Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  Getting his very own dead Architeuthis only whetted Roper’s research appetite. He yearned to know more about what the animal was like when it was alive. Was it really the dangerous fiend that a thousand years of sea legends claimed it was? Piccot’s dangerous adventure seems to have been a fluke, since no one has seriously reported such an event since then, but why had it happened at all?

  The only way to answer some of these questions, Roper determined, was to film a live specimen in its deepwater habitat. To find the giant squid, Roper first searched for sperm whales, whose principle diet is squid of many different species. Sperm whales often dive thousands of feet below the water’s surface in search of squid—giant, colossal, Humboldt, and otherwise.

  Therefore, Roper reasoned, where there were sperm whales, there would be squid. He and other scientists had analyzed the stomach contents of many dead sperm whales over the years and concluded that one whale may eat as many as forty-thousand squid a week. The species of squid eaten by the whale can be determined by looking at the squid beaks, which do not get digested. By separating out giant squid beaks from the other squid beaks, Roper estimated that a sperm whale might eat one or two Architeuthis a week.

  “It’s fuzzy math, because we don’t really have much data,” he told me, “but a sperm whale might eat between fifty to a hundred giant squid a year.” He suspects that sperm whales are eating only a “minuscule” fraction of the number of Architeuthis in the ocean depths. “There’s a lot of giant squid out there, but we don’t see them, because we don’t live where they live. Sperm whales and giant squid are neighbors who share the same feeding ground.” When a giant squid dies several thousand feet down, chances are good that the body will be consumed by other predators before any of its parts have a chance to float to the surface. Consequently, Roper suggests that Architeuthis, far from being rare, may be a fairly common deep-sea species.

  In 1996 Roper and Greg Marshall of National Geographic put an inflatable kayak in Atlantic waters around the Azores islands and paddled over to several female whales. I asked Roper if it was dangerous to interact with such a large animal while in such a tiny vessel.

  “Their reactions were variable, but never violent or aggressive,” Roper said. “You have to approach them slowly and carefully and from behind.” Sperm whales, when hunting, surface between dives for only about twelve minutes at a time. In that short period, Roper and Marshall managed to attach submersible cameras to the heads of two whales. After about an hour, the cameras popped off and the team retrieved them to look at the footage. They heard a lot of whale vocalizations and got images of a variety of deep-sea life. Fascinating. No giant squid, though.

  In 1997, Roper and his colleagues took more high-tech equipment, including an underwater roving vehicle, to a sperm whale haunt off the New Zealand coast. Again, no luck. There were plenty of sperm whales, but the expedition did not catch an image of a giant squid. In one final attempt, in 1999 he and his colleagues went to Kaikoura Canyon, a deep-sea location off New Zealand favored by sperm whales. Six specimens of giant squid had been brought up by the deep-sea fishing fleet, so the canyon looked like a good bet. But again, no luck. Whales, yes. Giant squid, no.

  “I’d go there again if I had the funding,” Roper told me wistfully. One of his big issues is the lack of funding for ocean research, something he feels is both unwise and unjust. “Why aren’t we spending billions studying our oceans?” he asked me. “We know more about the moon’s behind than we do about the ocean’s bottom.”

  Roper wasn’t the only Ahab in search of a live giant squid. Finally, in 2004 and 2005, Japanese scientist Tsunemi Kubodera succeeded in his own quest. Also using sperm whales as guides, Kubodera’s research team took the first photos and video of a living Pacific Architeuthis swimming in deep waters near the Japanese coast. The first picture was of a live giant squid that the Japanese team had caught and brought up to the surface. It died soon after, but the team was able to get a few photos before the animal’s demise. The second opportunity allowed Kubodera and his team to video the giant squid in its deep-sea habitat using its feeding tentacles to try to capture prey. The news flashed around the world: The giant squid had finally been located and filmed in its deep-sea habitat. Roper congratulated his successful colleague with a “job well done.”

  A Kubodera screengrab of a giant squid underwater

  For at least the past thousand years, and perhaps even longer, people have debated the question of how dangerous Architeuthis might be. If you just look at the size and power of its tentacles and at the teeth on the suckers on the tentacular tips, you’ll probably come to a pretty grim conclusion. Many scientists accept the gist of the tale told by Theophilus Piccot—that he and his assistant were aggressively attacked—although they question the information the men provided as to the size and vitality of the animal. Piccot said the animal’s body was 60 feet long, but of course, he hadn’t stopped to measure. In the popular imagination, the Kraken is both huge and vicious. In the popular novel Beast, Peter Benchley’s fiendish squid is about 100 feet in length.

  In reality, the animals studied recently have been about 40 feet or less, measuring from the tip of the mantle to the tip of the arms. The mantle itself often measures seven feet or less. Piccot described the beak as quite large, but modern studies show that most giant squid beaks fit easily in the palm of a man’s hand. It’s possible that the animals were larger in Piccot’s day—the general consensus is that sea life has decreased in size over the past century—but it’s also possible that the fishermen may have amplified certain aspects of their experience.

