Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  Julie also wanted to know how Dosidicus could move so quickly from layer to layer. The species’ ability to travel quickly up and down the water column, through various high- and low-oxygen layers, would be somewhat equivalent to our being able to jog from sea level to a 20,000-foot peak without feeling oxygen-deprived. Perhaps, Julie theorized, the Humboldt has particularly large gills and can take in more oxygen than, say, market squid—squid that tend to live closer to the oxygen-rich surface. Julie wanted to compare the Humboldt’s gill size to that of other squid, octopuses, and cuttlefishes. Thus, this Architeuthis specimen was like manna from heaven. She could include what she learned about the gills of this rarely studied animal in her thesis.

  Around the dissection table, the scientists began to divvy up the Architeuthis body parts. Field himself regretted not having the stomach to study. His specialty is looking at the stomach contents of animals that live in the sea in order to find out what they eat.

  Other scientists regretted the lack of eyes and gonads, which had been picked over quite thoroughly by greedy seabirds. “I guess those are the most delicious parts,” Julie decided.

  Samples were taken to see if toxins had accumulated in the specimen. The amount of mercury in the body tissue could help scientists figure out where Architeuthis sits in the food chain. The more mercury accumulated by the animal, the higher the animal is in the eat-or-be-eaten hierarchy. Predator fish like large tuna and sharks usually have much more mercury in their body tissue than do prey fish like herring. The toxicology results surprised the scientists. The giant squid flesh contained much lower levels of mercury and other toxins than they expected.

  Field explained later that “in general, the contaminant levels from the tissue samples all suggested low levels in the Architeuthis, which was interesting, as many other animals sampled from Monterey Bay have been shown to have high to very high contaminant loadings.” The scientists speculated that the giant squid spent very little time near the Bay shoreline. But since little is understood about how Architeuthis metabolizes food, the jury is still out on what the results mean.

  Lou Zeidberg of UCLA, who often works with Gilly and Julie on various projects, wanted to examine the specimen for statoliths—minuscule structures made of calcium carbonate, like seashells. Small enough to fit easily on the tip of your finger, these little structures, part of the vestibular system that helps the animal tell up from down in an ocean environment, behave somewhat like the balancing apparatus in our own ears. Fish have similar objects, called otoliths. Statoliths and otoliths differ from species to species. Experts can look at a statolith or otolith and identify the species it came from. “We can also measure them and extrapolate how big the prey species was,” Zeidberg explained. “You find these in the squid stomach, and find that perhaps it’s 4 millimeters long, and know that it came from a fish that’s 40 centimeters long. John Field looked at all the stomach contents of Dosidicus and extrapolated the size of the hake that the squid were eating. This way, you can figure out the food web in a much more powerful manner.”

  Scientists have also learned to use statoliths, which may be retrieved either from a predator’s stomach or from the body of a dead specimen, to estimate the age of a squid. Statoliths grow over the course of an animal’s life, putting on a small layer each day. Experts can read the layers and age the specimen rather like we can read the age of a tree by counting the rings. It sounds simple, but there’s an art to the process. Cutting a statolith for study is like cutting a diamond: Before it will reveal its secrets, it must be properly prepared. This requires delicate craftsmanship, since the three-dimensional, irregularly shaped object may easily be destroyed. Despite its anomalies, the statolith has two basic sides, which must be carefully filed to reveal the tree ring–like lines inside. In a sense, the tiny object must be peeled down to expose the layers. “A lot of people find it helpful to think of an onion as an analogy,” Zeidberg said. The scientific craftsmen must be careful to cut at only certain angles so as not to destroy the layers themselves.

  Owing to a scarcity of data, how long Architeuthis lives is currently a matter of debate. A few researchers think the animal, which lives in deep, cold waters, might live as long as twelve years. Others suggest the upper age limit might be three years. Acquiring and studying a large number of Architeuthis statoliths could help resolve the disagreement.

