relieved the drudgery. At one point, I felt fatigued, and lay down in the forward berth. I could fit only if I bent my knees toward my chest. As I closed my eyes and listened to the waves smashing against the hull, I could hear O’Shea grunting as he pulled in another net and cursing when there was nothing inside.
On yet another night, at around four in the morning, as we pulled in the trawling gear and dropped the contents in the cylindrical tank, Conway shone a flashlight and asked, “What’s that?”
O’Shea peered inside, and blinked several times, trying to keep himself awake. “Heaven help us!” he shouted. “It’s a fucking squid!” He stared blearily into its eyeball. “It looks like Archie,” he told us.
Although the creature was only the size of my thumbnail, I could see it, too—its tentacles, its fins, its eyes, its arms, its bullet-shaped mantle.
“This could be your dream squid,” Conway said.
“Quick,” O’Shea said. “Let’s drain some of the krill before they crush it.”
He held the cylindrical tank in the air, his arms shaking from exhaustion, as the waves pounded the side of the boat. “Steady!” he yelled. It was hard to see in the darkness—there was no moonlight—and as he poured some of the contents into a strainer, struggling to balance against the violent waves, something happened.
“Where did it go?” O’Shea asked.
“I don’t know,” Conway said. “I can’t see it anymore.”
“Jesus Christ,” O’Shea said.
He grabbed a specially designed tank, which he had purchased expressly for transporting a baby giant squid, and poured the rest of the cylindrical tank’s contents inside it. “Where is the bloody thing?” he said. “Where is it?”
He reached in with his hand, stirring the water frantically. “It has to be here,” he said.
He pulled out one shrimp, then another, holding them under the l
ight.
“It’s gone,” Conway said.
But O’Shea didn’t seem to hear. He sifted through the mounds of plankton, trying to find the baby squid’s microscopic tentacles. At last, he stumbled backward, and put his arms over his head. “It’s a fucking catastrophe,” he said.
He fell back in the captain’s chair, and sat motionless. I tried to think of something to say, but failed. “It was right there,” O’Shea said to himself. “I had it.”
After a while, he tried to drop the traps in the water again, but he no longer seemed able to muster his strength. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said, and disappeared into the forward berth.
That afternoon, O’Shea was sitting on the cabin porch, sipping a glass of whiskey. “Want a spot?” he asked.
“That’s all right,” I said.
He spoke in a whisper, and much more slowly than usual. He said he had pinpointed a new location to search, but I told him I thought I would stay behind and catch up on my work. He looked at me for a long moment. “That’s what always happens,” he said. “People get bored and give up. But I can’t pay any attention to what’s going on around me. I just have to stay focussed.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. “I can already hear the critics saying, ‘The great squid hunter lost his blasted squid again.’ Do you know how it feels when everything goes to custard like this?” He fell silent again, then added, “I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to give up. I don’t care if someone finds the squid first. I’ll still go until I find it myself.”
The next morning, when he pushed open the cabin door, he looked despairing. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
It was the end of the expedition; he had to go back to Auckland to lecture. We loaded up the gear and returned to the city. When we got there, O’Shea went to the aquarium to visit his specimens. In his absence, seventeen squid had died. The employee in whose care he had left them had posted a sign on the tank. It said, “They have a new trick . . . It’s called ‘jumping out of the tank and committing suicide!’”