Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  The cephalopod brain is quite different. It’s much more decentralized and seems to have a lot more opportunity for knee-jerk-like responses. Roughly three-fifths of the cephalopod brain resides not in the central system but in the arms and tentacles. This makes cephalopod arms weirdly independent. Arms and tentacles, at times, seem to be able to make their own “decisions.” If an arm separates from the body, which might happen for any number of reasons, it can continue to function for many hours. Does the arm “know” what it’s doing when it acts independently after being separated from the body, or is it behaving according to some preprogrammed autopilot arrangement? We’re unlikely to know the answer to that anytime soon.

  Squid and cuttlefish feeding tentacles are usually much longer than the arms. These feeding tentacles can strike with the speed and force of a projectile. There are cuttlefish feeding tentacles that are capable of shooting out and capturing prey in about a hundredth of a second. The giant squid may not enjoy such speedy tentacles, but it may not need the speed. Giant squid have some other pretty impressive tools, instead. Their tentacles widen into paddlelike clubs at the ends, on which are rows of enlarged suckers on flexible stalks. Each sucker is ringed with hard, sharp teeth that embed in the flesh of the prey to grasp and shred the victim’s skin and flesh. At the end of the feeding tentacles of the colossal squid are about twenty-five large swivel hooks, each set into a sucker, used to snare prey.

  Cephalopods live in all the planet’s oceans, except for the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. As a group, they occupy all ocean depths, although individual species may be more restricted in their movements through the water column. When cuttlefish gave up their protective shells, they evolved a cuttlebone, an elongated and firm structure that is somewhat like a backbone but remains rather rigid. You may have seen a cuttlebone in a bird cage, where it provides calcium to the bird.

  A cuttlefish

  Cuttlebones, with their honeycomb-like interior structure, provide buoyancy. Cuttlefish can increase or decrease the amount of gas in the cuttlebone, thus allowing the animal to rise and fall in the sea. But cuttlebones are brittle and are destroyed when water pressure is too high. Cuttlefish therefore do not descend into the deep sea.

  Octopus and squid species live at many different depths. The ghostly, translucent, and apparently blind deep-sea octopus, Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis—the “hot-water volcano octopus” or the “deep-sea vent octopus”—lives many thousands of feet below the surface around vents on the ocean floor that spew hot water. Only a few inches in length, it eats the strange crabs, shrimp, and other highly adapted fauna that swarm around the heat there. Other octopus species are adapted to shallow waters and a few are known to leave the water and crawl over land when hunting.

  Many squid species can navigate safely through a variety of depths, adjusting their physiological responses accordingly. These squid migrate nightly from several thousand feet below all the way up to the sea surface to feed on the variety of marine life that makes the same once-a-day up-and-down trip. The giant squid may also migrate up and down, but no one knows for sure, since the animal’s lifestyle remains mysterious.

  In fact, scientists know little about the behavior and lifestyle of most cephalopods. For example, we know that many species rest, but we don’t know whether cephalopods actually sleep, like mammals and birds, and we certainly have no idea what kind of dreams such animals might have. In between hunting forays, octopuses spend a great deal of time in their dens, their temporary homes. The bobtail squid and many other shallow-water species spend much of the daytime burrowed into the sand. But are they actually sleeping as we would, in the sense that they’re rejuvenating their brains? Are their brains processing events into memories, as we do? Or are they in some other kind of neutral, inactive state?

  Scientists are trying to answer at least a few of these questions in their study of one of the ocean’s larger squid, the Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas. At up to six feet in length from mantle tip to arm tip and weighing up to 100 pounds (but usually much less) and with a very powerful mantle muscle, this squid is a member of the flying squid family. It has large, muscular fins for swimming and ranges through the ocean, both horizontally and vertically, in schools of sometimes as many as a thousand animals. It eats smaller fish, mollusks, and, sometimes, other squid, including its own schoolmates.

