An elusive species of deep-sea squid has been seen alive for the first time off Antarctica, National Geographic has announced.

Researchers filmed the Antarctic gonate squid (Gonatus antarcticus) drifting through the black waters of the ocean's midnight zone, 7,060 feet (2,152 meters) below the surface, on Dec. 25, 2024.

As first reported by National Geographic, researchers spotted the 3-foot-long (0.9 m) blood-red creature using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which had been deployed from the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel, the R/V Falkor (too). They sent the footage to Kat Bolstad, head of the Lab for Cephalopod Ecology and Systematics at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, who confirmed it was an Antarctic gonate squid.

"This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first live footage of this animal worldwide," Bolstad told National Geographic.

Related: Elusive colossal squid finally caught on camera 100 years after discovery in world 1st footage — and it's tiny

Scientists have known about the Antarctic gonate squid for more than 100 years, but they have previously only seen dead specimens caught in fishing nets or beaks that had been preserved in the stomachs of other animals. This is the first time scientists have observed the squid alive and in its natural habitat.

The creature was in the bathypelagic or midnight zone, 3,300 to 13,100 feet (1,000 to 4,000 m) below the ocean's surface. No sunlight can penetrate that far into the ocean, so the midnight zone's only light comes from animals that can illuminate themselves with bioluminescence, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The squid released a cloud of greenish ink when the ROV approached, potentially startled by the presence of a large, bright vehicle in its environment. The researchers followed the animal for a few minutes, using the ROV's lasers to measure its size, before the squid shot away into the darkness, National Geographic reported.

While researchers couldn't determine the sex or age of the animal, Bolstad confirmed it was an Antarctic gonate squid by observing the presence of a single, large hook on the ends of its two longer tentacles.

"The impressive tentacle hooks are probably used for grasping and subduing prey during ambush predation," Alex Hayward, a senior lecturer in ecology and conservation at the University of Exeter in England who was not involved in the expedition, told National Geographic.

The elusive colossal squid has finally been caught on camera, an entire century after it was first discovered.

A team of scientists aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel Falkor filmed a not-so-colossal juvenile measuring 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) long as it swam through the ocean near the South Sandwich Islands at a depth of around 1,968 feet (600 meters).

The video, which was captured on March 9 in the South Atlantic Ocean by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named SuBastian, shows the translucent baby squid gently swimming through the abyss of the deep ocean, with its tiny tentacles dangling behind it.

"It's exciting to see the first in situ footage of a juvenile colossal and humbling to think that they have no idea that humans exist," Kat Bolstad, a squid researcher at the the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, who was an independent scientific expert consulted to verify the footage, said in a statement. "For 100 years, we have mainly encountered them as prey remains in whale and seabird stomachs and as predators of harvested toothfish."

Colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) are bigger than even the famous giant squid (Architeuthis dux). They are considered the largest invertebrates on the planet, measuring up to 46 feet (14 m) long — as long as a semitrailer — and weighing as much as 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms). They have the largest eyes of any known animal, which can measure up to 11 inches (27 cm) across — about the size of a soccer ball.

These bizarre creatures live deep beneath the Antarctic waters of the Southern Ocean. They live deeper and deeper with age, with the youngest and smallest squid being found down to about 1,640 feet (500 m), adolescents living between 1,600 and 6,600 feet (500 to 2,000 m), and fully grown adults living even deeper.

This year marks 100 years since the colossal squid was formally identified and named, but in the century since, very few have ever been seen. The species was first discovered after two of its arms were found in the stomach of a sperm whale during the winter of 1924-1925.

The new video is the first-ever live observation of this species in its natural habitat. Dying adult colossal squid have been filmed by fishermen, and the first complete specimen was captured in 2007 by a fishing vessel near Antarctica. Most of what we know about this species and its lifestyle comes from beaks found in sperm whale stomachs. Only 12 complete colossal squid specimens had ever been found as of 2015, and about half of those were juveniles.

The scientists on the previous Falkor expedition in January also filmed the first-ever confirmed footage of the glacial glass squid (Galiteuthis glacialis), which had also never been observed in its natural habitat before now.

"The first sighting of two different squids on back-to-back expeditions is remarkable and shows how little we have seen of the magnificent inhabitants of the Southern Ocean," Jyotika Virmani, Schmidt Ocean Institute's executive director, said in the statement. "These unforgettable moments continue to remind us that the ocean is brimming with mysteries yet to be solved."

Cameras at the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the South Pacific have captured rare footage of a bigfin squid with spindly arms that stretch several feet long, a new video shows.

Bigfin squid (Magnapinna) are an extremely elusive type of cephalopod — a group that also includes octopus and cuttlefish — with only around a dozen sightings on record. They are the deepest-dwelling species of squid known to science, surviving at depths of more than 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), according to the Ocean Conservancy.

The new footage is from 10,800 feet (3,300 m) beneath the ocean surface. Researchers spotted the squid by chance while exploring the trench, and they say it was a lucky encounter.

"We always hope to see this type of animal," Alan Jamieson, a professor and deep-sea scientist at the University of Western Australia who collected the footage, told Live Science in an email. "[Bigfin squid] are not something you would actively go looking for, they are a species that relies on us coming across them by accident," Jamieson said.

Most documented bigfin squid sightings are "serendipitous filming from oil and gas activities," Jamieson said.

Related: Rare video shows elusive deep-sea squid cradling her gigantic, translucent eggs

The squid in the new video was probably feeding or attempting to feed, he said. The footage shows the otherworldly animal walking slowly along the seafloor before suddenly stopping and pulsing the big fins attached to its body. Although it looks like the squid is tugging on something off camera, it's likely just trying to pull its sticky arms off the seafloor, Jamieson said.

Researchers estimate that the squid's body is 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters) long. Its arms stretched several times that length and looked "extremely disproportionate," Jamieson said. Scientists think bigfin squid can grow up to 26 feet (8 m) long, including the arms.

Why bigfin squid evolved such long, spindly arms remains a mystery, Jamieson said, but it's probably related to feeding. Bigfin squid are the only squid known to live at hadal depths — between 19,700 and 36,000 feet (6,000 to 11,000 m) deep — where food is scarce and mostly comes in the form of particles falling from above.

To solve the mystery, scientists first need to know more about the squid themselves. "The trick is to keep filming everything else that's going on and eventually, if you are lucky, one will grace you with its presence," Jamieson said.

Scientists have captured stunning video of a female deep-sea squid cradling unusually large eggs in her tentacles. The footage, taken by the team via a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) off Mexico's coast, reveals that the mother squid was carrying about 40 eggs, each around twice as large as those of previously encountered squid. 

The new video reveals additional details about the life cycle of deep-dwelling squid. These animals are rarely seen alive at depth and little is known about how they reproduce in a dark and cold environment, where oxygen and food is limited.

"The deep sea is the largest living space on Earth and there is a lot left to be discovered," Steven Haddock, a senior scientist and expedition leader at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), said in a statement. "Our unexpected encounter with a squid brooding giant eggs caught the attention of everyone in the ship’s control room." The findings were published in May in the journal Ecology. 

Seeing a deep-sea squid brooding, or protecting eggs after laying them, is especially rare. Most squids leave their eggs drifting in the water column or attached to the seafloor, according to the statement. Brooding is extremely arduous for female squid. This process often leads to the mothers dying after the eggs hatch, Henk-Jan Hoving, a deep-sea biologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany and lead author of the paper, said in the statement.

The researchers encountered the brooding squid in 2015 during an expedition to the Gulf of California to study animals that live in an extremely oxygen-poor environment. As the scientists launched ROVs into the deep basin, they spotted the mother, at around 8,418 feet (2,566 meters) deep. The species identity of this squid has never been described, but likely belongs to the family Gonatidae which is common in the Pacific Ocean.

While capturing video of a squid brooding is rare, it isn't unprecedented. MBARI scientists first spotted a female squid, of the species Gonatus onyx, — also from the family Gonatidae — brooding in Monterey Bay in 2002. In 2005, they filmed a brooding deep-sea squid (Bathyteuthis berryi) from a different family in the same geographic area. Over 37 years of exploration, MBARI scientists have observed 17 squid mothers cradling their eggs.

The mother squid they encountered in 2015 had far fewer eggs than the brooding squid in 2002, which carried 3,000 small eggs. Having many small eggs can be advantageous when food is limited and predators are abundant. Meanwhile, larger eggs are better for a less-threatening, stable environment, the researchers wrote in the study.

The squid the scientists encountered in the Gulf of California was about 3,000 feet (900 m) deeper than the one seen in Monterey two decades ago. The move into deeper territory with extremely low oxygen levels may be a strategic choice made to avoid predators such as sharks and seals, the researchers wrote in the study.

"This remarkable sighting underscores the diversity of ways that animals adapt to the unique challenges of living in the deep," Haddock said.

One of the world's most elusive squid species put on a blinding bioluminescent display as it attacked an underwater camera in the deep sea, exceptionally rare new footage reveals.

Researchers from the Minderoo Foundation and the University of Western Australia (UWA) Deep Sea Research Center captured the rare encounter, which occurred around 3,281 feet (1,000 meters) below the Pacific Ocean's surface, using a free-falling baited camera dropped into the sea near the Samoan Passage — an area of deep water flow north of Samoa. 

The team was on a research cruise documenting the diversity of the deepest part of the ocean — the hadal zone — when they spotted the rare creature.

The animal in the video is a Dana octopus squid (Taningia danae), a member of the family Octopoteuthidae that feeds on pelagic fish, crustaceans and other squid species. 

Squid species within the Octopoteuthidae family have eight arms which is why they are called octopus squid. As juveniles they have two long, trailing tentacles in addition to their arms, but these are lost as the squid matures.

Members of this species are known for their colossal size. The longest individual ever reported was a 7.5-foot-long (2.3 m) female, according to a 2003 study. The individual in the new video is around 2.5 feet (75 centimeters) long, according to a statement from UWA.

