Giant squid, also known as the king squid, is a squid that lives in the deep seas of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, whose natural enemy is the sperm whale, which is the longest invertebrate in the world.
The giant squid is the longest surviving mollusk of all. Although controversial in weight , the giant squid has longer tentacles than the King Sour Squid that lives in Antarctica.
Among several other extinct cephalopods, such as the Cretaceous Tost giant squid and the Ordovician horn stone, the latter is already very large compared to the giant squid. However, some scientists have found traces of suspected giant cephalopods attacking on ichthyosaur and marine iguanas in the Jurassic period, suggesting that there may have been larger unknown cephalopods in ancient times, but because no exact fossils have been found as evidence.
The size of giant squid, especially the overall length, is often exaggerated. Reports of specimens reaching or even more than 20 meters are common, but few studies to date on the size of the species have demonstrated it.
According to squid expert Steve O'Shea, this length may be due to the elastic elongation of the squid's tentacles after death, because the size of the giant squid found in the stomach of the sperm whale and the beak-like mouth are measured, and the largest giant squid is only 14 meters long, weighs about 280 kilograms, and is huge. Like other cephalopods, female squids are much larger than males, with males up to about 10 meters long and 150 kilograms in weight.
Although the largest individual has been confirmed to be 14 meters, some people still think that there may be a larger giant squid in the deep sea, which should be greater than 18 meters or even longer in length.
American paleontologist and geologist Mark McMenamin (Mark McMenamin) inferred the existence of large squid in ancient times based on some incomplete fossil evidence, and pointed out that some ichthyosaur or plesiosaur fossils showed "strange distortions", suspected to be caused by giant cephalopod attacks, and believed that there may be giant squids with a body length of more than 14 meters, but because they live in the deep sea, they are difficult to find.
The largest individual found so far is a specimen of the giant squid found in Norway in the early 19th century, which is about 17.03 meters long and weighs nearly a ton. One of the largest and strongest soft-bodied creatures in the world.
Biggest body size controversy: Some scholars believe that the giant squid is not the largest invertebrate, because in recent years, a larger king squid has been found off the coast of Antarctica, with a length of 18 meters, but there are still some doubts about the authenticity and measurement of this individual.
The two fins of the posterior end of the giant squid are conjunctive, slightly rounded, the end is pointed, the cornea is open, the wrist is very long, the tentacles are particularly long, about four times the length of the carcass, and there are suction cups and barbs on the tentacles, which makes it more dangerous than the same kind of large squid.
The inner shell is pinnate and. In addition, in order to maintain the floating nature of the body, the squid will secrete some ammonia gas, so that after being caught, it will emit a strange stench.
Imaginary image of a giant squid fighting a sperm whale
Recent studies have shown that giant squid prey on large deep-sea fish and other cephalopods. They would catch prey with two long tentacles and clamp its ends with jagged suction cups. They then take it to the mouth located in the center of the tentacle and chop the prey with a bird-like beak before placing it in the esophagus.
The beak of the giant squid
A model of the giant squid, which shows the location of the beak.
Current research evidence suggests that giant squid forages alone, as most of them are individuals when caught in fishing nets. Moreover, fishermen in Newfoundland, Norway and New Zealand will find giant squid that cannot break free because their beaks or suction cups are stuck in nets or hooks when fishing, and strange hook marks can be seen on some of the captured giant fish, proving that the giant squid is a ferocious predator.
Giant squid fighting sperm whale imaginary model
Museum of Natural History, New York
The only deadly predator of adult giant squid is sperm whales, but the remains of giant squid are occasionally found in large predators such as pilot whales, Pacific sleeping sharks, and Antarctic sleeping sharks.
Sperm whales use sonar to locate giant squid in the deep sea, and scientists have tried to use them to observe them study giant squid, and the latest findings suggest that female sperm whales cannot prey on giant giant squid. Only male sperm whales use their large bodies and sonar to hunt giant squids, because the giant squid's perception of sound is very strong, and sperm whales can make strong and powerful noises in the deep sea, enough to shock the giant squid and swallow it into its belly. Despite many articles and novels about giant squid fighting sperm whales, the two are not equal biological relationships but predators and prey. To date, there has been little direct evidence that giant squid can defeat sperm whales.