  Some of the exaggeration may be due to the elasticity of the squid’s two feeding tentacles, which can sometimes stretch to many times their normal length. When a squid is dead, the feeding tentacles lose their elasticity completely, so that some descriptions may overestimate the true tentacle length of a living animal. The late South African squid expert Martina Roeleveld believed that the tentacle length of a living Architeuthis is in fact quite varied. Her own measurements of numerous specimens showed that the tentacle length may be anywhere from 23 percent to an amazing 832 percent of the length of the specimen’s mantle.

  What is the temperament of a giant squid? Is it laid-back, or is it a rapacious hunter? Does it pass its time suspended in the water column, waiting for unsuspecting prey to drift by, as do some other mid-water species? Does it live alone, with a few other squid, or in large groups, like Dosidicus gigas? Many people claim the giant squid is quite aggressive. Piccot described the animal as dangerous, but he had had an unfortunate encounter, which likely influenced his fact-finding. Some suggest that the animal is benign. The truth is probably somewhere in between. I, for one, wouldn’t want to meet one by accident while diving or in a small boat.

  Roper, on the other hand, would probably be delighted to do just that. Of course, he’s known as somewhat of a fanatic. A YouTube animation from Britain has him answering the question “What do giant squid eat?” with: “Anything they want.” At the same time, the animation shows several muscular and menacing giant squid arms pulling the bearded scientist and his little skiff down under the gently roiling sea surface.

  He’s grinning as he goes down with his ship.

  I asked: Would he paddle up behind a surfaced Architeuthis as he did with the sperm whales?

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any real concern about that, as long as I had a waterproof video camera, maybe with a flotation device for the camera. It would be absolutely thrilling. Can you imagine?

  “Can you imagine,” he continued, “how absolutely spectacular it would be to swim along with them? That gigantic eyeball as big as your head! I’m not sure I’d look forward to a gigantic embrace….”

  Truly a man possessed, I thought to myself. I asked if he discounted the tale of Theophilus Piccot.

  He said he’d take it with a grain of salt. No one really knows much about the animal’s temperament. About Piccot, Roper said: “A giant s
quid that appears at the surface is not normal. It’s either dead or dying. The tales sound wonderful and exciting, but for somebody like me, you want to deal with the truth. How do you determine truth? Show me the evidence—a confirmable photograph or video, something that really will prove that the animal was there and alive and vigorous.”

  Nevertheless, in some of his writing, Roper exhibits no Gentle Giant illusions about Architeuthis. “Two-thirds of their total length consists of two long, bungee cord–like tentacles with sucker-studded clubs at the ends, used for capturing their prey like a two-tongued toad,” he once wrote.

  For quite a while, most people believed that the giant squid was the world’s largest and most ferocious invertebrate. But recent studies of the colossal squid, which lives in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, show that this animal may far outshine the giant squid in these matters. The mantle of the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, may be twice the length of the giant squid mantle, and measuring from mantle tip to tentacle tip, the animal may be as long as 60 feet. We don’t know for sure, since we haven’t recovered enough intact colossal squid specimens to be sure. But we have recovered quite a few colossal squid beaks. French scientist Yves Cherel and Canadian Keith A. Hobson analyzed the chemistry of those beaks, as well as of giant squid beaks, in order to learn more about the diet of both species. They found that the colossal squid eats much higher up the food chain, like sharks and some of the toothed whales, than does the giant squid.

  Nevertheless, the photos and video of the live giant squid taken by Kubodera seem to show a highly focused hunter with powerful feeding tentacles. In a 2005 Royal Society paper, Kubodera and coauthor Kyoichi Mori described their September 30, 2004, encounter. The team dropped a line baited with smaller squid to a depth of about 900 meters, or roughly 3,000 feet, into a deepwater canyon near the Ogasawara Islands off the coast of southern Japan. They also dropped a deepwater camera, which caught images in which an Architeuthis approaches the bait with open arms. Next, the two tentacles flash out. One, hooked by the squid jig, breaks off after several hours and is brought to the surface.

  “Architeuthis appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey,” the two scientists wrote. “The recovered section of tentacle was still functioning, with the large suckers of the tentacle club repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers…. Giant squid are unique among cephalopods as they can hold the long tentacle shafts together with a series of small suckers and corresponding knobs along their length that enable the shafts to be ‘zipped’ together. This results in a single shaft bearing a pair of tentacle clubs in clawlike arrangement at the tip.”

  Reading this, I wondered how many swimmers would be jumping into the water alongside Roper, were he ever fortunate enough to find an Architeuthis to swim with.

  A Kubodera photo of a giant squid being captured on the surface of the water

  Because we have more ships at sea these days, we’re recovering more intact specimens, as well as more giant squid bits and pieces. In the summer of 2009, on a cruise a few hours out of Los Angeles, scientists from Scripps found a piece of giant squid. Around the same time, federal scientists pulling a deepwater trawl in a Gulf of Mexico area frequented by sperm whales also hauled up a giant squid. Since a carcass had been found on a Louisiana shoreline in the 1950s, scientists were not taken completely by surprise, but neither was the Gulf of Mexico team expecting the specimen.