In the footage, the squid suddenly appears from the darkness and darts toward the camera, engulfing it with its arms before making a quick getaway. Moments before latching onto the camera, the squid shows off a pair of bright, light-emitting organs, known as photophores, at the tips of two of its arms.

This species' photophores — which emit bursts of light as a result of a chemical reaction — are the largest of their kind in the animal kingdom, researchers wrote in the statement. But scientists have rarely seen the squids' biological lights used in action. 

"As we were reviewing the footage, we realized we had captured something very rare," Heather Stewart, a marine geologist and affiliate researcher at UWA, said in the statement. "I think we were very lucky to have witnessed this."

Related: Black-eyed squid dragging thousands of eggs like a cape captured in video off Costa Rica

Researchers believe the squids' photophores help them stun prey in the dark waters of the deep sea and possibly communicate with other individuals of the same species. These squid can change the pattern of flashes by controlling the eyelid-like membranes that cover their light-producing organs, according to a 2017 study.

In the video, the squid "descended on our camera assuming it was prey, and tried to startle it with its huge bioluminescent headlights," Stewart said.

Overall, researchers know very little about this species' behavior because T. danae are rarely seen alive. 

"Many records of this species are from strandings, accidental bycatch or from the stomach contents of whales," Alan Jamieson, director of UWA's Deep Sea Research Centre, said in the statement. 

T. danae were only spotted alive for the first time around 19 years ago, by researchers using a similar camera system, according to a study published in 2007. And these squid have been seen alive only a handful of times since.

"The rarity of live observations of these amazing animals makes every encounter valuable in gathering information on geographic locations, depth, and behavior," Jamieson said in the statement.

A deep-sea squid has been filmed gliding through inky waters with thousands of eggs suspended from its arms.

Researchers spotted the black-eyed squid (Gonatus onyx) — one of the few squids known to brood their eggs — off the coast of Costa Rica in December. Mesmerizing footage shows the squid trailing its cargo of eggs like a long gown and flapping the fins protruding from its head to move through the water.

"The large egg mass is suspended from hooks on the squid's arms, and while carrying it for several months, the cephalopod will go without feeding," representatives of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which organized the expedition, wrote in a post on Instagram. 

Marine biologists had long assumed that black-eyed squid and other squids lay their eggs in clusters on the seafloor, leaving them to develop and hatch independently. However, in 2001, Brad Seibel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), turned this assumption on its head. Seibal observed a black-eyed squid brooding an egg sack in Monterey Canyon, off the coast of California, through the lens of a remotely operated submersible.

Related: Watch elusive, sucker-less squid in rare footage captured off the Galapagos 

"I just remember jumping out of my seat," Seibel, now a professor of biological oceanography at the University of South Florida, told Science Friday in 2016.

In a 2005 study, Seibel and colleagues described the brooding behavior of G. onyx females, which carry up to 3,000 eggs through open water until the young hatch and swim away. The squid use their arms to pump fresh water through the egg mass, which may help keep them supplied with oxygen. 

Black-eyed squid are among the most abundant cephalopods in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, according to the study. In the North Pacific Ocean, the species is typically found at depths above 6,200 feet (1,900 meters).

These squid are neutrally buoyant, meaning they don't require any effort to float or swim, but "brooding squid cannot swim very quickly, and may be easy prey for deep-diving marine mammals," according to the Instagram post.

Two new species of pygmy squid have been found in the subtropical waters of a Japanese island. These cephalopods, which are smaller than paper clips, find refuge in the coral beds and seagrass fields of Okinawa and take their names from- fairies in Japanese folklore and martial arts.

The two newly discovered creatures were described in a study published last month in the journal Marine Biology.

Related: Watch a see-through squid with demon-like eyes swim in Alaska's deep waters

 The Ryukyuan pygmy squid (Idiosepius kijimuna) derives its species name, "kijimuna," from a mythical creature in Okinawan folklore. Kijimuna are said to be red-haired, childlike creatures who live in banyan trees. Similar to kijimuna, I. kijimuna is slightly red and lives in the seagrass forests close to shore, up to 6.6 feet (2 meters) below the surface. Although the species was found back in 2018, researchers had too few specimens to write a formal description at that time, the team wrote in the study. 

The second species, the Hannan's pygmy squid (Kodama jujutsu), takes its name from underwater photographer Brandon Ryan Hannan, who originally found the creature clinging to the underside of a coral reef. This species represents a whole new genus, Kodama, also named after a mythical being. According to the new study, Kodama are ghostly, rounded tree spirits believed to dwell in ancient forests. Their presence is believed to be a sign of a healthy forest.

I. kijimuna swims smoothly, while K. jujutsu bobs along with its arms splayed outward, in order to catch hapless shrimp. These predatory water acrobatics led to the species name "jujutsu" (also spelled "jujitsu" or "jiujitsu"), a martial art. 

"Jiu-jitsu revolves around grappling and using your opponent's strength, and the Kodama jujutsu preys on shrimp larger than itself by grappling with its small arms," co-author Jeffrey Jolly, of the Marine Climate Change Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, said in a statement.

Collecting these tiny creatures was tricky;  both species have a maximum length of about half an inch (1.2 centimeters). 

"There are so many other things to look at, that finding a small squid the size of a pinky fingernail is not easy," Jolly said. Not only are both teensy squid nocturnal , but according to the study, the Ryukyuansquid appear only in the winter. Their whereabouts during the summer months is a mystery.

Though these sea-dwelling creatures were discovered recently, land use threatens their habitats. 

A research vessel off the coast of the Galapagos Islands recently spotted a rarely seen, ghostly squid with weak, sucker-less tentacles floating in the deep, marking only the second time this elusive species has ever been filmed alive. 

Researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, in collaboration with the Charles Darwin Foundation and Parque Nacional Galápagos, spotted the ethereal cephalopod, dubbed Grimalditeuthis bonplandi, using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) during an expedition to hydrothermal vents.  

G. bonplandi can grow up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) in length. These squid have fragile bodies and are slow swimmers. According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the species inhabits depths of 660 to 5,000 feet (200 to 1,500 meters). Although believed to exist worldwide, the squid are rarely encountered — until 2005, scientists had only studied dead specimens that came from the stomach contents of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus).

Related: What is the largest squid in the world?

Unlike other squid, G. bonplandi has feeding tentacles with no suckers. Other cephalopods whip and thrash, grabbing their prey with their tentacles and trapping them with their suckers, but G. bonplandi is thought to be a graceful feeder that undulates its tentacles to lure small shrimp and other crustaceans. 

Early research collected from dead specimens made it clear that this squid lacked muscle in its tentacles. In 2005, scientists  spotted the creature in the Monterey Canyon off central California and recorded its strange behavior for 22 minutes. At that time, the creature stayed still, as if stunned. Only the ends of its tentacles waved and fluttered. This behavior led scientists to speculate how the animal captures its prey. It could be mimicking the movement of a small fish or worm, luring creatures by resembling their prey — a method called aggressive mimicry, which is common in other cephalopods. However, with the limited video observations and infrequent encounters, this is uncertain.

There is still much to learn about these mysterious creatures, but ROVs have made it possible to capture illuminating footage to inform new theories until the next live sighting.

An alien-looking, see-through squid with demonic red eyes has been filmed in the deep waters off the coast of Alaska.

Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ocean Exploration team spotted the glass squid (Taonius borealis) on July 15 while operating a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) at a depth of around 2,300 feet (700 meters) in the Pacific waters surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The dive was the first of NOAA's Seascape Alaska 3 expedition onboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer, which aimed to map unexplored areas of the deep sea in the state's exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Video footage of the encounter shared Aug. 16 on NOAA's Ocean Explorer YouTube channel shows the inverted squid slowly descending through the water, with its mantle — the main part of a squid's body that contains all its vital organs — pointing downward and its small arms appearing to form a single hat-like mass above the eyes at the top of its body. It is unclear how large the squid in the video is, but the species' mantle can grow to a max length of around 26 inches (66 centimeters), according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Related: Weird-eyed strawberry squid spotted in 'twilight zone' off California's coast 

"This is a fairly common squid in these waters, but the close-up imagery captured here was anything but [common]," NOAA representatives wrote on YouTube.

One of the most striking parts of the new video is the see-through squid's visible internal organs. The largest red-colored organ is the digestive gland. It is flanked on either side by two white sacs, which are the gills. 

During the video, there is a brief moment in which one of the squid's eyeballs appears to briefly retract within the surrounding purple discs. This behavior is the equivalent to humans and other animals blinking, NOAA representatives wrote.

The squid also has white crescent-shaped structures beneath each eye. These are photophores, or light-producing organs used to attract prey, including shrimp, small fish and other squid, NOAA representatives wrote.

There are more than 60 known species of glass squid within the family Cranchiidae, and each have at least partially translucent skin. The largest glass squid is the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), which reaches 33 feet (10 m) long and is the heaviest squid in the world. 

A diver in Japan swam alongside an unusual companion earlier this month: An 8.2-foot-long (2.5 meter) giant squid. 

Yosuke Tanaka, who co-runs Dive Resort T-Style with his wife in Toyooka City, Japan, got the opportunity on Jan. 6 when a local ferryman called him to say that there was a large squid swimming near the surface off the coast in the Sea of Japan. Tanaka hurried over, he wrote on his blog, and was rewarded with a close-up encounter with one of the ocean's most mysterious creatures.

It was the first time he'd ever swum with a giant squid (Architeuthis dux), Tanaka told Live Science in an email. 

"I felt a little scared because it was so big," he said. 

Related: Giant squid filmed alive for second time in history. Here's the video.

Giant squid typically live in the deep ocean, so they're often only seen as corpses washed ashore or as accidental bycatch in fishing nets. They can grow to 40 to 45 feet (12 to 14 meters) long, a size even more incredible considering that the animals likely only live about five years in the wild, according to the Smithsonian Institution. Their elusive nature means little is known about their daily lives or mating habits, though investigations of their guts reveal that they eat fish and other squid. They're also often found in the stomachs of sperm whales, indicating that they aren't just hunters, but are also hunted.

Though most people won't get a chance to swim alongside a giant squid, Tanaka's encounter was not so surprising to squid scientists. 

