But our understanding of the behavior of these few sea species is anomalous. Of most sea life, we know nothing. Indeed, much of the life in the ocean has yet to be catalogued. Discovering facts about animals that live in the ocean depths is inordinately difficult—expensive and time-consuming and technology-dependent. Money is tight. We can’t afford to spend much on each individual species down there. But, to Julie’s good fortune, some money at least is available for studying Humboldts. Commercial fishermen charge the Humboldt squid with the crime of eating salmon and hake and smaller squid, species that commercial fishermen sell at market. This connects the Humboldt to a big-money product and so makes research funding more available than it would be otherwise.
As her third tagged Humboldt swam away, Julie was thrilled. So was Gilly. “We’ve had hauls like this down in Baja,” he said, “but never anything like this up here before.”
For a scientist, data is the be-all and end-all, the ultimate goal, the sine qua non of fieldwork. No data, no science. No science, no funding. The goal of an evening cruise like this is to get enough information to keep Gilly’s lab humming for months. It doesn’t always happen. Fishing for data is as risky as fishing for big-money bluefin. You might hunt and hunt and just as easily come up with nothing as come up with a fortune. The odds are better than wasting your time in Vegas, but not by much.
Julie’s tracking tags were fairly large in size, 175 millimeters (a little less than 7 inches in length) and 75 grams (a little less than 3 ounces)—“the size of a karaoke microphone,” Gilly mused. You might use something about the same size on a sea turtle or a tuna or a shark. The tags, called Pop-up Archival Transmitting Tags, come with a pair of plastic pins, but it’s up to the scientist to figure out how best to attach the tag to the research animal. The scientist can also program the tag to release from the animal in a specified number of days. Stewart had chosen to attach the tag to the fins, using the pins, and to program the tag for release in seventeen days, by which time the data storage chip would be full.
As the squid moves vertically and horizontally through the water, the computer chip in the tag records information, including temperature and light levels, from which depth can be calculated. This information is recorded on the computer chip, but not all of that is sent to the satellite. Instead, because transmitting the data to a satellite is expensive, Julie has opted for the information to be sent to the satellite only periodically. From the satellite, the data is sent to her laptop.
The receiving satellite, one of a six-satellite system called the Argos System, has been providing scientists with important animal behavior data for more than thirty years. Today, well over four thousand tagged animals worldwide provide data via this technology. Much of what we know about sea turtles, for example, comes from Argos technology. By using tracking tags, Barbara Block, a colleague of Gilly at the Hopkins Marine Station who studies sharks, learned that great white sharks migrate far offshore into the Pacific, overturning the belief that the animals stay fairly close to the shoreline. Other tracking tags have shown that dolphins dive much more deeply after prey than hitherto expected. Recently scientists began tracking walrus migrations through the Arctic seas.
The information from the tag that’s beamed up to the satellite then down to the scientist is useful, but the information archived in the tag itself, the instant-by-instant story of what the animal’s been up to, is the real treasure. When the tag pops up, it transmits its location to the satellite. Scientists will go to great lengths to retrieve that tag, since it has more of what they want. But they also want the instrument itself, since it can be sent back to the manufacturer for reprogramming and reuse. Most marine labs can’t afford to waste $3,500.
Unfortunately, looking for a tracking tag about the size of a karaoke microphone bobbing in the waves of the ocean is like looking not just for a needle in a haystack but for a needle in a moving haystack. The task can be both time-consuming and frustrating. You know the item is there, but you just can’t see it. Stewart remembers being out on the ocean looking for a tag and knowing from the satellite signal that it was right there, almost beside her. But she just couldn’t find it. Eventually she had to give up and accept the financial and scientific loss.
Most tags carry information about a reward if found. Scientists often get them back that way. Fishermen know to pull things like that out of the water. Beachcombers may pick them up. Surfers may find them. Salvador Jorgensen, a great white shark researcher in Barbara Block’s lab, once searched high and low for one of his tags. Determined to get his data, he followed the pinpointing signal. It led to a residential neighborhood, then to an individual house. He knocked on the door.
“Do you have my tag?” he asked.
It turned out to be in the wet suit of a surfer who had found it in the water, put it in his pocket, then carried it home and forgot about it.
If following the animal can be expensive, every once in a while, scientists get lucky. The animal comes to them.
CHAPTER FOUR
Architeuthis ON ICE
And God said: Let the waters teem with countless living creatures.
—GENESIS
he morning of June 25, 2008, wasn’t a good one on Monterey Bay. It was a little more than a year before Julie and her research team came upon the huge shoal of Humboldt squid.
That early summer morning, the shark hunting hadn’t been great. The weather wasn’t holding up. The bay was choppy. The wind was picking up. Conditions were going from bad to worse, and so, even though it was only around 9 a.m., the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation’s Sean Van Sommeran decided to call it a day. No shark tagging on this trip. He was about to head back to Santa Cruz. Then, like Theophilus Piccot more than a century earlier, Sean spotted something odd. A large object was on the surface of the sea, rising and falling in the heightening swells. A number of birds were battling over something valuable. What Van Sommeran saw several hundreds yards off seemed to him to have all the features of a feeding event. Perhaps, he thought, it involved a shark. Maybe he’d get at least one animal tagged before heading home. Otherwise, all that expensive boat fuel would be wasted.
