The Giant Squid: A Remarkable First Sighting

In March, Kat Bolstad returned from an Antarctic expedition, which used a new camera system specifically built to search for elusive giant squid.

No one had filmed footage of one of these animals swimming in the deep sea. She also found none of this voyage.

But the day she left the ship, Dr. Bolstad, a deep-sea cephalopod biologist, learned about a recent video taken from the South Sandwich Islands on March 9th. A team searching for new marine life and using Schmidt Ocean Institute’s submarines remotely was happening to young cephalopods.

The boy was about 30 centimeters (less than a foot) and had a clear body, delicate arms and brown spots. It was a huge squid.

“I knew as soon as I saw the footage there was a good opportunity,” said Dr. Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at Auckland Institute of Technology in New Zealand. She discusses Schmidt’s Antarctica work remotely.

It has been 100 years since the giant squid was officially described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal can grow to a massive squid or other invertebrates on Earth, growing to 6 or 7 meters long or up to 23 feet.

The first common sight of the species scientist in 1925 was incomplete. It’s just a fragment of the arm from the two squid on the belly of a sperm whale. It is believed that adults spend most of their time in the deep sea.

Dr. Bolstad said that huge, fully grown squids sometimes appear at sea level and are pulled up to the fishing boat while they are being pulled up. Young specimens appear in the trawl net.

However, up until now, humans had not witnessed any giant squid in their homes, swimming in the deep Antarctic ocean.

One of the reasons they are so elusive is the size of the house. Furthermore, squid is probably eschewing us, Dr. Bolstad said. “They know their surroundings very well, because the obstacles to the surrounding water column might mean predators.”

The sperm whales, the main squid predator, can dive up to 2 kilometers (1.25 miles). Perhaps to help them avoid whales, the giant squid has evolved its biggest eye in the world, much more than basketball.

They also have a unique combination of suckers and hooks in their arms and tentacles,” Dr. Bolstad said.

The footage was filmed by a remotely operated submarine called Subastein, which the Schmidt Ocean Institute uses to explore the deep seas. This particular dive was a partnership with the Nippon Foundation-Nekton Oceansus, an initiative to discover unknown species. The submarine stopped for several minutes during the descent, photographing small, transparent cephalopods.

“I think it’s very exciting,” said Christine Haffard, a biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Institute in California, who is not involved in the expedition.

Dr. Hafard uses other remotely operated submerges in her research. She said these exploratory missions have “incredible value.” For example, her observation of an octopus Walking two sides At the seabed, you can walk two arms and use the other six to camouflage yourself as a mass of algae or coconut. The findings are useful for soft robotics researchers, she said.

Capturing footage of rarely seen marine animals, such as giant squid, can also communicate decisions about human activities, such as deep sea mining, according to Dr. Huffard.

She said it will help you know where these animals spend their time, where they are, where they mate and spawn, and how long they have lived.

The young giant squid in the video was swimming about 600 metres below, Dr. Bolstad said it was not a deep water body that adults are likely to live in. Other deep-sea squids spend their early life in shallow waters, she said. Having a transparent body may help predators swim the baby before the baby descends from the dark ocean as an opaque, reddish adult.

Submersible’s camera detects squid and can instantly send images. Unlike scientists a century ago, they had to dig into a massacre partially digested in whale belly, so everyone was part of the moment when Schmidt saw a “dive stream” from their home and found a giant squid, Dr. Bolstad said. “It’s incredibly amazing that humans can do, in real-time, from anywhere on Earth, to help them participate in these explorations and discoveries.”

She continues to search for grown animals. “I can’t wait to see what a giant living adult squid looks like, in the deep sea house it belongs to,” she said.

However, she also said she was pleased that the first sightings of the wild species were not an adult version. Rather than a leviathan swinging a giant hook, it’s “this beautiful early life stage that looks like a small glass sculpture.”

“In fact, I love seeing the first glimpse of what this will become a true giant,” Dr. Bolstad said.