"It's unusual any place other than where they saw it," said Michael Vecchione, a zoologist and cephalopod expert at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "Actually, in the Sea of Japan it turns out that it's fairly common to see giant squids at this time of year." 

Japanese zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera, who captured the first photographs and video of living giant squid in their native habitats, has documented large numbers of giant squid between January and March in the coastal waters of the Sea of Japan. In a 2016 paper, Kubodera and his colleagues reported finding 57 giant squid in just those three months, 28 of which were alive. 

The squid, unfortunately, do not fare well in this region at this time of year. According to Kubodera's research, the squid travel through the Tsushima Strait between South Korea and Japan as part of their typical north-south migration. Those that time the migration wrong, however, get trapped by cold water at the depths where they usually swim. 

"When that happens, they can't stay in the really deep water that they usually stay in," Vecchione told Live Science. "They come up close to the surface, and then the surface water gets cold. When you see them up close to the surface, they're not healthy." 

Tanaka's video shows a squid in rough shape, said Sarah McAnulty, a squid biologist who runs a Squid Facts hotline ( Text "SQUID!" to 1-833-724-8398) and the executive director of Skype a Scientist, a science outreach program. 

"You can tell this squid is approaching the end of its life by looking at its skin," McAnulty told Live Science in an email. "A healthy giant squid should have smooth shiny skin and be kinda red. This poor thing has been through it!"

Tanaka said he swam near the squid for about a half-hour. The squid was swimming slowly, he said, but was trying to move away from him. 

Though giant squid have a fearsome reputation in literature — think "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by French writer Jules Verne — the chance of anyone being attacked by a giant squid is extremely small, Vecchione said. The only encounters with humans tend to be when people poke or prod at the squid, as in a 2017 incident caught on video when a surfer lassoed an injured juvenile squid, which then wrapped its tentacles around the surfboard. No humans were injured.  

Legends about gargantuan squid have existed for millennia, with photos confirming their existence nearly 150 years ago. But what is the largest squid in the world?

Depending on how you measure, there are two contenders. The giant squid (Architeuthis dux) is the longest squid, and the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is the heaviest.

The giant squid, found in every ocean, is estimated to reach up to about 40 to 45 feet (12 to 14 meters) long from the tip of its body to the tip of its tentacles and weigh about 600 pounds (270 kilograms), Heather Judkins, a cephalopod expert at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, told Live Science. There have been claimed sightings of giant squids up to about 66 feet long (20 m), but they have not been verified, according to Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The colossal squid, which lives in Antarctic waters but may venture as far north as New Zealand, is estimated to reach about 30 to 33 feet (9 to 10 m) long. However, what it lacks in total length compared with the giant squid, it makes up for in weight — it can reach about 1,000 pounds (450 kg), Judkins said. This likely makes the colossal squid the most massive invertebrate on Earth, according to ocean nonprofit Oceana.

Giant squid and colossal squid have the largest eyes of any living animal, and possibly the largest eyes that have ever existed in the animal kingdom, according to the Museum of New Zealand. They measure about 11 inches (27 centimeters) wide, about the size of a soccer ball, a 2012 study in the journal Current Biology noted.

Each colossal squid eye is also equipped with a light-emitting organ known as a photophore, the Museum of New Zealand said. Colossal squid use these photophores like headlights to see in the dark. (Giant squid eyes lack photophores, Judkins said.)

The colossal squid also has the largest beak of any squid, made of a material similar to what human fingernails are made of. The squid uses its beak to slice a meal into bite-size pieces before it enters the mouth, and a tooth-covered, tongue-like organ called the radula shreds food further once it's inside the beak.

Related: See 15 crazy animal eyes

Both huge squid species eat fish and other squid. After they reach adulthood, the only regular predator they face is likely the sperm whale, according to Two Oceans Aquarium. Colossal squid might form as much as 77% of a sperm whale's diet, according to the Museum of New Zealand.

Because the ocean is so vast and the squid live so deep, these sea monsters are rarely seen, the Smithsonian noted. Although both the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and the ancient Roman scholar Pliny the Elder recounted details about huge squid, according to Two Oceans Aquarium, the first photo of such an enormous squid wasn't taken until 1874, when Rev. Moses Harvey of Newfoundland captured a picture of a dead giant squid from a fisherman who caught it by accident, the Smithsonian said.

Most of what scientists know about giant squid comes from remains discovered floating on the ocean surface, washed up on beaches or within sperm whale stomachs, a 2013 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B noted. The same holds true for colossal squid, according to the Museum of New Zealand.

Scientists did not manage to capture a photo of the adult giant squid in its natural habitat till 2004, and the first video footage of an adult giant squid in the wild was not taken until 2012, Britannica explained. Similarly, no one had ever seen an intact colossal squid until 2003, according to the Museum of New Zealand. An international expedition to Antarctica this December will attempt to find and film the colossal squid in the deep sea for the first time.

"The ability to see these animals in their natural habitat is amazing," Judkins said. "To get the opportunity to capture them with remotely operated floating camera systems is great. It's an excellent way to observe behaviors."

One of the deep sea's most elusive and spectacular creatures, the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), recently astonished a group of tourists after it washed up as a half-eaten corpse on a New Zealand beach. A tour guide who was leading the group at the time described the chance finding as a "once-in-a-lifetime" experience. 

The colossal cephalopod, with a mantle measuring around 13 feet (4 meters) long, was discovered Sept. 9 on the beach at Farewell Spit, a nature reserve in the north of South Island. A lone guide from the nature tour agency Farewell Spit Tours found the remains, which were half buried in sand, and quickly alerted a nearby tour group to come and take a look. After diverting to examine the squid's corpse, the group spent time marveling at the amazing animal and snapping photos next to the rare remains.

"It's not a common find on any beach, so if you're able to be there at the right time, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Anton Donaldson, the Farewell Spit Tours guide who was leading the group, told The New Zealand Herald. But it was also sobering to see such a "magnificent example of a large sea creature" dead on the land, he added.

Giant squids are the second-largest squids in Earth's oceans — dwarfed only by the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) — and can measure up to 43 feet (13 m) long. The hefty cephalopods, which are thought to be the real-life inspiration for the massive mythological sea creature known as the "kraken," live in deep water more than 2,950 feet (900 m) below the surface and are rarely seen in the wild.

Related: Beached sperm whale in Australia shows scars from tussle with a giant squid 

It is unclear exactly how long the dead squid's entire body measured, because most of its tentacles were incomplete or buried beneath the sand.

"It looked like [the tentacles] had been chewed back by some other sea creatures, such as small sharks or fish," Donaldson said. "While I don't know for sure, I imagine it had been floating out there for a period of time and had washed up."

The tour company informed New Zealand's Department of Conservation about the beached squid, and the agency will likely attempt to retrieve the remains so they can be studied, according to The New Zealand Herald.

Seeing a giant squid up close may be a "once-in-a-lifetime" experience for most people, but this isn't the first time that remains of the deep-sea giants have beached on Farewell Spit's shores. In total, at least six dead giant squids have washed up on the beaches of the nature reserve in the last 30 years, a Farewell Spit Tours representative told Live Science in an email. 

In 2019, on the same part of the beach, another tour group came across a fully intact giant squid measuring 18 feet (5.5 m) long, Farewell Spit Tours representatives said in a statement at the time of the incident.

South Africa is another location where dead giant squids are known to wash ashore. In April, an 11.5-foot-long (3.5 m) specimen washed up near Kommetjie, and in August, a 14-foot-long (4.3 m) squid was found on a beach near Cape Town.

Originally published on Live Science.

The massive, sucker-covered carcass of a giant squid washed onto the rocky shore of Scarborough Beach in Cape Town, South Africa, Tuesday (Aug. 16). The beast, which measured nearly 14 feet (4.3 meters) long, was the second giant squid to crop up on a beach in the region this year, according to the South African news site news24.

The last known giant squid (Architeuthis dux) to wash ashore near Cape Town showed up about 6 miles (10 kilometers) northwest of Scarborough Beach, on Long Beach in Kommetjie, on April 30, Live Science previously reported. That cephalopod measured roughly 11.5 feet (3.5 m) long. For comparison, the largest giant squid ever seen measured a whopping 43 feet (13 m) long, and some studies suggest that the creatures could potentially reach 66 feet (20 m) long, although no squid of such size has ever been spotted. 

The squid that washed onto Scarborough Beach this week seemed to be another A. dux specimen, said Mike Vecchione, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration invertebrate zoologist stationed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "Although other large squids exist, I am fairly certain this is a true giant squid," he told Live Science in an email. 

Other squid species, including the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), rival A. dux in terms of sheer size, and some scientists argue that the Architeuthis genus actually includes a variety of giant squid species, rather than A. dux alone, according to the Smithsonian. 

Related: Why are there so many giants in the deep sea? 

Without an examination of its internal organs, it's difficult to guess how the Scarborough Beach squid perished, Vecchione said. "Note that most of the skin has abraded and some of the arms are broken off, but this (especially the skin abrasion) can result from washing up on the rocky shore." The remaining skin on the squid's mantle — the muscular sheath that houses its organs — gleamed ghostly white in the sun. 

It may be that the squid ventured into shallow, near-shore waters to feed and got struck by a ship propeller, "but this is difficult to prove without witnesses," Dylan Clarke, a marine scientist and curator at Iziko South African Museum, told news24. "The literature … suggests that they come up into shallower waters because they display a behaviour called diel vertical migration. In other words, they venture into shallower waters during the evening to feed and migrate back to deeper waters during the day."

Giant squid generally live in frigid waters some 1,640 to 3,280 feet (500 to 1,000 m) beneath the ocean surface, and they use their dinner plate-size eyes to peer through the inky darkness, according to the Smithsonian. Based on where the animals have washed ashore, scientists think the squids may inhabitat all the world's oceans, but they're most frequently seen on the shores of New Zealand and Pacific islands, on the east and west sides of the North Atlantic, and in the South Atlantic along the African coast.