As he drew closer, Sean could see a slick on the water’s surface. Gulls and shearwaters and even a black-footed albatross were having a field day. He realized the birds were feasting on some kind of animal, alive or dead. He thought it might be a marine mammal, perhaps an elephant seal, since the boat wasn’t that far from Año Nuevo Island, a favorite haul-out for the massive creatures, which can weigh as much as 5,000 pounds.
As they closed in, the birds drew back. Sean saw a large, moldering mass just beneath the small whitecaps. Bits and pieces of torn and shredded white and red protoplasm were still attached to the main body.
Seabirds love eyes. Those delectably soft, gooey organs are usually the first to be eaten. And in this carcass they were indeed gone. The stomach had been torn away as well. Dangling from the main body of disintegrating flesh were ten appendages, none of which seemed intact. Just a bit of what once might have been a fin rose from time to time above the waves.
At first Sean thought the decaying specimen was a Moroteuthis robusta, a robust clubhook squid. Said by some to be the ocean’s third-largest squid, after the giant and colossal squids, Moroteuthis can reach human-size lengths if measured from tentacle tip to mantle tip. While they aren’t as common in the bay as market squid, Loligo opalescens, neither are they rare. He’d seen many others.
Then Sean took a second look. The specimen, shredded as it was, seemed too big to be a clubhook.
“That might be an Architeuthis,” he said, thinking aloud. “It’s gotta be. It’s so big.”
“What’s that?” some students along on the trip asked him.
Van Sommeran was thrilled. He’d read about the giant squid, but, to his knowledge, there hadn’t been any recovered in Monterey Bay. To him, the find was better than a gold strike.
He explained the specimen’s value to the students on board: Only
a few giant squid had been identified along the California coastline. He knew the teuthologists would want to take a look at it. He regretted the loss of the specimen’s eyes. The skin still seemed to be changing colors. He figured that he might have missed finding a live animal—or at least one with intact eyes—by only a few minutes. Still, he knew he was in possession of a scientific treasure trove. His first thought was that the animal might have been killed by a shark, but no one would ever be able to pinpoint the exact cause of death.
Sean picked up a gaff and leaned out over the water, gently pulling the carcass toward him, trying to secure it without further damaging it. Two crew members picked up nets and, together, with part of the carcass in each net, hauled it on board. They beelined back to Santa Cruz.
He started calling his contacts.
“I’ve got an Architeuthis,” he said triumphantly.
“How do you know?” one person asked.
Duh, Sean thought to himself. “You don’t need a guidebook to know an Architeuthis when you see one.”
The scientists who met him on the dock confirmed his find. They were as excited as he was. Only four other such specimens had been recorded on the California coast, and none of those had been found recently. Marine science has come a long way since the days of Theophilus Piccot, when the most pressing question was merely to prove the existence of such a huge skeleton-free creature. Modern science had developed a number of analytical techniques that could be applied to the squid, dead though it was, including, of course, DNA analysis. This dead animal was bound to be the center of a lot of scientific attention.
Theophilus Piccot’s squid may have marked the beginning of serious scientific research into the giant squid, but our specific knowledge hasn’t increased much over the past hundred years. With the invention of deep-sea submersibles, professional and public interest has grown, but some important and rather basic questions remain to be answered. One of the most pressing: “Just what is a giant squid?” Incredibly, more than a century after the photo of Piccot’s squid appeared in the British science journal, scientists have yet to determine how many species of giant squid, Architeuthis, exist in the world.
The word species can be either singular or plural. It usually denotes a particular group of animals that can breed and produce offspring, and these offspring can also produce offspring. Whereas a horse and a donkey can produce a mule, the mule is sterile and cannot produce its own offspring. Therefore, a horse and a donkey are considered two separate species.
A species is given two names, both taken from the Latin language and by convention italicized. The first name denotes the animal’s genus, a grouping of very close relatives. The second denotes the specific species. The easiest way to think about this, the Smithsonian’s Clyde Roper suggests, is to think about a car—a Ford Fusion, perhaps. “Ford” would be the genus; “Fusion” would be the specific species. By convention, the first word of the scientific name is capitalized; the second is not.
Over the past several centuries, whole scientific careers have been based on debating which animals belong to which genera (“genera” is the plural of “genus”) and whether two very similar animals belong to the same species or should be classified as two separate species. To the outside world, these debates may seem like medieval how-many-angels-on-a-pinhead debates, but the scientific naming of an animal is more than just esoteric. It is the foundation of the biological sciences.
When scientists talk about various organisms, they have to be sure they’re all talking about the same thing. Species may look alike and even seem to the casual observer to be exactly the same, but looks can be deceiving. Two look-alikes may turn out to behave quite differently. Each individual species has something special to offer.