  Zeidberg sat firmly in the three-year camp, but he wanted to know for sure. He dug the statoliths out of the Architeuthis head, then took them back to Gilly’s Monterey laboratory. Two experts in Architeuthis statoliths, a husband-and-wife team, just happened to be in town for a conference. Zeidberg joined with them in trying to age the giant squid specimen, but the right equipment wasn’t available. The Gilly lab is well equipped with modern technology, but it lacked the precise technology—a very high-powered microscope with certain very specific types of lighting—to prepare statoliths. The couple took one of the statolith specimens back to the Falklands, where their own lab had the appropriate tools. As of this writing, their findings haven’t been published.

  During the Architeuthis dissection, Gilly was in his element. He hadn’t been feeling well when he’d been called in, but all the excitement cheered him up. Wearing two pairs of glasses, a regular pair on his nose and a jeweler’s visor with magnifying lenses on his forehead, he spoke to the television cameras. “This is a miraculous thing,” he said. “Only four or five of these things have been found in the history of California science as far as we know.”

  Gilly was surprised to find chromatophores—cells that contain color—on what seemed to be interior muscular tissue. Julie had also found chromatophores on the gills themselves. “Unusual,” she mused. Squid, octopuses, and cuttlefishes have a wide palette of colors on their skin that they can flash under a variety of conditions, but these are believed to be modes of communication.

  “Why,” Gilly wondered, “would there be chromatophores inside the animal?” There are several other species of squid that also have chromatophores on the inside of their bodies, but no one knows what function those chromatophores might fulfill. Gilly also noted that the specimen’s ganglia—clusters of nerve cells—seemed to be proportionally smaller than equivalent clusters in the Humboldt.

  “Does that mean that Architeuthis is less intellectually advanced than the Humboldt?” I asked.

  He said he just couldn’t answer such a question. Too little is known about cephalopod intelligence to make such comparisons.

  Gilly cut off a piece of flesh and tasted it. For science’s sake. Previously Clyde Roper had grilled up some long-frozen giant squid flesh for a dinner with friends and colleagues in honor of one of his students who had just passed his doctoral exams. This was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, not far from where Piccot and Squires chopped the tentacles off their giant squid more than a century earlier. When Roper handed his hot-off-the-grill delicacy around to the dinner guests, it turned out that he was the only diner willing to partake. He didn’t eat much. Architeuthis flesh tasted like ammonia, something like floor cleaner, perhaps, he declared. Since his experiment, other scientists had concurred with Roper’s “floor cleaner” finding.

  However, Gilly disagreed with that reigning scientific wisdom. He had changed his vehicle’s battery terminals more than once in his life and accidentally gotten battery acid on his lips. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The giant squid flesh, he said, reminded him of that.

  “But the texture was nice,” he said later. “The difference may be in the fact that we had it sashimi-style and Clyde had cooked it. We need to have a group tasting. After all, it’s all in the presentation.”

  One of the most important tasks of the field scientist is to properly preserve specimens for study by later generations. In the past hundred years or so, all over the world, vast libraries of such information have been archived in dusty museum drawers, university basements, and, in modern times, ultra-deep-freeze freezers.

  These archived specimens will pro
vide answers to questions scientists don’t yet even know they want to ask. In 1835, for example, Charles Darwin collected and sent back for archiving a mockingbird from the island of Floreana in the Galápagos. Several decades later, the species became extinct. Today, scientists are using the genetics from the archived bird to reestablish the species on the island.

  And so, what remained of Sean Van Sommeran’s Architeuthis was put in plastic bags and preserved in a freezer at -20° Celsius. Eventually, it was sent to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, an institution with scientific roots reaching back to the days of Theophilus Piccot. There it was archived on ice by Eric Hochberg, a world expert on cephalopod taxonomy.

  Only a few months after Sean Van Sommeran brought his tattered giant squid to the scientific team, a craigslist posting appeared: “Free Giant Squid. Location—the Ocean. Can no longer afford food costs, due to recession. To good home only.” There was only one response following the entry: “I would take it in, but I’m not sure if it will get along with our cats.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FUZZY MATH AND TENTACLES

  It appears that the tentacles coil into an irregular ball

  in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey

  within coils of their body immediately after striking.