"Strandings of Architeuthis on South African shores are not unusual at all," Vecchione told Live Science. "It is one of several places around the world where they show up regularly." 

Officials gathered tissue samples from the squid carcass on Scarborough Beach, and these will soon be examined by researchers at the Iziko South African Museum, Gregg Oelofse, the City of Cape Town coastal manager, told news24. Scientists could use such samples to sequence the animal's DNA and run chemical analyses to detect pollutants and stable isotopes — nonradioactive chemical elements with varying numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — in its flesh, Vecchione said. The isotope analysis would provide hints about the squid's feeding history, as would an examination of the animal's digestive system. 

In addition, scientists could determine how old the squid was based on its reproductive organs and statoliths, small mineralized masses that sit inside sensory organs in the squid's head and accumulate "growth rings" over time, Vecchione said. Past studies of these statoliths suggest that giant squid can live to be about 5 years old, according to the Smithsonian.

"The availability of information on giant squids is relatively poor and is either based on dead or dying animals that have been washed ashore or captured in commercial trawl nets," Clarke told news24. The newfound Scarborough Beach squid will join a collection of giant squid specimens at the Iziko South African Museum that were largely acquired through such strandings or incidental catches during bottom trawls, he said.

Originally published on Live Science. 

Extremely rare footage of a squid mom carrying a gelatinous string of glimmering pearl-like eggs in her arms has been captured in the dark ocean depths off the coast of California. 

Researchers from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently spotted the deep-sea squid (an unknown species in the genus Bathyteuthis.) around 56 miles (90 kilometers) off the coast at a depth of 4,560 feet (1,390 meters), a depth roughly three times the height of the Empire State Building. The team used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to capture high-definition footage of the squid and her still-developing offspring, allowing researchers to "examine the pelagic [open-water] parent in astounding detail," MBARI representatives wrote in a description of the video, which they shared July 6 on the MBARI YouTube channel.

It is extremely unusual for female squids to be seen carrying their eggs along with them; such behavior is known as brooding. "Most squids reproduce by depositing egg cases on the seafloor or releasing eggs in a gelatinous mass that drifts in open water," and then abandon their unhatched larva to fend for themselves, researchers wrote in a statement. 

Sometimes "these nurturing mothers will carry the eggs until they hatch to improve their babies' chances for survival," the researchers wrote. But carrying eggs is also likely to be energetically expensive for the mom and increases her risk of being predated, which is why it is uncommon to see this behavior in action. 

Related: Weird-eyed strawberry squid spotted in 'twilight zone' off California's coast 

This is only the second time MBARI researchers have observed this brooding behavior in Bathyteuthis squid, after first glimpsing it in 2005. Only two other species of brooding squid, both from the deep sea, have ever been spotted carrying their eggs in this way. However, the researchers suspect that "other deep-dwelling squids may also turn out to be brooders," according to the statement. 

The overprotective mom in the video appears deceptively large alongside her tiny eggs, but in reality, her mantle — the main part of a squid's body containing all the major organs — can only grow to a maximum length of 3 inches (7.5 centimeters), according to MBARI.

Researchers say that videos like this one show the importance of continuing to explore deeper waters. "The deep ocean is challenging to study and we only get brief glimpses into the behaviors of deep-sea animals," the researchers wrote. "Each observation logged by our ROVs provides another piece of the puzzle and helps improve our understanding of life in the deep."

Originally published on Live Science.

On April 30, beachgoers in Kommetjie, South Africa encountered a rare sight: a giant squid carcass glistening on the sand at Long Beach. 

"It was incredible to see," Alison Paulus, a Cape Town resident and founder of the wildlife conservation organization Volunteer and Explore, told Live Science in an email. "The body was around 2.2 meters [7.2 feet] alone, then with the tentacles and arms I'm sure it would have stretched to 3.5 meters [11.5 feet]."

Giant squids are among the most elusive animals on the planet. They live at ocean depths between 1,000 to 3,000 feet (300 to 1,000 m) and only rarely rise to the sea surface. For centuries, the only information scientists had about these creatures came from studying beached carcasses or remains found in the bellies of sperm whales — the first photos of a live giant squid weren’t captured until 2004, according to National Geographic. 

Spotting a giant squid on a South African beach is rare, though not unheard of. A beautifully preserved baby giant squid washed up near Cape Town in 2020, the Washington Post reported. Another adult specimen that washed ashore in the same area in 1992 was just over 30 feet (9 m) long, Devon Bowen, a digital manager at Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town, told the South African news site Independent Online (IOL).

Related: What's the difference between arms and tentacles?

This squid beached at night after sustaining injuries, possibly from an encounter with a commercial boat or fishing vessel. "We could see a long gash above its tentacles which we presume was from a boat propeller," Paulus said. Investigation by wildlife professionals revealed that the animal was a female. "I would say that she was most likely struck by a ship while she was at the sea surface," Jon Friedman, a wildlife officer from the Cape of Good Hope Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), told IOL. 

Friedman estimated that the squid was around two years old when she died. Giant squids can live for up to five years and reach lengths of 43 feet (13 m), though most top out around 36 feet (11 m), according to Smithsonian. 

By the time SPCA officials reached the scene, local fishers had already removed the squid’s eyes, beak, and portions of its tentacles. Most of what remained of the carcass was then chopped up by the SPCA and thrown back into the sea, though officials sent some tissue samples off to Cape Town's Iziko South African Museum for DNA analysis. The museum currently holds the remains of 19 other giant squids, IOL reported. 

Paulus was disappointed that the body did not make it back to the museum, but said that her family was thrilled to see the squid while it was still intact. "I have two small sons who are crazy about wildlife, so we went down straight away to see," she said.

Originally published on Live Science.

On a recent deep dive into the twilight zone, a submersible hundreds of feet underwater filmed an unusual fruit-colored creature: a bright-red strawberry squid with eerie eyes — one small and black and the other large, bulbous and yellow.

Oblivious to the video camera, the strawberry squid (Histioteuthis heteropsis) cruised through its dark ocean home, occasionally twisting and curling its eight arms and two tentacles as its ghostly white fins rippled.

The sighting, which happened last month, wasn't totally unexpected, but it was still a pleasant surprise. "We see them often (maybe one dive in four), but they are far from abundant," Bruce Robison, a senior scientist with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), told Live Science in an email. Robison, who wasn't part of the expedition that spotted this squid, leads the midwater ecology group at MBARI.

Researchers controlling a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) known as Doc Ricketts — an uncrewed submersible equipped with an ultra high-definition 4K resolution video — spotted the squid in Monterey Canyon off the coast of California. The canyon, home to diverse sea life, is nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon, making it one of the deepest submarine canyons on the West Coast of the U.S., according to MBARI.

Related: What's the difference between arms and tentacles?

The strawberry squid's mantle (the body, not including the eyes or appendages) can reach up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) long. The MBARI team tweeted about the encounter on March 23, saying, "Fresh from the deep!⁠ ⁠During a recent deep-sea dive, our team came across one of the most remarkable residents of the ocean's twilight zone: the strawberry squid (Histioteuthis heteropsis). We spotted this crimson cephalopod 725 meters (2,378 feet) deep in Monterey Canyon."

In a second tweet, the team noted that "The strawberry squid has one big eye and one small eye. Together, this unlikely pair helps the squid hunt for food in the ocean's twilight zone. The big left eye looks upward to spot shadows cast by prey in the dimly lit waters above."

Meanwhile, the squid's smaller right eye looks downward, searching for "flashes of bioluminescence produced by prey or predators lurking in the darker waters below," MBARI tweeted. Due to its differently-sized eyes, the strawberry squid is sometimes called the cockeyed squid.

Strawberry squid, however, aren't born cockeyed. Rather, H. heteropsis hatchlings are born with two identically-sized eyes. As they develop into juveniles, the left eye surges in size, and by adulthood the left eye can be more than double the size of the right eye, MBARI reported.

On land, vibrant colors make animals stand out, signaling prospective mates or broadcasting a warning about toxic defenses. But for the strawberry squid, its bright red color actually helps keep it hidden in the ocean depths. "Red light does not reach the deep sea," MBARI reported. "There, a crimson coloration actually appears black and helps the squid hide from the gaze of predators like sperm whales, dolphins, tunas, swordfish and sharks."

The strawberry squid doesn't get its name just from its red color; the cephalopod has dark spots on its red body that look like teensy strawberry seeds. These spots are actually photophores, or organs that produce light through a chemical reaction or through symbiotic glowing bacteria. The strawberry squid uses its photophores to counter-illuminate itself, meaning that it uses this light to match its surroundings as a form of camouflage. This helps the squid avoid predators that might otherwise see its dark visage in the dim twilight zone, Robison said.

Robison added that the squid's "fin rippling is generally for station-keeping or slow cruising. When it wants to move quickly, it uses jet propulsion out the siphon. It has soft canard-like fins on its lateral arms like some jet fighters do."

Originally published on Live Science.

Octopuses and vampire squid are famous for their eight arms, but one of the oldest relatives of the group that includes them didn't get the memo. This newly described creature, named Syllipsimopodi bideni after President Joe Biden, had a total of 10 arms when it was alive during the Carboniferous period about 328 million years ago, a new study finds.

The beastie was wee, with a mantle (the body, not including the eyes or arms) measuring 3 inches (7.7 centimeters) long, about the length of an adult's palm. It's the oldest record ever of a vampyropod — a group that includes octopuses and vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) — pushing the group's existence back 82 million years. The new date supports evidence from molecular clock models that calculate, based on the expected rate of genetic mutations, when an animal likely evolved, the researchers said.

Some scientists, however, disagree with the assessment of the creature, pointing out that parts of the fossil are difficult to interpret and that the specimen might belong to a previously known species that was described in the late 1980s.

Related: Photos of the vampire squid from hell

The vampyropod fossil was discovered in Fergus County, Montana and donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada in 1988. But it remained unexamined until recently, when two researchers determined that it was a newfound species. Its 10 arms appear to have suckers, which would be the oldest known suckers of any cephalopod, a group that includes octopuses, squid and nautiluses, the researchers said.

