March 31, 2004
The Age of Architeuthis
(Update: 9/28/05 - Japanese scientists have captured the first images of a living Giant Squid.)
The first thing you should know is that it has the largest eye of any living creature, thirty centimeters in diameter, bigger than an elephant’s eye, a whale’s eye; that’s an eye like a dinner plate; that’s bigger than your head.
Holy shit.
I’m talking about the giant squid, Architeuthis dux.
Sometimes the remains are discovered in whale carcasses. Occasionally they are wrenched up in deep sea trawling nets. More often they wash ashore, where they end up in a local news story, before being shipped off to laboratories that smell like fish markets where biologists pore over the remains.
Scientists know their approximate size (17-20 meters) and their predators (sperm whales and sleeper sharks) and where they dwell (all of the oceans), but the giant squid has never been seen alive and well in its native environment. Over the years, fishermen have made claims of them attacking their boats or battling whales, but the reports are unreliable. No one has ever managed to document the squid in its native environment, swimming, mating, doing whatever it is that squid do when they are not dying.
Not yet, at least.
In 1955 Disneyland opened the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction. Visitors were invited to explore the interior of the Nautilus and to look through a porthole at the giant squid. Looking at that eye and those long tentacles, the children inside were taught to trust in the strength of the glass, the integrity of the vessel’s design, and the indifference of the alien creature outside.
In February 2002, what appeared to be a giant squid was found stuck in the rocks off the shore in Kyoto. It was alive, for a while at least. The onlookers took photos of it, but it was too late to save it. A little girl in a rain slicker stood at the side of the tide pool and watched. It was the most exciting thing she had ever seen at the shore.
In 2003 a team of scientists captured 14 giant squid larvae in the surface waters off the coast of New Zealand, but the trip back to the aquarium proved deadly, and the Squid died before reaching the lab.
Then, that October, fishermen in the Ross sea came across the first complete specimen of the colossal squid. There are a number of differences between the collosal and the giant squid, and while it's been suggested that the colossal squid is the larger and more lethal of the two, there's no documentary evidence to support this. I suspect that the giant squid could hold its own in a battle.
Clyde Roper is one of the world’s authorities on the giant squid. In Errol Morris’ documentary Eyeball to Eyeball, he described the lengths he’s gone to capture the creature on film. His method is to follow sperm whales, the squid’s main predator, and to stake out their feeding grounds in a tiny deep-sea diving craft. So far, at least, this has proved unsuccessful, but he is undeterred. In Morris’ interview, he says: "People ask: 'What would you do if a giant squid grabbed this tiny little submersible? Wouldn't the squid crack it open or damage it?' My response (very, very honestly I believe this): 'I would love it.'"
Architeuthis dux is a cottage industry online. Poormojo’s Almanac has a rather brilliant web serial imagining the giant squid as an advice columnist. For a while, someone went through the trouble of managing the giant squid's friendster network. The artist Brandon Bird has a painting of a giant squid and a T-Rex attacking a whale, entitled: “Bad Day on the High Seas.” (I have a cafepress print of this painting, and I’m always explaining to people that I am not kidding about it.) Every time a giant squid turns up, thousands of people link to it from their weblogs, or forward it to their friends along with a calamari joke.
Someday Roper, or someone like him, will capture the squid on film and you’ll be able to watch it online. You might get it in an email from someone you know, or spot it on the Cephalopod database, or on a blog you like. It might reach its tentacles up the pages of MSNBC and tear down the murder and celebrity weight-loss. You might not hear about it until after it has passed, but when it happens there will be nothing between you and that eye and those tons of oceanic pressure but the flat lights of your monitor and a sliver of glass.
Everyone is waiting for something, I am waiting for the giant squid. I invite you to join me. He is out there, he will appear someday. Cold, indifferent and majestic, he is washing ashore. Wait for him.
Squidliography
G.I.S: Giant Squid