  —TSUNEMI KUBODERA AND KYOICHI MORI, 2005 Proceedings of the Royal Society

  n July 17, 1838, American diplomat Richard Rush set sail from London on the triple-masted schooner The Mediator. He was headed for the United States with eleven boxes of English gold sovereigns—the dowry for the soon-to-be-consummated marriage between scientific knowledge and the American people. Carrying boxes of money in a ship that could easily sink in a transatlantic crossing was risky, but in those days there was no way to transfer money except to move it physically from one place to another.

  The money was a bequest from an obscure English scientist, James Lewis Macie Smithson, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland. Smithson had left his fortune to the United States of America to be used “for an increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Smithson had never visited America. No one knows why he left the American people his hefty fortune, which came to him through his mother, an English royal. Nevertheless, his bequest has been successful, probably beyond his wildest dreams.

  In the United States, the English coins were melted down into about half a million dollars’ worth of gold. After nearly a decade of debate—states’ rights senators opposed acceptance of the bequest because the institution would increase the power and prestige of the central government—the money gave birth to the Smithsonian Institution, today the world’s largest research institution with about five hundred staff scientists and another five hundred or so scientific fellows on temporary assignments.

  Among those scientists is Clyde Roper, a man whose obsession with the giant squid has made him the model for the main character of several novels and who has been featured, like Bill Gilly, in numerous television documentaries. To find out why Roper pursued the giant squid, I visited him in the office where he’s worked since 1966. Walking to his lab through the Smithsonian’s maze of windowless hallways was like visiting ancient, musty catacombs. A faint odor of decayed flesh seemed to waft through the air.

  Roper’s own rooms are filled with bits and pieces of squid and other animals stored in formalin-filled, clear glass specimen jars; with stacks of files containing his numerous research papers; and with all the flotsam and jetsam and detritus and sediments that have accumulated in corners and on top of filing cabinets and shelves throughout the course of his forty-five-year career in science. His place could be a museum in its own right.

  Science has been good to Roper, but he has certain regrets. His professional life’s compulsion, to find a live giant squid, has not been achieved. I asked him about the roots of his Ahablike fixation.

  His bushy eyebrows arched.

  “You don’t work in cephalopods for very long without realizing that the big one is out there,” he told me in his Downeast New England accent.

  Growing up on the edge of the North Atlantic, Roper had always known about the giant squid, but his interest changed to something more compelling after an event that occurred on Plum Island, along the northern Massachusetts coastline, quite near where Roper grew up and only a few miles from where Rob Yeomans teaches high school marine biology.

  Roper told me the abbreviated version of his first giant squid encounter. Curious, I did a little research of my own.

  On a frigid winter morning in February 1980, thirty-six-year-old Steve Atherton, a family friend of Yeomans, woke with mixed feelings about the Nor’easter raging outside his Newburyport cottage. The moisture was needed, but the bone-chilling wind blowing in off the North Atlantic would make for a nasty beach run. As Atherton drank his early morning brew, he briefly toyed with the idea of staying warm inside with his wife and another cup of coffee. Then habit took over. His daily run—spring, summer, fall, and winter, no matter what the weather—was a matter of pride. Atherton opened the door and trotted down the desolate beach.

  Plum Island, a nine-mile-long, six-thousand-year-old barrier of sand and rock that protects the mainland from the open North Atlantic, remains mostly in its natural state. When Atherton ran over the sand that frigid, windy morning he saw what he thought was a log washed in by the gale. But both the color and the shape were wrong. Finally, only a few yards away, Atherton understood: It was a squid. A huge squid, of a size unlike any he’d ever seen.

  It seemed nearly dead, but its eyes were still clear. Its two feeding tentacles were missing and the thing was huge, almost beyond imagination. But it was mostly the eyes that he would remember. They were as large as dinner plates. They still seemed, even in that deathly state, to have an eerie ability to follow prey with an intense and unwavering focus.