Some cephalopods, like squids, cuttlefish and bobtail squids, have 10 appendages — eight arms and two longer tentacles. "Octopuses and squid are both types of cephalopods, but they're very distantly related," said study lead author Christopher Whalen, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow of paleontology hosted at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City and co-hosted by the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale University.

So, it was surprising that this newly described creature had 10 arms. "It's the earliest ancestor of octopuses [and] things related to octopuses, but it looks a lot like a squid," Whalen told Live Science. 

Vampire squid — which are not squid or vampires, but are named for the cloak-like webbing between their arms — have eight arms and two thin filaments. It's thought that these filaments are vestigial arms, which octopuses lost completely. "However, all previously reported fossil vampyropods preserving the appendages only have eight arms, so this fossil is arguably the first confirmation of the idea that all cephalopods ancestrally possessed ten arms," Whalen said in a statement. 

"Prehensile-foot" Biden 

Whalen and study co-author Neil Landman, a curator emeritus in the AMNH's Division of Paleontology, named the critter "Syllipsimopodi" from the Greek words for prehensile and foot. "The name prehensile-foot is chosen because this is the oldest known cephalopod to develop suckers, allowing the arms, which are modifications of the molluscan foot, to better grasp prey and other objects," the researchers wrote in the study. The species name honors  Biden. "When we submitted the article, initially, it was actually just a few weeks after his inauguration," Whalen told Live Science. 

Related: What's the difference between arms and tentacles?

When S. bideni was alive, North America was a very different place. Montana, near the equator, was submerged under a tropical marine bay. Seasonal monsoons swept across the region. Just like fertilizer runoff can lead to algal blooms today, it's possible that heavy rainfall brought on by the monsoons led to a rapid influx of nutrients in the water, which in turn could have led to oxygen-poor waters; a pristine environment for fossilization, Whalen said.

S. bideni likely ate the ancient creatures whose fossilized remains were found nearby in the formation, including crustaceans, sponges, brachiopods and conulariids, which are thought to be related to jellyfish. "It probably had a lifestyle similar to modern nearshore squid," Whalen said.

Outside take

Although the fossil is in fairly good shape, some parts are difficult to interpret. For instance, the researchers noted that each arm has two rows of suckers, rather than just one as was thought to have been present in the early relatives of vampire squid and octopuses, said Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who specializes in living cephalopods and was not involved with the study. 

"That is really surprising to me," Vecchione told Live Science. It's possible that this interpretation isn't correct, he added. 

And it's not clear if this fossil represents a new genus, said Christian Klug, a curator at the University of Zurich's Palaeontological Museum and a professor at its Palaeontological Institute, who was not involved in the study. The new specimen looks an awful lot like Gordoniconus, an early cephalopod, co-described by Landman, in 1988, from the same place in Montana. 

"The proportions are identical, the size is identical [and the] conch shape is similar," Klug, who wrote about Gordoniconus in a 2019 study in the journal Communications Biology, told Live Science in an email. "Even if you accept that this is a different species: How likely is it to have two different species with almost identical shape in the same habitat?"

Whalen disagreed. "I also do not consider Syllipsimopodi to be similar to Gordoniconus in terms of proportion, size, or conch shape," he told Live Science in an email. Moreover, he noted "it is not in any way unusual for similar species to have overlapping ranges. For example, most people are used to seeing multiple species of similarly sized birds in their neighborhood; similarly, it would not be unusual to see multiple species of butterflies in the same garden at the same time."

The study was published online Tuesday (March 8) in the journal Nature Communications. 

Originally published on Live Science.

A team of researchers hunting for the wreck of a lost WWII destroyer ship in the Philippine Sea returned to land with another, perhaps even more exciting discovery: Video evidence of the deepest-swimming squid ever recorded.

Cruising just above the floor of the Philippine Trench at a staggering 20,300 feet (6,200 meters) below the surface, the young bigfin squid (family Magnapinnidae) became an instant record holder — blowing the previous champ, another bigfin squid swimming about 15,400 feet (4,700 m) below the Pacific Ocean, out of the water.

The researchers also recorded four cirrate octopuses — better known as dumbo octopuses for their fins that resemble elephant ears — around the same depth, the team wrote in a recent study. According to study co-author Michael Vecchione, this is just the second time that dumbos have been observed so deep, proving that previous observations of the floppy-finned cephalopods in the Java Trench were not just a fluke.

"This dive showed that multiple types of cephalopods can live in at least the upper parts of these really deep ocean trenches," Vecchione, a zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who is Curator of Cephalopods at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., told Live Science in an email.

The sightings also raise some questions, Vecchione added — like, "How do bigfin squids manage to live physiologically at depths ranging from 3,200 to 19,600 feet (1000 to 6000 m)," where atmospheric pressures can be up to 600 times greater than at the ocean's surface.

Researchers detected the bigfin in March 2021, while hunting for the wreck site of the USS Johnston — a U.S. Navy destroyer that sank in 1944 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Using the manned submersible DSV Limiting Factor (the same type of submersible that explorer Victor Vescovo used to descend to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in June 2020), the researchers filmed their dive to the bottom of the Philippine Trench, where they explored for more than four hours.

The team spotted the bigfin squid just above the ocean floor. Although the sub was hovering too high to image the squid in precise detail, the researchers were able to discern telltale features — such as the squid's extremely large back fins and its distinct swimming posture — that confirmed its identity. Because the squid's tentacles were relatively short, the researchers hypothesized that the deep-dwelling cephalopod was a juvenile.

The team published their findings Dec. 2, 2021 in the journal Marine Biology.

Originally published on Live Science.

A number of marine animals — including octopuses, squids, crabs and lobsters — will be recognized as sentient beings as part of a new law proposed by the U.K. government.

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill was first proposed in May and is currently under review. The proposed law originally included all vertebrates, or animals with a backbone, but no invertebrates. However, on Nov. 19, the U.K. government announced that two invertebrate groups — cephalopod mollusks (octopuses, squids and cuttlefish) and decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimp and crayfish) — will now be included on the list of sentient beings, which means their welfare will have to be considered when future government decisions are made about them..

The driving force behind this addition was a new report published Nov. 19 by The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which reviewed evidence from hundreds of scientific studies on these two invertebrate animal groups. 

Related: 8 crazy facts about octopuses

"After reviewing over 300 scientific studies, we concluded that cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans should be regarded as sentient, and should therefore be included within the scope of animal welfare law," lead researcher Jonathan Birch, a philosopher of biological sciences at LSE, said in a statement. "I'm pleased to see the government implementing a central recommendation of my team's report."

Historically, it has been hard to prove sentience in animals because it is difficult to define.

"Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement," the researchers wrote in the report. However, pain reception is now widely considered to be the central criterion policymakers consider when drafting new legislation on animal welfare, they added.

The new study focused on evidence for different forms of pain reception, such as the possession of pain receptors and specific brain regions associated with pain, as well as behavioral experiments that show that these animals make choices to avoid painful or stressful scenarios. 

Being recognized as sentient means that the welfare of cephalopods and decapod crustaceans will have to be considered in any future decision-making processes, according to the U.K. government. "The Animal Welfare Sentience Bill provides a crucial assurance that animal wellbeing is rightly considered when developing new laws," Lord Zac Goldsmith, the U.K.'s animal welfare minister, said in the statement. "The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain, and therefore, it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation." 

However, the new listing will not affect existing legislation surrounding these animals. This means several questionable practices — such as selling animals to untrained handlers, transporting animals in ice-cold water and boiling animals live without stunning them and other extreme slaughter methods remain legal even for sentient animals. 

The researchers are now calling for these practices to be outlawed. 

Boiling lobsters alive without stunning them is already illegal in the U.S., Switzerland, Norway, Austria and New Zealand, according to IFLScience.

Originally published on Live Science.

A ghostly squid with huge, iridescent fins and funky, elbow-like bends in its tentacles is rarely seen, but scientists recently captured stunning footage of the elusive animal during an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico. 

To date, there have been fewer than 20 confirmed sightings of this deep-sea cephalopod, known as a bigfin squid (Magnapinna), and this recent sighting adds one more to the list, according to a statement from NOAA Ocean Exploration.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists spotted the elusive squid on their recent "Windows to the Deep 2021: Southeast ROV and Mapping expedition," during which the team explored poorly understood deepwater areas in the western Atlantic Ocean off the southeastern United States. While filming underwater near the West Florida Escarpment — a steep slope in the seafloor that separates the shallow, coastal waters from the deep Gulf of Mexico — the team noticed a set of spindly blue appendages drifting past their remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

Related: 8 crazy facts about octopuses 

In the footage, the camera turns to reveal the bigfin squid in all its glory, its eight arms and two tentacles strewn out behind it. The creature's large fins — which extend off the main portion of its body, called the mantle — ripple softly in the water, similar to how a stingray's fins flap. The see-through mantle holds the squid's organs, which appear light yellow and pink in the light of the ROV. 

Mike Vecchione, a research zoologist with the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Laboratory and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, was onshore watching the ROV footage on a satellite feed as the bigfin squid came into view. He and Richard E. Young of the University of Hawaii first described the bigfin squid family, called Magnapinnidae, in 1998, according to a report in the South African Journal of Marine Science. Since then, three species of bigfin squid have been described, but there may be more bigfin squid species to discover, according to the NOAA statement.  

When the bigfin squid popped up on the ROV feed, Vecchione quickly called the vehicle operators, to share his knowledge of the animal, the statement says. "Magnapinna … all of their arms and tentacles have this extension on them, long, spaghetti-like extension," Vecchione can be heard saying in the NOAA video footage. "It's really difficult to tell the arms from the tentacles, which is very unusual for a squid." The bigfin squid holds all these appendages out from its body, creating those distinctive elbow-like dents that make its tentacles so recognizable.

The squid was seen swimming about 7,825 feet (2,385 meters) beneath the ocean surface, but in the past, bigfin squid have been spotted as deep as 15,535 feet (4,735 m) down, according to the statement. Members of the bigfin family are widely distributed throughout the world's deep ocean ecosystems, but it's unclear how many there are in total since the cephalopods are seen so rarely. Last year, scientists reported seeing five of the squid near the Great Australian Bight, a large bay in South Australia — the first time any bigfin squid had been spotted in Australian waters, Live Science previously reported.  