Evolution has blessed Julie’s Dosidicus gigas, for example, with unusual sucker rings, sharp enough to easily slash a person’s arm or leg. The squid’s beak and sucker rings have the strength and sharpness of well-manufactured steel, yet they’re wholly organic. This remarkable fact is providing materials designers with clues as to how to design new substances that remain hard and sharp, like strong metals, but are made entirely of protein rather than of elements mined from the earth. Researchers hope that they will eventually be able to design a material that mimics this wholly organic structure. If they can, the benefits to human medicine will be profound. Some investigators, for example, hope to be able to use materials like this to create organic aids to amputees.
That’s why species conservation is important—not only because of conservation itself but also because those species are gold mines of possibility. And in order to ensure the survival of these species, scientists must know as much as possible about their needs. “Each species has slightly different requirements for life and for survival,” Roper said. Several species of squid that look the same may spawn at different times, or perhaps one group will spawn and attach its eggs to the seafloor while another will release its fertilized eggs into the water. Or one species may possess the key to curing a human illness while its closely related cousin does not. “You really need to know the biology and the characteristics of each species,” Roper said. “In medicine, so many animals, of course, are just extremely important in providing pharmaceuticals. In closely related species, one might be incredibly effective in treating a particular disease, but another that’s very similar might be totally ineffective.”
A species name also helps bring clarity to some very messy human discussions of the natural world. The common name for an animal varies from language to language and from culture to culture, but the Latin name, the scientific name, is universal. This eliminates confusion.
This is particularly true in the case of the giant squid, with its centuries-old history of so many different popular names for what might well have been the same animal. Since the mid-1800s, the giant squid has been given many different scientific names as well—at least twenty, denoting as many as twenty different species. But few scientists genuinely believe that the ocean has as many as twenty different giant squid species. The confusion primarily stems from the lack of specimens to study and the lack of time and money to do research.
The question is unlikely to be settled officially anytime soon. Eventually, when funding becomes available, DNA analysis will probably be called into play. Meanwhile, some scientists believe there is only one Architeuthis species spread throughout the earth’s ocean, while others hold that there may be many. Most experts, according to Roper, believe that there are three separate species—one based in the North Atlantic, one based in the North Pacific, and one based in the Southern Ocean, the contiguous ocean surrounding Antarctica.
Only hours after Sean Van Sommeran brought his tattered specimen on board, Julie Stewart got a surprise phone call from her colleague John Field. The squid was going to be dissected at Field’s National Marine Fisheries Service lab on the north coast of Monterey Bay, in Santa Cruz. There would be lots of scientists at the party, among them her doctoral adviser, Bill Gilly, and Julie was invited. Field would be the lead author of the paper that would report their work to the rest of the scientific community.
The next day the Architeuthis carcass was hauled out of Field’s subzero freezer and laid on the cold steel table. Some of the researchers gathered around the table like a bunch of television doctors performing an autopsy, although jeans were more common than white coats at this surgical procedure. Other scientists, observing officials, television cameras, print reporters, and other hangers-on milled about. Julie found herself in the middle of a scientific and media frenzy. In her casual clothes, without a chance to gather her thoughts, she was called upon to explain her research in front of very demanding television crews.
Word had spread fast. Everyone wanted to be there. Researchers from San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences had driven several hours to attend the gala. When it came time to dissect, Julie pulled on her latex gloves and stepped up to the table. Once again, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She dug
into the carcass, trying to ignore the caustic smell of ammonia.
She carved out the gills. She wanted to do a comparison between the gills of this giant squid and those of her own longterm research subject, the Humboldt. Her hope was to better understand the details of how squid gills work. When she first thought about what questions to ask for her doctoral thesis, Julie was interested in how Humboldt squid managed to survive for long periods of time in parts of the ocean that had low levels of oxygen.
While the ocean contains oxygen almost everywhere, it is not evenly distributed. Surface waters contain almost as much oxygen as our atmosphere, but levels decrease as you descend—to a point. Then levels begin to rise again. This middle layer, the oxygen minimum layer, is not static. In any one location, like everything else in the ocean, it fluctuates. Over time, the layer may shift up or down hundreds of feet, depending on factors like water temperature.
One of the marvelous things about the Humboldt squid is its ability to move quickly from layers of water with low levels of oxygen to layers with high levels of oxygen, so it has a larger habitat range than many sea species. Some other sea species are able to survive for a time in low-oxygen environments if necessary, but it’s possible that the Humboldt and some other cephalopods may sometimes actually seek these places out as refuges, since they can’t easily be followed by predators. The sperm whale can dive into these depths to follow and catch squid prey, but only because this whale is able to hold its breath underwater for anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes. Most other squid predators do not enjoy this particular talent and thus cannot survive for long in low-oxygen layers. The ability to survive in water with low levels of oxygen may be yet another reason why cephalopods have survived so many extinction events.
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