Sleeping sharks and deep-sea cetaceans may not provoke large individual giant squid, while Pacific sleeping sharks cannot prey on giant squid larger than them, so they only eat dead giant squid.
Scars on the skin of sperm whales
Suction cups on the giant squid tentacles
Cannibalism is also a major feature of giant squid: between mid-October and evening 2016, a 9-meter giant squid was washed up on the coast of Galicia, Spain. Shortly before its death, the squid was photographed by a traveller named Javier Ondikel and examined by the Marine Species Research and Conservation Coordinator, indicating that it had been attacked and fatally injured by another giant squid, losing part of its fin, damaged its gills, and apparently swallowing one eyeball, and the complete nature of the specimen indicated that the squid had slowly retreated to the shoals to escape prey from its kind.
In addition, in Spain and Australia, traces of the same kind have been found in the body of the giant squid that was washed up on the coast. Or, this squid attack could be the result of prey competition. According to the fact that the American giant squid, which also belongs to the giant cephalopods, also has a habit of preying on its own kind, scientists believe that cannibalism is a major feature of large squid in the deep sea.
In the early 2000s, scientists judged based on incomplete evidence that giant squid lived in the deep sea and were carnivores, with a lifespan of only a few years and a very fast growth rate. It was speculated that the maximum body length was 13 meters, but no one knew how big the largest individual was. Some scientists believe that if humans live in the same realm as giant squids, the latter will immediately eat humans.
Giant squid is mainly found in the North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans. It lives in waters with a depth of 300-3100 meters. It is speculated that the deep seas of the world are distributed in large quantities. According to fishermen in the Arctic and Russia, giant squids were previously found by their whaling boats with huge trawls, most commonly captured in Newfoundland, Norway and New Zealand. Large squid caught in the Arctic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean live in shallower waters.
Tasmania captures, more than ten metres long; giant squid bodies or remains are often found off the southeast coast of Australia and japan's Ogasawara Islands, but the individuals are small; larger squid can be caught near New Zealand, but most of them are king squid; and some squid can also be caught in South African waters, but for some reasons, it is difficult to capture more complete specimens.
Some scientists have used the location of the captured seas and the activity of local cetaceans to infer that any water where there are sperm whales are mainly active will have the nest of giant squid.
The record of the giant squid in history
The legend of the giant squid has always existed, whether it is Europe or China, but in most cases the giant squid appears as a giant sea monster, and because of its age, most of the literature has not been able to verify, and it is still difficult for the scientific community to prove whether the sea monster encountered by seafarers at that time is a giant squid. The most famous is a giant turtle-like creature that can swallow an entire ship and spit out black ink. The Norwegian sea monster Kraken, by far the most famous sea monster, has many tentacles that can spit out black venom and pull ships to the bottom of the sea. But because humans didn't know much about marine life at the time, for a long time Norwegian sea monsters appeared as sea snakes or whale-like creatures, and were sometimes described as giant crabs or crustaceans.
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle depicted a giant squid he called Teuthus, distinguishing it from other small squid (Teuthis). He once said: "Teuthus is much larger than Teuthis because Teuthis is nearly five times smaller in size than Tenthus." No one knows what he meant by this, but some speculate that Aristotle used Teuthus' plural Teuthis to describe giant squid and ordinary squid, and also represented the sheer size and horror of the former, as cephalopods were often depicted as a terrifying underwater creature at the time.
In ancient Greece, the crew had witnessed huge squid or cuttlefish-like creatures and named this unknown creature "ruler squid".
Five hundred years later, Pliny the Elder, who lived in the first century AD, also depicted in his book Natural History a giant squid, which was 9.1 meters long and weighed 320 kilograms.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort painted a picture of a famous Norwegian sea monster: a huge, giant octopus with a pair of big eyes wrapped around a sailboat. The image also became a classic portrait that was later widely circulated when people talked about norwegian sea monsters. He was inspired by an unidentified cephalopod tentacle about 8 meters long found in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1783 to confirm the existence of a large octopus.