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists mapping the seafloor in the Gulf of Aqaba, the "right antenna" part of the northern Red Sea, recently made two remarkable sightings almost simultaneously: a sunken shipwreck and a mysterious big squid zipping around it, according to the marine research organization OceanX.

After sending down a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), the OceanX team quickly identified the shipwreck — it was the Pella, a ferry that caught on fire and sank in November 2011. The squid, however, took longer to identify. But it made plenty of cameos; the crew used the ROV and submersibles to visit the wreck three times, and each time they saw a huge squid swimming by.

After consulting with Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the crew finally got an answer; the cephalopod was a purpleback flying squid (Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis), and a giant one at that.

"We got photobombed by the giant purpleback," Mattie Rodrigue, science program lead at OceanX, told Live Science. "I was joking it was a made-for-TV moment."

Related: Release the kraken! Giant squid photos

The purpleback flying squid run ins happened in October 2020, when OceanX's research vessel, the OceanXplorer, was on its maiden voyage mapping the seafloor of the northern Red Sea. The crew was in the Gulf of Aqaba's Neom region, and was steadily cataloguing the region's underwater ecosystem and bathymetry with technology aboard the ship, including multibeam sonars and deep-sea vehicles. 

Then, the ship's survey technician alerted Rodrigue that the multibeam sonars were picking up an anomaly about 328 feet (100 meters) long on the seafloor. Some crew members thought it was a large rock or coral reef, but others guessed it was a shipwreck. A subsequent investigation with the deep-sea vehicles confirmed it was the shipwreck of the Pella, which sank while en route to Nuweiba, Egypt, resulting in one passenger death.

As the ROV approached the shipwreck's bow at about 2,788 feet (850 m) below sea level, a large squid "came toward us then swerved away," Rodrigue said. 

The ROV has lasers that can help measure underwater objects, but the crew didn't turn them on in time. It's likely that the squid had a total body length of about 6 feet (2 m), said Vecchione, who spoke both with OceanX and Live Science. There are reports of mature female purpleback flying squid with mantles (the body or "hat-like" part of the squid) of up to 2.6 feet (82 centimeters), he said.

Purpleback flying squid come in five sizes, ranging from dwarf form to giant form, which this one likely was, Vecchione told Live Science. The squid's short and broad fins, as well as its body proportions, match those of a purpleback flying squid, and the Red Sea has a known population of giant form purpleback flying squid, he noted.

These squid are active predators that live in tropical and subtropical waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans, according to the Australian Museum. They live in the open ocean down to depths of about 3,280 feet (1,000 m), but swim frequently upward to shallower depths at night to feed. What's more, these muscular and speedy squid can cruise at speeds of 6.2 mph (10 km/h) with bursts of up to 22 mph (35 km/h), according to SeaLifeBase, an internationally maintained marine research site.

S. oualaniensis are harvested as bait for tuna in Japan and Taiwan, and they're also eaten by humans, "although the quality of the meat is relatively poor," according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

It's unknown if purpleback flying squid frequently hang out around shipwrecks, but the sighting of this individual (or individuals, it was unclear if there was more than one) raises the question, Vecchione said. It's possible that shipwrecks attract fish, which squid prey on, he noted.

Spotting the squid was a memory she'll never forget, Rodrigue said.

"It was just so spectacular for me," Rodrigue said. "It was already going to be an exciting day because we were thinking that we were going to see a shipwreck … but we had absolutely no idea that we were going to encounter such a magnificent and large animal."

Originally published on Live Science.

Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) are mysterious deep-sea predators with basketball-size eyes and tentacles that can stretch to 33 feet (10 meters) long. Giant squid are one of the world’s largest invertebrates and belong to an ancient group of mollusks called cephalopods, which also includes octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiluses. 

Giant squid sightings are likely what inspired tales of the ship-destroying Kraken from Scandinavian mythology. Real giant squid live at depths of at least 2,950 feet (900 m) below the ocean's surface and aren't known to attack ships.

Scientists still have much to learn about the lives of giant squid. Only twice have researchers been able to catch footage of these elusive giants in their natural environment — both times within the last 10 years, Live Science previously reported. Experts still aren't sure how many giant squid there are, or how many different species may exist, according to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York.

Related: 500 million-year-old fossil is the granddaddy of all cephalopods

How big is a giant squid?

The biggest giant squid ever found was almost 43 feet (13 m) long, including its tentacles — that's about as long as a semi-trailer. However, scientists estimate that the species may be able to grow up to 66 feet (20 m) long, based on the size of giant squid beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), which prey on giant squid, — according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. In many squid species, females are larger than males, and scientists believe the same is true for giant squid.  

Squid have eight arms and two tentacles, with spiked suckers that help grasp and pull prey toward their beaks. Squid beaks are made out of hard chitin, the same material as insect exoskeletons, with sharp edges that are perfect for chopping up prey into bite-size chunks, according to the AMNH.

Related: Stunningly intact giant squid washes ashore in South Africa

Giant squid vs colossal squid

Giant squid are massive, but they still have competition for the title of biggest ocean cephalopod. Colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) live in the Southern Ocean at depths of at least 3,280 feet (1000 m) and have larger and heavier bodies than giant squid, according to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. One of the few known colossal squid specimens, held at the Te Papa museum, weighs 992 pounds (450 kilograms), while giant squid are thought to only weigh up to about 606 pounds (275 kg). Colossal squid can reach lengths of 45 feet (14 m), but giant squid can grow even longer because of their two elongated tentacles, and may reach 66 feet, according to the Smithsonian.  

Where do giant squid live?

Giant squid can be found in oceans around the world at depths of at least 2,950 feet, but their exact geographic range is unknown. Giant squid are most often recorded in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and near South Africa and New Zealand, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 

Some scientists believe that giant squid should be split into multiple different species, including separate species for populations in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern Ocean. However, a 2013 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B analyzed 43 giant squid samples collected from across their range and found little genetic diversity. This suggests giant squid are a single species and intermingle through migration.

Related: Giant squid all one big, happy family

Breeding

Giant squid are solitary, and scientists aren't sure how males find females to breed. Researchers hypothesized that because males and females probably only encounter each other occasionally, the females would collect and store sperm from multiple males. However, a female caught off the coast of Japan in 2020 only had sperm from a single male, suggesting giant squid may actually be monogamous, Live Science previously reported.  

Scientists aren't sure what squid mating even looks like. Experts assume that males place their sperm onto the female squid's arms, and suspect females may release eggs and hold them as they are fertilized in the water. The female then releases millions of fertilized eggs stuck together as an egg mass, according to the Smithsonian.

Baby squid are just 1 to 4 millimeters long when they hatch from their mother's eggs, and feed in the upper ocean at depths of about 650 feet (200 m), before descending deeper into the ocean when they mature, according to the Delaware Museum Of Natural History. Squid have short lifespans, and most species only live for one to three years. While scientists don't know exactly how long giant squid live, they believe it is no more than five years so they must grow very quickly, according to the Smithsonian.

What do giant squid eat?

Giant squid eat other, smaller squid species and hunt fish, including blue grenadier (Macruronus novaezelandiae), a torpedo-shaped deep-sea fish, according to the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web. 

Giant squid are themselves prey for sperm whales. But the cephalopods don't go down without a fight, and sperm whales are often found with sucker-shaped scars after hunting giant squid, according to the American Museum of Natural History.

Related: Beached sperm whale in Australia shows scars from tussle with a giant squid

The Kraken from Scandinavian mythology, likely inspired by giant squid sightings, was said to appear as small islands on the water to fool sailors into thinking it was land. As the story goes, the giant sea creature would then use its tentacles to pull ships and their crews beneath the waves. But humans are not part of the real giant squid's diet, and there's no reason for giant squid to attack ships.

Are giant squid endangered?

Giant squids are categorized as a species of least concern by the IUCN, which means they are not threatened with extinction. They have a wide geographic range and are less likely to be negatively impacted by human activity than many other species, as they live in the deep ocean. However, scientists don't know for sure how big the giant squid population is or what threats it could be facing.  

Additional resources

• Book about squid and other cephalopods: "Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods" (The Experiment, 2020). 
• The American Museum of Natural History has a short video on YouTube describing encounters between giant squid and sperm whales. 
• BBC Earth offers more information about giant squid and their links to the mythological Kraken.  

A female of the world's largest squid — sometimes called the "kraken" after the mythological sea monster — that was caught off the coast of Japan apparently had just one amorous encounter in her lifetime. 

The female had sperm packets from just one male giant squid embedded in her body, which surprised researchers. Because giant squid are solitary creatures that probably run across potential mates only occasionally, scientists expected that females would opportunistically collect and store sperm from multiple males over time.

"We were almost confident that they are promiscuous," said Noritaka Hirohashi, a biologist at Shimane University in Japan. "We just wanted to know how many males are involved in copulation. So this is totally unexpected."

Related: Release the kraken! Giant squid photos 

Mysterious mating 

Hirohashi and his colleagues study reproduction and sperm biology in several squid species, but the most mysterious of all is Architeuthis dux, the giant squid. Rarely seen alive, the giant squid has a life cycle shrouded in deep ocean mystery. Video of living giant squid in their natural habitats has been captured only twice. The only thing researchers know about these mysterious creatures' mating habits is that female giant squid are sometimes found with large sperm packets known as spermatangia embedded in their muscles. Researchers writing in a 1997 paper in the journal Nature posited that male giant squid probably use their "muscular elongate penis" to inject the sperm packets into the females.

How sperm meets egg from there isn't entirely clear. It's possible that the female releases chemical cues that activate the sperm when she's ready to spawn, or perhaps she releases her eggs in such a way that they trail along the sperm packets as they leave her body. Squid females do have organs near the mouth called seminal receptacles, where some species storm sperm, and it's possible that in those species, the embedded sperm can travel over the skin to these receptacles. 