  Atherton thought he was alone on the beach that morning, but from a distance another person had seen the same animal—from a patrol vehicle.

  I hope that isn’t a whale, Bill Papoulias thought to himself. Maybe it will wash away.

  Papoulias, the local federal Fish and Wildlife Service officer, didn’t like whales on his beach. Whales were a pain in the derriere, particularly dead whales or, even worse, dying whales. There’d be paperwork, burial detail, and slews of annoying press calls and stressed-out animal activists. A dead or dying whale was not what he needed, not this early in the morning and not on this nasty day.

  Maybe, Papoulias hoped, whatever was out there would go back where it came from. He continued his patrol but on the return trip saw that the thing had washed up even farther. It was now solidly beached above the wrack line. It wasn’t a whale at all, but a massive squid. This was good from the point of view of paperwork, but not so good when it came to figuring out what to do with all that dead flesh.

  Papoulias figured that since it was so large, he ought to report the carcass. But who would you report a squid to? He tried the hotline for Boston’s New England Aquarium, but the weekend operator was blasé.

  “If it’s not a marine mammal, we don’t handle the problem,” she answered.

  Next Papoulias called Bill Coltin, the photographer for the local newspaper. Coltin was intrigued. Papoulias picked up the photographer and graduate student Barney Schlinger and took them out to look at the animal. When Schlinger saw the huge carcass, he was awestruck. He and Papoulias started to examine the squid while Coltin took photos nonstop. No one yet knew exactly what kind of squid it was, but they all knew it was a good story.

  When the photos went out over the newswire, it was finally identified as an Architeuthis—one of the few nearly intact specimens recovered up to that time.

  The Plum Island squid

  Papoulias just wanted it off his beach.

  One man’s headache is another man’s treasure. The aquarium operator, it turned out, had forwarded the message. Aquarium biologist Greg Early, annoyed by the request to drive an hour from Boston to Newburyport to respond to
a squid, called Papoulias.

  “Put it in a bucket and we’ll get up there and pick it up,” Early said.

  “Uh, I don’t think it will fit,” Papoulias answered.

  A bigger-than-bucket-size squid … now Early was interested. Who knew what this might be? Plum Island was a place where strange things from the North Atlantic often washed up. He and an assistant drove up to take a look.

  When the pair saw the animal, Early decided he had to have it. He dug it out of the frozen sand, then recruited a crew to carry it to his truck. It took ten men and a stretcher.

  At the aquarium, the team preserved the specimen, but no one knew exactly what to do with it. From mantle tip to arm tips, the thing was 30 feet long. Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology considered providing a final resting place, but museum officials nixed that idea. They worried that the floors in the classic old museum building wouldn’t be strong enough to hold it. For a while it sat in the front entry area of the New England Aquarium, but staff complained about the aroma.

  Clyde Roper, thrilled that such a rare specimen had washed up on a beach not far from his childhood home, drove all the way up from Washington, D.C., to take a look. Roper decided the carcass belonged in the Smithsonian, where there was plenty of room to display it, where the floors were strong enough to hold it, and where thousands of schoolkids every day could have a look at this real-life sea monster.

  He squeezed the squid into a coffin, the only container he could find that was large enough, and drove it back to D.C. For years, the squid rested honorably in the institution’s Museum of Natural History rotunda beside the 13-foot-tall African bull elephant.

  Roper claims that, after the Hope Diamond, the giant squid was the museum’s second most popular exhibit. Then the Women’s Christmas Committee decided to have their Christmas party in the rotunda. Not willing to host the smelly squid at their gala gathering, the women decreed: The corroded cadaver had to go. For a while, it sat in the basement. Barney Schlinger, with Papoulias the day the animal washed up on Plum Island, ended up heading a UCLA research lab. When he had to travel to D.C. for business reasons, he used to sneak in to visit it hidden away among the dusty old walruses. Today, replaced in the Smithsonian by newer and better preserved specimens, the Plum Island giant squid sits in a glass sarcophagus in the Georgia Aquarium by a display of live whales.