Catch of the Century

A creature that can grow up to 13 m, with tentacles as long as a city bus and eyeballs the size of a human head shouldn't be that hard to find. But scientists have never caught a glimpse of a live giant squid in the wild. The cephalopod's reign as the Greta Garbo of the undersea world, however, is over: last week two Japanese scientists—Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori—published the first photographs of a giant squid in action, captured by a robotic camera 900 m below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. For obsessive squid hunters, it's the scientific equivalent of Captain Ahab finally getting his white sperm whale.

In fact, sperm whales are the main predators of giant squid, and the Japanese found the squid by following the whales off the Ogasawara islands, about 1,000 km south of Tokyo. Starting in 2002, the team searched for squid in the area for around two weeks every year, lowering into the waters a digital camera and weighted hooks baited with common squid and mashed shrimp. Depth mattered: the giant squid were believed to live about 1,000 m down. "At that point, our squid-watching turned unmistakably into squid-hunting," says Kubodera. No squid took the bait until Sept. 30, 2004, when an 8-m giant with a taste for prawns impaled itself on the hook. For the next four hours the camera clicked while the squid struggled to free itself, swimming back and forth until one of its 5.5-m-long tentacles finally tore off its body. The team hauled the still-moving limb to the surface, where they examined it. (Disappointingly, the team passed on eating it—Mori, who had previously sampled a dead giant squid, dismisses it as "extremely salty and bitter.") The nearly 600 images taken of the giant squid show a creature far more aggressive and active than many scientists had suspected. That should give Kubodera and Mori pause before their next hunt: somewhere out there is a squid that's missing one tentacle and may be nursing a serious grudge.