Knowing that witnessing two giant squid mating is highly unlikely, Hirohashi and his team developed a window into the process, using genetics. Examining squid specimens from fisheries and museum archives, they pinpointed some segments of the giant squid genome that would distinguish one set of squid DNA from another. Think of it like a squid paternity test: Any sperm packets found on a female can be tested to see if they came from multiple males and, if so, how many. 

The researchers are always on the lookout for sperm-spangled females. They send out flyers to local museums, fisheries and aquariums, asking them to alert the research lab if a giant squid specimen turns up. In February 2020, they got good news. 

"In this case, we found [a] Yahoo News [article] telling that the giant squid was caught," Hirohashi wrote in an email to Live Science. 

Saving sperm 

The specimen was a female, with a mantle, or main body, 5.25 feet (1.6 meters) long. It was missing a pair of tentacles and one eye but still weighed 257 pounds (116.6 kilograms). The squid had been caught in a fisher's net in Kyoto and was displayed at the Miyazu Energy Aquarium before being dissected. 

When Hirohashi's team examined the body, they found that the squid was just reaching maturity and that it had squiggly spermatangia 3.9 inches (10 centimeters) long embedded in five separate locations: three places on the squid's mantle, one by an arm and one on the head. Each location hosted at least 10 spermatangia. Some were near gashes that may have been caused by a mating male's beak. 

Genetic analysis of the spermatangia revealed that each and every one came from the same male. This was shocking to the research team; giant squid are often found bearing sperm packets, in a way that suggests that males aren't particularly picky. Spermatangia have been found on immature females, perhaps as a way for males to make their sperm available after the female matures, and even on males, perhaps because males are willing to try anything (or perhaps because they sometimes accidentally self-fertilize). All of the evidence pointed to a species that would mate first and ask questions later.

The specimen, of course, is just one female, so more research is needed to see if monogamy is the norm among giant squid females. It's possible that this female had simply only encountered one male before she was entangled in the net that ended her life, the researchers wrote in the September issue of the journal Deep Sea Research Part 1. Or perhaps it is typical for females to mate with just one male. The gashes might be part of the males' strategy for ensuring other males don't move in, perhaps by limiting a female's life span after mating so that she doesn't have time to collect more sperm. Or, the researchers speculated, the aggression and injuries could spur the females to mature and spawn so that the sperm is speedily fertilized. 

The next step is to study the spermatangia of more specimens, Hirohashi said. And researchers need to figure out how the stored sperm reaches the eggs, which are not deposited particularly close to the spermatangia. Researchers also need to figure out basically everything else about this elusive creature, including its life span, migration and habitats, he added. 

"Kids ask these questions at the aquarium, so we must answer," Hirohashi said. 

Originally published on Live Science

NASA is preparing to rocket around 5,000 tardigrades — those adorably pudgy "water bears —" and 128 glow-in-the-dark baby squid into space.

The animals are heading to the International Space Station (ISS) next week as part of SpaceX's 22nd cargo resupply mission.

SpaceX is set to launch the microscopic critters onboard a Falcon 9 rocket on June 3 1:29 p.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Related: 8 reasons why we love tardigrades

Tardigrades are tiny, just 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) long, and get their popular nickname from their tubby, bear-like appearance when viewed through a microscope. And these little guys are no pushovers — capable of surviving extreme radiation; pressures six times those found in the deepest parts of the ocean; and the total vacuum of space, making the microscopic animals much tougher than their ursine namesakes. In fact, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet was carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades onboard when it crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11, 2019. If any life-form could survive the crash, perhaps these creatures would, especially since they were in their dehydrated "tun" state from which they could be resuscitated.

It's these abilities that make the tardigrades such a useful research organism aboard the ISS, where astronauts hope to identify the specific genes responsible for the teensy animals' remarkable feats of adaptation to high stress environments. This should, in turn, give us some vital insights into the health impacts of long-duration space travel.

"Some of the things that tardigrades can survive include being dried out, being frozen and being heated up past the boiling point of water. They can survive thousands of times as much radiation as we can and they can go for days or weeks with little or no oxygen," Thomas Boothby, assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming and principal investigator for the experiment, said in a news briefing. "They've been shown to survive and reproduce during spaceflight, and can even survive prolonged exposure to the vacuum of outer space."

For Boothby's study, astronauts will examine the molecular biology of the water bears to look for signs of any immediate and long-term adaptations to life in low-Earth orbit — which subjects daring space travelers to the rigors of zero gravity and increased radiation exposure. He hopes that the information gleaned from the creatures, set to arrive at the station in a semi-frozen state before being thawed out, will provide vital insights for future therapies that could protect astronauts' health during prolonged space missions.

A separate and parallel experiment also set to be delivered by the resupply mission will bring baby bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) to the station. The 0.12-inch-long (3 mm) squid have a special light-producing organ inside their bodies where bioluminescent bacteria give the squid their glow. The researchers of this experiment hope to investigate this symbiotic relationship between bacteria and squid to see how beneficial microbes interact with animal tissue in space.

"Animals, including humans, rely on our microbes to maintain a healthy digestive and immune system," Jamie Foster, a microbiologist at the University of Florida and principal investigator of the Understanding of Microgravity on Animal-Microbe Interactions (UMAMI) experiment, said in a statement. "We do not fully understand how spaceflight alters these beneficial interactions."

The squid are born without the bacteria, which they then acquire from the ocean around them, so the researchers are planning to add the bacteria to the squid as soon as the animals get thawed out at the ISS. This way, researchers can observe the squid as they establish symbiosis with the bacteria. By studying the molecules produced during the process, the researchers will be able to determine which genes the squid turned on and off to accomplish the feat in space. Knowing this could help humans better look after their gut and immune system microbiomes across long-distance space journeys.

Although the journey into space is a stressful one, the tardigrades, at least, have endured worse, having recently survived being shot from a high-speed gun. In that study, researchers found that tardigrades were able to survive impacts made at speeds of roughly 3,000 feet per second (900 meters per second), as Live Science previously reported.

Originally published on Live Science.

When a bizarre, white-polka-dotted blob the size of a person's palm washed ashore in North Carolina last December, rangers at Cape Lookout National Seashore weren't sure what to make of it. 

So the rangers turned to the public for identification help, posting a photo of the semitranslucent blob tangled in seaweed on their Facebook page on May 18. "It might be something like the egg sacks of a squid (but we aren't sure)," Cape Lookout rangers wrote in the post.

Turns out, their guess was spot-on: The blob is likely made up of the eggs of the Atlantic brief squid (Lolliguncula brevis), two biologists told Live Science. This squid, which lives in inlets and estuaries along parts of the Atlantic coasts of North and South America, is so small, it's "not the target of commercial fisheries, but they are abundant and important in marine ecosystems," said Ian Bartol, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University in Virginia who was not involved with the blob's discovery.

Related: Under the sea: A squid album 

The blob's odd shape is officially known as an egg mass, but it has so many egg-filled sacks, researchers sometimes call such masses "mops," said Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved with the recently discovered blob. 

After mating, female brief squid lay about 30 eggs in a clear, gelatinous finger-shaped sack, which is usually about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) long, Vecchione said. Then, the female secures the egg-filled sack to the seafloor in shallow waters — for instance, to oyster shells or clam shells — and other females often follow suit, attaching their egg-filled capsules to the same base, forming a mop.

It's unclear why females attach their egg capsules together, but the strategy might be protective. "If one capsule is attached and it doesn't drift away, chances are, that's a good place to attach them," Vecchione told Live Science. 

In the Chesapeake Bay, brief squid usually lay their eggs in September and October, Vecchione said. Farther south, the squid might lay their eggs later in the year, "so finding them in December in North Carolina doesn't really surprise me," he said.

It's possible that strong currents from a storm washed the egg mass ashore on Shackleford Banks, one of the barrier islands in Cape Lookout National Seashore, where they were found on Dec. 31, 2020, Karen Duggan, a park ranger at Cape Lookout National Seashore, told Live Science.

While getting washed ashore was definitely a game-ender for these eggs, there are surprisingly few predators that eat these mops in the ocean, Vecchione noted. For instance, some worms burrow into brief squid egg capsules, and in other squid species, crabs and fishes prey on egg masses, "but it's not very common," Vecchione said. "If they were easy to eat, then they would just be a smorgasbord for whoever comes along." It's possible that the gelatinous capsule has chemical defenses, and there's some evidence it has anti-microbial properties, he added. 

After the squid babies hatch from their eggs, however, it's another story. "As soon as they start hatching, they're fair game for a lot of things," including fish and other marine animals that eat plankton-size prey, Vecchione said. 

In adulthood, a brief squid's mantle (a measurement that doesn't include its head, eight arms or two tentacles) is usually no larger than 4.7 inches (12 cm) long, according to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. The squid has a few claims to fame. For one, it can live in waters with low salinity — as low as half that of regular seawater — which is rare among cephalopods, a group that includes squids, octopuses and nautiluses, Vecchione said. The brief squid can also tolerate "a broad range of temperatures and dissolved oxygen levels, allowing it to venture into estuaries where other squids cannot," Bartol added.

Brief squid also have rotating jets, so they can easily "swim both forward (arms first) and backward (tail first), and they are extremely maneuverable, as the jet and fins can be employed in a coordinated fashion," Bartol said. They can also change color, achieving optimal camouflage, he said.

A DNA analysis would be needed to formally identify this egg mop, as it is "kind of beat up from being washed ashore," but based on its size and place of discovery, it most likely belongs to a brief squid, Vecchione said. Other guesses include the longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) and the slender inshore squid (Doryteuthis plei), which also live in the region, according to an update Thursday (May 20) on the ranger's Facebook post.

Originally published on Live Science.

Architeuthis dux — the world's largest known squid — is surprisingly camera shy.

The elusive giant squid has wriggled its way into folklore for thousands of years, inspiring tales of fearsome krakens with bodies as large as islands. In reality, A. dux is a tad smaller than that, capable of growing to about 46 feet (14 meters) long —  about the length of a semi-trailer.

