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Shortly after 10 a.m. on January 6, 2023, in the Southern Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers south of Argentina, Matthew Mulrennan’s underwater camera captured a one-of-a-kind sighting: there, 176 meters below his ship, a lone squid was propelling itself through the frigid water. With its outstretched vermilion tentacles, transparent body and faint blue bioluminescent glow, this 12-centimeter-long squid is potentially the first colossal squid ever filmed in its natural environment.
Video captured off the coast of Antarctica at a depth of almost 200 meters shows what could be a colossal juvenile squid living freely in its natural environment. It is possible that this is not a colossal squid but rather another type of closely related glass squid. Video courtesy of Matthew Mulrennan/Kolossal
Mulrennan, a marine scientist and founder of the California-based nonprofit Kolossal, has worked since 2017 to record images of wild colossal squid. Cephalopod experts are convinced that Mulrennan filmed some kind of glass squid, the scientific family to which colossal squid belong. But they still don’t know if it was a colossal youngster, an adult Glacial Galiteuthis, or a previously unknown species in the closely related genus Taonius.
The Antarctic water where Mulrennan’s team spotted the squid was full of marine snow, giving the video a grainy quality reminiscent of early photos of another little-known cephalopod: the giant squid.
Although both cephalopods are so elusive as to be practically legendary (and often compared to the mythical kraken), colossal squids have larger, heavier bodies and slightly shorter tentacles than their giant brethren. While giant squid were first photographed and filmed in their natural habitat in 2004 and 2012 respectively, the only sightings of colossal squid have come from corpses or animals brought to the surface.
Until now perhaps.
Colossal squid were first described scientifically by zoologist Guy Robson in 1925 after a sperm whale washed up in the Falkland Islands with two colossal squid tentacles in its stomach. Since then, these massive animals have rarely been captured, photographed or even seen. It’s a striking feat for a creature longer than a container with eyes the size of volleyballs. As adults, colossal squid are the largest invertebrates on Earth. They eat Patagonian toothfish (also known as Chilean sea bass) and are hunted by sperm whales. When young, colossal squid appear to venture closer to the ocean surface, where they are captured by penguins, albatrosses, seals and Patagonian toothfish. Little is known about their behavior; most clues come from munching on fishing lines, examining the stomachs of predators, and the occasional dead squid washed up on a beach.
William Reid, a marine biologist at the University of Newcastle in England, had the chance to get up close and personal with a colossal squid after fishermen unexpectedly caught one in 2005 near the island of South Georgia, located between Antarctica and South America. Although its meters-long mantle is too heavy to salvage, Reid’s incomplete 200-kilogram specimen revealed how the hooks and suckers that line the squid’s arms can detach, giving the animal an impressive grip but also allowing you to easily detach yourself from prey and predators. .
In the depths of the ocean where little light penetrates, Reid suspects that colossal squid are ambush hunters who wait patiently for prey to wander into range, then use their long arms to stuff their catch into their beaks. He says the squid’s giant eyes might be able to see bioluminescence, which could alert them to the arrival of hungry sperm whales.
Colossal squid have also been documented on a few other occasions. Soviet fishermen captured and photographed the first whole colossal squid in 1981 off the coast of eastern Antarctica. In 2003, New Zealand fishermen captured a dead 300-kilogram juvenile colossal squid in Antarctica’s Ross Sea, and then in 2007 they recovered a live 500-kilogram adult from a depth of 1,500 meters. And in 2008, Russian scientists captured one further west, in the Dumont d’Urville Sea.
But no one has ever seen a colossal squid living quietly hundreds of meters below the surface, where it naturally lives. And, as Reid points out, because colossal squid tend to collapse under their own weight when pulled from the depths under high pressure, studying them in their natural environment is the only way to see both their behavior and their anatomy completely intact.
That’s why, from December 2022 to April 2023, Mulrennan and his crew undertook four multi-week voyages from Ushuaia, Argentina, aboard the Ocean effort, an expedition ship full of tourists operated by Intrepid Travel. Sailing alongside about 200 curious tourists, Mulrennan and the Kolossal team traveled to the South Shetland Islands, South Georgia, the Antarctic Peninsula and other areas below the Antarctic Circle in search of the oversized squid.
While passengers slept and disembarked on day trips to observe penguins, whales and Antarctica’s icy terrain, researchers, including Jennifer Herbig, a doctoral student at Memorial University of Newfoundland and -Labrador, took turns dropping an attached underwater camera from one of the ship’s gangways. in the icy water below.
“We would put the camera in the water at midnight or 1 a.m., stay up until 4 or 5 a.m., then have to get up at 6 or 7 a.m.,” Herbig says. With the camera suspended up to 400 meters underwater, it required near-constant effort to keep it from clinging to sea ice and disappearing into the depths.
In total, the team captured 62 hours of high-definition footage. In addition to their colossal squid potential, scientists have spotted a giant volcanic sponge (animals thought to live up to 15,000 years) and dozens of other Antarctic deep-sea species.
It was hard work, made easier by the ship’s fellow passengers, who brought the scientists cookies and hot chocolate during long nighttime deployments. Herbig, for his part, cherished the interest of tourists. “They could just look over our shoulders and see what we were doing, so we had to explain some of the science,” she says.
“Every day on the ship I was asked, “Did you find the squid?” “, says Mulrennan. “People really want to know more about these large kraken-like species,” especially the ship’s chef, who kept joking about cooking the squid if he found any.
Whether or not the video captured by Mulrennan’s team turns out to be a juvenile colossal squid – that final determination depends on continued examinations by squid experts at New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology – researchers of Kolossal have not yet completed their quest.
While last year’s expedition relied largely on using an underwater camera to film near the noisy ship, the team hopes to return to Antarctica as early as November 2024, armed with a suite of much broader tools.
Mulrennan plans to expand from one underwater camera to a dozen he can deploy simultaneously, and he wants to add remote-controlled cameras that would allow filming further away from the boat. Another option for improving their technique, Herbig says, would be to get longer camera cables so they can peer even deeper into the colossal squid’s icy domain. Herbig adds that they could also bring equipment to analyze environmental DNA and measure biomass, helping the team study the abundance of creatures that share this deep-sea habitat.
With a tattoo on his left arm commemorating zoologist Guy Robson’s sighting of a colossal squid in 1925, Mulrennan hopes to direct or inspire verified underwater filming of a live, wild colossal squid by 2025.
“If finding the giant squid was like landing on the moon, then finding the colossal squid would be like landing on Mars,” he says.