  The species has a formidable reputation. Mexican fishermen call it Diablos Rijos, or Red Devil, alluding to the numerous stories told by fishermen and others who claim that if a person falls overboard into a school of these animals, only the skeleton will be left by the time the body reaches the seafloor.

  Maybe so; maybe not. Scientists are divided on how dangerous Dosidicus might be. The Smithsonian’s Clyde Roper was bitten on his inner thigh, near his femoral artery. The bite penetrated his diving suit. On the other hand, Dosidicus expert Bill Gilly of Stanford University says he’s swum with these squid without protection and not been bothered. The solution to the disagreement could be that the Humboldt, like most sophisticated animals, has a flexible temperament. In fact, I think of the Humboldt as being a kind of saltwater version of the coyote, an opportunistic predator who can survive in deserts, on the Great Plains, and on the golf courses of Cape Cod.

  Scientists have recently begun to study the Humboldt in depth, because, like the coyote, the Humboldt has begun expanding its range. The species once seemed limited primarily to South American and southern North American salt water, but over the past decade, the Humboldt has become common in coastal waters as far north as Alaska.

  No one knows why.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A SALTWATER SERENGETI

  An ocean without its unnamed monsters

  is like a completely dreamless sleep.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  ulie Stewart cradled her research subject in her arms. Her ponytail dripped salt water. The back straps of her luminescent yellow waterproof Grundens were twisted tightly to better fit the slight frame of her 5′3″ body. She was covered in squid ink. The sun had long since set. It was mid-November, 2009, about a month away from the Winter Solstice. The sea was a bit rough. The air, a bit chilly.

  Julie was kneeling on the dive platform of an unnamed government research boat on Monterey Bay. She was outside the safety of the deck rails. Above her were all the stars in the universe. Two miles below her was the bed of one of the world’s most sublime kingdoms, the Monterey Submarine Canyon.

  Julie Stewart with a Humboldt on the dive platform

  You could have said she was ethereally poised between heaven and earth, but you’d have been taken down a notch if you’d looked around at water level: Monterey Bay is rimmed by all the inglorious mundanity of twenty-first-century human existence. Nearby were the mansion lights of Pebble Beach, the golfers’ Mecca. A corporate jet flew overhead preparing to land at the local airport. Off in the distance the towering stack lights of the region’s hulking electric plant glistened and beckoned nearly as powerfully as the stars overhead.

  Nevertheless, Monterey Bay is a wild place, filled with whales and sharks and shoals of fish and forests of kelp and 20-pound sea slugs and 50-pound Humboldt squid and diaphanous 100-foot-long siphonophores, jellyfish-like creatures that form nets with their poisonous tentacles and wait for prey to come their way. This cold, deep world throbs with energy. It’s a saltwater Serengeti.

  Rocked by three- and four-foot waves, Julie held her animal close to her chest. At twenty-eight, she was chief scientist of this evening-long research cruise and was part of an informal international team of scientists stretched along the west coast of South and North America. They were all focused on learning more about the biology and behavior of the suddenly prolific Humboldt. The scientists had endless questions. Where had the species come from? Why were these squid here in Monterey in such great numbers? Where were they going? Had something changed in the Pacific that had suddenly opened up a niche that these opportunistic animals were exploiting? Was it because the ocea
ns were warmer? Was it because many of the sea’s top predators like whales and sharks had disappeared? Was their explosion in numbers a symptom of some kind of extinction event that affected other kinds of animals but not cephalopods? Or was the species’ sudden increase simply one example of the normal long-term ebb and flow of life in the ocean?

  On the boat, Julie was at the center of organized chaos and exultant bedlam. Encircling her were five men furiously pulling up five- and six-foot-long squid. Earlier in the season, the team’s Humboldt hunts had come up with zilch, but on this particular night the men could hardly keep up with their work.

  A huge school of ravenous squid had surfaced just at dusk and were lured to the boat by the large glowing lights on the two-foot-long fishing jigs. In the frothing waters surrounding the boat, squid swirled everywhere. If one squid was hooked on a lure, others saw its vulnerability and attacked.