In 1802, Pierre confirmed the existence of two species of large octopuses in his encyclopedia of mollusks, The Natural History of Ordinary and Special Molluscs: the first, the kraken octopus, which had been described by Norwegian sailors and American whaling crews, as well as by ancient writers such as Pliny the Elder. The second was given a scientific name, the giant octopus (colossal octopus). The second type of body is much larger, more in line with Pierre's study of large unknown cephalopods. He had heard of giant octopuses attacking freighters sailing from Saint-Malo off the coast of Angola.
De Montfort later made a more sensitive point: he said that 10 British warships mysteriously disappeared one night in 1782 and were therefore sunk by an attack by a large octopus. Unfortunately, the British knew exactly what had happened to those battleships. De Montfort's reputation was greatly damaged by this and never recovered. In 1820, he starved to death in Paris in poverty. It is worth mentioning that the origin of many of the concepts proposed by De Monfort about the Kraken octopus was used by later scientists in the study of giant unknown cephalopods.
After the Industrial Revolution, the scientific community slowly began to gain the upper hand, and the legend of sea monsters gradually disappeared. Danish biologist Jopartos Stinglip wrote many papers on giant squid in the 1850s. In an article of 1857 he first used the term "Architeuthus" (which is his chosen spelling) to describe "unknown giant cephalopods".
Artwork: Giant squid captured by the French warship Alecton in 1861. This event inspired the novelist Jules Verne to create the work Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
The first real sighting of a giant squid was on November 30, 1861, when the French warship Alecton saw a squid-like creature about 6 meters long in the Canary Islands off the Atlantic Ocean, and Captain Syer later wrote: "I think it is a large squid-like creature that has caused a lot of controversy and is considered by many to be fictional." Hiyer and the crew forked it with a harpoon and wrapped it around its tail with a rope. But the monster frantically danced its horns, breaking the harpoon and escaping. Only a piece of meat weighing about 40 pounds was left on the rope. The incident even alarmed the French Navy, so the scientific community resumed research on giant cephalopods.
From 1870 to 1880, many squid remains were found off the coast of Newfoundland. For example, the most complete specimen found in Newfoundland on 2 November 1878 is 6.1 meters long, with a tentacle length of 10.7 meters and an estimated weight of 1 ton. In 1873, there were several attacks in New Zealand suspected of being giant squids, most of the victims were strangled by tentacles, and there were suction cup-like marks on the neck.
The first recorded attack on a giant squid occurred in Newfoundland in 1873. In October, two fishermen and a twelve-year-old boy went out to sea to go fishing, but in the middle of the sea they were attacked by a monster that resembled a squid. Later, the boy cut off a tentacle before the three escaped, and the tentacle was six meters long. A local priest believed after the study that the organism should be more than 32 or 37 feet long. According to the trio's description, the monster resembles the Norwegian Sea Monster in both characteristics and behavior. As a result, many people began to believe that the giant squid may indeed exist, although the range of the giant squid was not yet speculated at the time, but in Newfoundland, Norway and New Zealand, a large number of giant squid corpses were captured, all about 5 to 13 meters in length. Some scientists believe that giant squid reproduces cyclically like ordinary squid or cuttlefish, dying in large numbers after spawning. But little has since been reported of the discovery of a large number of giant squid corpses, and the size is also less than 13 meters, the specific reason is unknown.
During World War II, there were reports of sightings of large unknown cephalopods in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The most famous is the British soldier J.D Starkey, who served in the Maldives Archipelago, who claimed to have witnessed a terrifying cephalopod up to 40 meters long. Both U.S. and British navies claim to have seen unknown cephalopods in the no-man's land under the dark, and some even attacked crews. At the time, scientists' research on macrocephalopods was still limited to their mutilated remains, and it was impossible to confirm the credibility of the crew's remarks. But one thing that can be proved is that there are indeed unknown cephalopods in the deep sea, and large octopuses or squid exist.