  On August 24, 2002, bathers at a popular Portuguese swimming beach noticed something strange in the water that turned out to be a dead juvenile giant squid, the first ever reported off this part of the coast of Portugal. Scientists were surprised to find an Architeuthis that far south, as many had previously believed that their regular Atlantic Ocean habitat was farther north. Was its presence an indication of a change in ocean ecology? And off the coasts of Japan and New Zealand, the number of recorded specimens seems to have increased in recent decades.

  Not all reported sightings turn out to be accurate. A “giant squid” reported by the press in the Caribbean’s Cayman Islands in the fall of 2009 turned out to be only a very large squid of about six feet in total length. It wasn’t an Architeuthis at all, but an Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, a species that may be spreading from its former Pacific Ocean habitat. (Or, given our lack of knowledge about life in the ocean, it may have been in the Caribbean all along, but not specifically identified.) Some of the confusion comes from reports in the press. The media frequently calls Dosidicus gigas a “giant squid,” meaning that it’s a very large squid, rather than a squid of the Architeuthis group.

  The confusion is understandable when you consider that even scientists are sometimes uncertain which squid species is which. At a scientific conference in Portland, Oregon, a federal marine biologist approached Gilly to say that recent deep-sea exploration vehicles had filmed many Humboldt squid swimming in deep-sea canyons along the northwest coast.

  “In the canyons?” Gilly asked, surprised. “We’ll have to come up and take a look.” Humboldts had been caught in the Pacific that far north, but large numbers using the deep-sea canyons implied that they may not have been just passing through.

  “Of course,” Gilly speculated, “it could be some other large squid species we don’t even know about.” No one knows if some species of squid are truly becoming more common, or if the animals are only being found more frequently than before because we are able to penetrate the ocean depths with more technology.

  If more Architeuthis are showing up in the world’s oceans, does that mean there are more living now than in past centuries? Or does it just mean that there are more of us out there looking for them? If there are more, should we be afraid? For centuries, people have fantasized about the abilities of all these large squid species—giant, colossal, Humboldt, and others—to the extent that I often wonder if there isn’t some kind of vestigial horror of being entwined in all those arms embedded in the evolutionary recesses of our brains. In Peter Nichols’s A Voyage for Madmen, a nonfiction account of a solo round-the-world race, one of the sailors confuses nighttime phosphorescence in the waves with the eyes of a giant squid, which he tries to kill with a harpoon.

  Even Rachel Carson indulges in a tiny bit of fearmongering: “We can imagine,” she writes, “the battles that go on, in the darkness of the deep water, between these two huge creatures—the sperm whale with its 70-ton bulk, the squid with a body as long as 30 feet, and writhing, grasping arms extending the total length of the animals to perhaps 50 feet.” Carson wasn’t intentionally exaggerating the size of the giant squid. During her era, many scientists thought the animals were that large because of the size of the circular squid sucker scars found on sperm whale skin. But Roper speculates in one paper that those scars might be that large because they were made when the whales were smaller, and expanded in diameter as the whale grew larger.

  Of course, what people really want to know about Architeuthis is how smart it is. The question of squid intelligence in general has piqued the curiosity of marine scientists for several decades. Gilbert Voss, Roper’s doctoral adviser, wrote in a 1967 National Geographic article that “some squid exhibit behavior bordering on active intelligence.”

  I asked Roper what he thought about cephalopod intelligence.

  His answer was a big question mark with a provocative caveat: “When you look into their eyes, you know there’s something there,” he said. “But be careful how you use the word ‘intelligence.’ We use the word but don’t try to imply any kind of human characteristics for mollusks or any invertebrates. They do, however, show a great deal of brainpower.”

  Gilly is less reticent. “They can certainly respond to novel situations in appropriate ways,” he said. “I could call that intelligent.” He mentioned some BBC footage he’d seen of large numbers of Dosidicus swimming together in a highly coordinated way, as though their movements were choreographed. They seemed to b
e moving in unison, as though they were able to communicate with each other. “They were turning on a dime,” he said. “It was really, really beautiful.”

  On the Monterey Bay research boat, the severed head of a Humboldt squid flew out of Julie Stewart’s hands and across the boat deck. The lethal beak slashed a “V” in her thick, protective Grundens. Carrying another squid, she slipped on the slime of Dosidicus ink that covered the deck. Her hands were cold. Strands of ink-covered hair escaped from her ponytail and got in her mouth. Her back was tired. The skin on her fingers was lacerated with countless tiny cuts. Marine biology is not a science for the faint of heart.

  Stewart at the center of the action

  None of this bothered Julie. “You take a shower when you’re done,” she said. “Your hands still smell like squid for a couple of days. You get squid ink under your fingernails, but it doesn’t stay long. That’s just part of the job.” Then she trailed off and shrugged her shoulders … not a problem. Once when she was asked what she liked most about field science, she gushed. When she was asked about what she liked least, she couldn’t think of anything. She mentioned that spending time on a boat in rough water makes a lot of people seasick: “But I don’t get seasick.”