  Scientist John Field pulls in a Humboldt

  Cannibalism is common in this species. On another Humboldt fishing trip months earlier, Tom Mattusch, captain of the 53-foot fishing charter Huli Cat, pulled up a Humboldt from about a thousand feet down. When he got the squid above the surface, he saw a lot more than just eight arms and two tentacles. He thought at first he’d somehow caught two animals on one lure, but then he took a second look. Most of the body of the first squid lay in the clutches of the second, which was shredding the first animal and eating it.

  On Julie’s Humboldt expedition, the men were using stand-up rods, about the size used for bluefin. On the end of their 50- and 60-pound test lines were the specially made heavy jigs that the animals proved unable to resist. As squid after squid was pulled on board, the deck was chaotic.

  A few feet away from Julie was her doctoral adviser and laboratory head, neuroscientist-turned-naturalist Bill Gilly of Stanford University and Monterey’s Hopkins Marine Station. Over the past several years, Gilly had become somewhat of a television personality, having been featured in numerous documentaries about the “dangerous” Humboldts. Some of these documentaries featured the Humboldt as a “killer,” the way wolves were once featured as deadly in children’s stories like “Little Red Riding Hood.” Gilly and his team sometimes roll their eyes at this kind of dramatization.

  Gilly was frustrated at having lost a squid after expending quite a bit of energy hauling it up from a thousand feet down. He chewed pensively on a bit of raw tentacle. The squid had escaped the scientist, but this tiny bit of living flesh had broken off the animal and stayed behind, caught on the strong, sharp spikes of the jig. As Gilly gnawed on the squid’s body tissue with its still-flexing suckers, he considered the taste. “Not too bitter,” he said.

  He also considered the temperament of the Humboldt, which he believed to be much more benign than television shows liked to let on.

  Gilly has swum with the animals several times without protective gear, in only snorkel and T-shirt. “One of them just came up right at me, took an arm and touched my hand, and went away. If you’re kind to them, they’ll be kind to you,” he told me later. Maybe so. I could see his point. The animal in Julie’s arms didn’t look dangerous. On the other hand, I wasn’t planning on swimming among them.

  Not far from Gilly was Rob Yeomans, bending over the open transom in the stern of the boat, pumping the line of his boat rod. Dressed in a hooded black sweatshirt and orange foul-weather pants, he braced his 5′4″ frame against the roiling sea. He was cackling with excitement. Rob looked like a metronome, moving forward and backward, forward and backward, pulling squid after squid out of the water. There was a great deal of joy on the boat that night.

  At thirty-seven, Rob is a fervent and irrepressible high school marine biology teacher from Newburyport, Massachusetts. By heritage and by emotional makeup, he is a commercial fisherman, but because of overfishing in the North Atlantic, he was forced to change jobs. I had first met Rob a half-year earlier when I’d attended a Humboldt squid dissection in his high school classroom. The frozen carcass had been shipped from Gilly’s West Coast lab across the continent, then thawed on Rob’s worktable. Rob had wanted to meet Gilly in person, visit his lab, and go out with him to catch some squid. I decided to travel along, to see what all the hoopla was about.

  The Monterey region was once sparsely populated with bandits’ cabins and shoreline squatters’ shacks where Chinese fishermen dried squid for export to distant cities. But the peninsula was “upgraded” by the Pacific Improvement Company at the end of the nineteenth century, when the railroad and improved highways created the new industry of tourism. The real estate developers turned the place into a posh resort with firstclass accommodations that included a huge hotel with acres of gardens called the Del Monte, Pebble Beach’s golf course, and a clubby lifestyle. All kinds of celebrities showed up, from the Surrealist Salvador Dalí to the Hollywood personality Bob Hope. Teddy Roosevelt galloped his horse along the bay’s dramatic shoreline, and President William McKinley visited only months before his 1901 assassination.