In 2004, a large squid named Archie, 8.62 metres long, was discovered in the Falkland Islands and subsequently sent to the Natural History Museum in London for research and preservation. It was exhibited to the public on March 1, 2006. So far, few complete specimens of giant squid have been found, most of them are squid less than 10 meters long, and most of them have been mutilated by other organisms.
Live giant squid research and tracking
The corpse of a giant squid is displayed in the bathtub of the home of The American priest Moes Harvey in 1873. In the nineteenth century, the invention of the camera led to the corpse of the giant squid beginning to be recorded.
Although giant squid were discovered in the 19th century, until the early 2000s, it was difficult for scientists to find living specimens in the wild. Marine biologist Richard Ayres describes it as "the most elusive creature in natural history."
In 1993, a picture of the "Architeuthis dux" (living squid) was published in the book "European Seashells", which was considered to be the first photograph of a giant live squid. However, according to the study, it is believed that this photo is not a giant squid at all, but another kind of deep-sea large squid, and it is this one that is dying before swimming on the shallow coast.
It wasn't until 2001 that scientists found photos of seedlings suspected to be giant squid in the deep ocean.
It was only in 2006 that the first living photograph of the giant squid was taken in the deep sea.
The first photograph of a giant adult squid
On January 15, 2002, in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan, the first photograph of a dying, mature giant squid was taken. The squid was tied to the dock, but had died when scientists fished it out because of the long anticipation in shallow waters.
The first photo of a giant squid found in the deep sea
On September 30, 2004, the giant squid was photographed for the first time by Tsuneyoshi Waji and Kyoichi Mori of the National Science Museum of Japan (members of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association). After 2 years of searching, they found traces of the presence of giant squid in the Ogasawara Islands. So they used a 5-ton fishing boat and hired 2 crew members. Using the range of the giant squid's natural enemy, the sperm whale, as a clue, a small squid and shrimp fell on the hook and sank into the 900-meter water. A camera and flash were also prepared.
After more than 20 fishing attempts that day, a giant squid about 7.8 meters (23.4 feet) long attacked the bait. Two people took a photo when the squid's tentacles were hooked and could not escape. The squid then ripped off its tentacles and disappeared into the deep sea. Judging by the salvaged tentacles, this giant squid is less than 10 meters long. Later DNA tests confirmed that the animal was a giant squid.
Waji Hengji
On September 27, 2005, Tsuneyoshi Waji and Kyoichi Mori released their photographs to the world. These photographs are also recognized worldwide as the first "living photographs of giant squid". According to Tsunade, "We knew that the Great King Squid would eat its own kind, but we didn't know what kind of water this creature lived in, so we planned to lure it out with bait." Tsuneyoshi Waji and Kyoichi Mori later described their observations in detail in the British journal Royal Society Reports.
The first video of the giant squid
In November 2006, American explorer and diver Scott Cassell traveled with his expedition to the Gulf of California to observe the local Humboldt squid. In order to study these giant squid in more depth, they used a special shooting method: using a special camera to load it on the flesh fin of a squid, and then sending it back to the sea for observation. But when everyone observed the squid's movements in front of the computer, they all saw that it was being chased by a giant squid estimated to be 12 to 18 meters long. A year later, both DISCOVERY and National Geographic channels produced documentaries to explain the event. But Kassel later declined to talk about the documentary because he thought it was less like a known creature like a giant squid.
In December 2007, Japanese scientists again used a small squid as bait in the waters off the Ogasawara Islands in an attempt to find a large squid that was alive. He was able to capture a giant squid alive, but died shortly after it was caught leaving the deep sea and when it was caught in daylight. The squid is a juvenile female with a total length of 7 meters and a body length of 3.5 meters. This was also the first time that humans captured a living giant squid, and confirmed that the color of the giant squid was dark red.
In December 2015, a lost giant squid swam into Toyama Bay, Japan, about 4 meters long, and a local dive photographer guided it back to the sea while recording it. When interviewed by the photographer, he mentioned that it was very painful to be sucked by the suckers of the giant squid several times.
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