  Despite the upgrades, Monterey’s waterfront continued to smell of rotting fish. The town government established an official “permanent smelling committee” to fine or arrest people who perpetrated offending aromas, but even that didn’t work. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise,” wrote John Steinbeck in his 1945 novel Cannery Row. “The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned….”

  But eventually, the canneries closed down because the region was fished out. Today called Ocean View Avenue instead of Cannery Row, the street looks much like the main tourist street in Provincetown on Cape Cod, or like Main Street in Bar Harbor, Maine, or like any other reclaimed “quaint” fishing town. Steinbeck’s bums and whores and slightly seedy, rather rowdy intellectuals and street cops who enjoy a good drink now and then are mostly gone, along with the infamous stink.

  In 1992, Monterey Bay became a federal marine sanctuary, which is something like a national park, although not as commercially restrictive. This good fortune has greatly benefited the sea life in the bay. The kelp beds are healthier. Sea otters put on a show for anyone who cares to walk by the seashore and peer down into the waves. And if you don’t feel like exploring even that much, you can just see them in the aquarium. The key to continuing the improvement is science—which in this case means the methodical discovery of how to fit the puzzle pieces together. This is particularly challenging because no one knows what the final picture—a healthy ocean ecosystem—should look like.

  We do know a few interesting things, though. Scientists have recently found, for example, a very cool ecological chain reaction: The kelp beds that cradle sea life depend on the sea otters who wrap themselves in the tops of the kelp fronds when they sleep. The otters eat the sea urchins which in turn eat the kelp. Too few otters means too many sea urchins. Too many urchins means too little kelp. So it turns out that the otters, who might at first glance seem to be somewhat harmful to kelp by wrapping themselves in the fronds, are in fact enabling the kelp to thrive.

  Nature is funny that way. Sometimes the truth is counterintuitive. It took us a while to unravel the otter-urchin-kelp jigsaw puzzle, and when we did, we felt pretty smart. But when we take a step back, we see that the puzzles we are able to solve in ocean ecosystems are only tiny achievements, like puzzles for toddlers with only three or four pieces. “They’re not even two-dimensional jigsaw puzzles we have to solve,” Gilly said. “They’re three-dimensional. We need some kind of systems approach, but we don’t even know what that would begin to look like.” The ocean, after all, is not about stability but about flux. Change is normal. Everything is changing. All the time. It will be decades and decades before we can understand the sea in any kind of meaningful way.

  Among the current, pressing puzzles in Monterey Bay is the sudden proliferation of Humboldt squid. This is not the first time that Humboldt squid have shown up in the bay and elsewhere on the West Coast, but their numbers this tim
e may be greater than in the past. “We don’t know whether they’re going to stay long this time, either,” Julie told me. “But we’re trying to at least understand why they’re here whenever they are here.” It’s a tough task.

  The fact that Humboldts have suddenly become common during the summer and fall is not necessarily a bad thing. Charter fishing boat captains like these very large squid because they’re not as challenging as game fish to catch, and on the best nights, they’re more than plentiful, so most clients come away happy. In the summer of 2009 so many Humboldts swam near the wealthy town of La Jolla that several mass strandings occurred, littering the popular swimming beaches with rotting squid carcasses.

  A Humboldt stranding on a California beach

  In earlier eras, the public might have been displeased to have their beaches defiled by writhing squid tentacles and slowly rotting squid flesh, but times have changed. Gilly lab doctoral candidate Danna Staaf was in La Jolla when the stranding happened. She went over to the beach to take a look and decided to do some cheap research. It costs money to take a boat out to catch squid, but if the squid come to you, the price is just the cost of a few freezer storage bags.

  Strandings of sea life are fairly common. On Cape Cod, sea turtles commonly strand after fall storms. Whales often stranded on the Cape during the Pilgrim era. Even jellyfish strand in huge numbers, making beaches treacherously gelatinous until predators, like gulls, carry the carcasses away. Sometimes animals strand because they’re ill, or because they’ve been trapped in currents, but most of the time, scientists have no idea why marine life washes up on beaches in great numbers.