But despite their size, these cephalopods are almost never seen in the water; most observations of the behemoths come from dead or dying squids that wash up on shores or become ensnared in deep-sea trawling nets. That finally changed in 2012, when a team of marine scientists filmed a young A. dux in its natural habitat, about 2,000 feet (630 m) below the sea south of Japan.

Now, a study published online in the journal Deep Sea Research Part 1: Oceanographic Research Papers delves into why these giants of the deep are so elusive, and explains how a team of researchers was able to capture the first footage of A. dux in its natural habitat in 2012, and again in 2019 in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the study authors (many of whom were present for the 2019 giant squid sighting), the creature's evasiveness is due, in part, to its enormous eyes.

Related: Release the kraken! Giant squid photos

Giant squids can live thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. Very little sunlight can penetrate this deep so to adapt, the giant squid evolved the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. Each of these cephalopods' peepers are about as large as a basketball — roughly three times the diameter of any other animal, Live Science previously reported.

These huge eyes not only help giant squids make their way around the deep, dark ocean, but probably also make them extra sensitive to the bright lights that marine researchers mount to their submersibles and underwater cameras, according to the study authors. That sensitivity could explain why giant squids are so hard to find in their natural habitats; by the time a research vehicle reaches a squid's swimming grounds, the squid has long since fled the craft's lights and vibrations.

To correct this over-illumination, the researchers involved in the 2012 and 2019 A. dux sightings turned down the lights on their submersible (named the Medusa). After reaching the desired depths, the Medusa turned off its lights and stopped moving, allowing creatures of the deep to come to it rather than actively navigating across the bottom of the sea. The team also illuminated its camera with a dim red light instead of the bright white lights typically used on expeditions like these, capitalizing on a natural deep-sea color-blindness.

"Many deep-sea species, including squid, have monochromatic visual systems that are adapted to blue [light] and blue bioluminescence rather than long wavelength red-light," the researchers wrote in the study. "Using red light may thus be a less obtrusive method for illuminating deep-sea species for videography."

The researchers also used the squids' attraction to blue light to their advantage, outfitting the Medusa with a custom lure that they called the E-Jelly. This small, spinning ring of neon blue lights sat on the end of an outstretched arm, mimicking the movement and glow of a bioluminescent jellyfish.

The lure worked, drawing A. dux out of the darkness in both 2012 and 2019. In fact, the giant squid spotted in the Gulf of Mexico was a little too convinced by the E-Jelly's display; as footage of the encounter shows, the giant squid tried to attack the Medusa's camera arm with its tentacles in the hope of taking home a nice jellyfish meal. (This assault enabled the team to measure the squid's tentacles, which appeared nearly 6 feet, or 1.8 m, long).

This strategy of combining low-light equipment with bioluminescent bait seems to be the most effective known method of tricking the giant squid out of hiding, the researchers concluded. That's a handy trick, as there is much to learn about the kraken's behavior that can only come to light in the darkness of its natural habitat.

Originally published on Live Science.

Several years ago, divers exploring the western coast of Norway encountered an object they couldn't explain: An enormous, jelly-like orb, more than 3 feet (1 meter) wide, was hovering in place partway between the seafloor and the surface. A dark streak cut through the center of the orb, but the object was otherwise translucent and totally featureless.

It was, simply put, a perfectly inscrutable blob.

Nearly 100 similar blob sightings have been reported around Norway and the Mediterranean Sea since 1985, but the mysterious gelatinous masses have always evaded classification. Now, thanks to a year-long citizen science campaign and a new DNA analysis, researchers have finally identified the blobs as the rarely-seen egg sacs of a common squid called Illex coindetii.

Related: Release the Kraken! See photos of the giant squid

According to a new study, published March 30 in the journal Scientific Reports, each blob may contain hundreds of thousands of teensy squid eggs, encased in a bubble of slowly disintegrating mucus. Remarkably, while scientists have known about I. coindetii for more than 180 years and have observed the species widely around the Mediterranean and both sides of the Atlantic, this is the first time they have identified the squid's egg sacs in the wild, the researchers wrote.

"We also got to see what's inside the actual sphere, showing squid embryos at four different stages," lead study author Halldis Ringvold, manager of the marine zoology organization Sea Snack Norway, told Live Science. "In addition, we could follow how the sphere actually changes consistency — from firm and transparent to rupturing and opaque — as the embryos develop."

I. coindetii belongs to a common group of squids called Ommastrephidae. During reproduction, females in this group produce large egg spheres — or egg masses — made of their own mucus to keep their embryos buoyant and safe from predators, Ringvold said. However, sightings of these masses are rare, and some species' masses have never been seen before.

When the Norwegian blob sightings became international news several years ago, some researchers suspected that the spheres were Ommastrephid egg masses, Live Science previously reported. But without a DNA analysis of the blob's tissue, there was no way to show what squid species, if any, had created them.

So, Ringvold and his colleagues launched a citizen science campaign that encouraged divers to collect small tissue samples of any blobs they encountered in the waters near Norway. In 2019, divers came through with tissue samples from four separate blobs, which they collected in small plastic bottles and stored in home refrigerators (the tissue collection did not appear to damage the egg masses in any way, according to the study).

The samples included both the gooey body of the blobs, plus embryos at different stages of development. A DNA analysis of the tissues confirmed that all four blobs contained I. coindetii squids, the researchers wrote.

So, mystery solved? Partially. Without sampling tissues from every single sphere, the researchers can't be sure that all of the nearly 100 observed blobs belong to the same species, the team wrote. However, given that all of these blobs were very similar in shape and size, it's likely that "many of them" were made by I. coindetii, the team concluded.

As for the strange, dark streak running through many of the spheres? According to the researchers, this could be ink released when the eggs were fertilized.

"Spheres with or without ink may be a result of spheres being at different maturity stages, where spheres with ink are freshly spawned," the researchers wrote in their study. "After a while, when embryos start developing, the whole sphere, including the streak, will start to disintegrate."

The streak could also be a sort of camouflage mechanism, the team wrote, meant to mimic large fish and scare off potential predators. The solution to that mucus-y mystery will have to come another day.

Originally published on Live Science.

It looks like an alien — head dwarfed by enormous flapping fins, body blobbing through dark water, thin blue tentacles streaming behind it in a tangle of neon spaghetti. But despite its otherworldly appearance, the elusive cephalopod known simply as the Bigfin squid (Magnapinnidae) may be more common in Earth's deep oceans than scientists ever knew.

In the 113 years since its discovery, the Bigfin squid has been spotted in the wild only 12 times around the world. Now, a study published Wednesday (Nov. 11) in the journal PLOS ONE, adds five new sightings to the tally, all of them captured thousands of feet below the surface of the Great Australian Bight in South Australia.

Not only do the sightings mark the first time that Bigfin squid have been seen in Australian waters, but it's also the first time that five of them have been caught hanging out together in one place. The resulting footage — captured by underwater cameras trailing behind a large research vessel — provides an unprecedented look at the bizarre cephalopod's anatomy and behavior, lead study author Deborah Osterhage told Live Science.

Related: 8 crazy facts about octopuses

"I was stunned and excited when I first saw the Bigfin squid in a photo collected by our camera," Osterhage, a marine researcher with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (or CSIRO, Australia's government science agency), said in an email. "I recognized it immediately, with its distinctive large fins and extremely long and slender arms and tentacles."

Scientists identified the first Bigfin squid specimen, which was caught by fishers near Portugal, in 1907. It took more than 80 years before anyone saw one in the wild, swimming 15,535 feet (4,735 meters) underwater off the coast of Brazil in 1988. The squid is distinct, with giant fins jutting off of its body like Dumbo the elephant's ears. These fins are as wide as the squid's upper body (or mantle) is long, Osterhage said, and Bigfins propel themselves through the water by flapping them like wings.

That's nothing new for cephalopods (just ask the adorably named Dumbo octopus), but what really sets the Bigfin squid apart from its other deep-sea cousins are incredibly long, stringy tentacles. Now, researchers have a better idea of just how long and stringy they can get. In the new study, which culminates from more than 40 hours of underwater observations at depths of 3,100 to 7,900 feet (950 to 2400 m) below the surface, the team not only sighted the gaggle of Bigfins swimming through the Bight, but they even measured one of them with more accurate methods than ever before.

"We were able to measure [one specimen] with lasers — a first, as previous measurements are estimates based on nearby objects," Osterhage said. "It measured 5.9 feet (1.8 m) in length. The specimen's mantle was around 6 inches (15 centimeters), with the remaining 5.9 feet [1.8 m] made up of those long arms and tentacles."

Think, an upper body as long as a U.S. dollar bill, trailing tentacles as long as U.S. tennis champ Serena Williams. And that may even be on the small side; according to Osterhage, previous studies have estimated that Bigfin squid can grow to 22 feet (7 m) long.

Stranger still may be how the squids hold those tentacles. Unlike most cephalopods, whose tentacles hang below their bodies, the Bigfin squid's appendages jut out at perpendicular angles to their mantles before bending and curling away, making each tentacle look like an "elbow," Osterhage said.

During one of the team's sightings, a Bigfin surprised the researchers by raising one long arm above its body and holding it there — a baffling behavior never before seen in squids, the researchers wrote. The posture could have something to do with filter feeding, they speculated, but the truth is nobody knows for sure. Finding the answer to that (and many other outstanding questions about the oddball squid) will require many more encounters in the wild.

"There is much to learn about the Bigfin squid — basic questions such as what it feeds upon, how it reproduces, etc., are still unknown," Osterhage said. "But one exciting thing about our paper is that all five specimens were found clustered in close spatial and temporal proximity of each other, which has never been seen before."

Why they were clustered together is yet another question without an answer, but this behavior is often associated with survival or mating opportunities, Osterhage said. Future sightings will help determine the squid's specific needs, she added — but for now, maybe it's safest just to say that aliens of a feather (or tentacle) stick together.

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have captured rare footage of a teeny, tiny squid swimming near the Great Barrier Reef; the squid is the only living member of its genus and has never before been observed alive and in its natural habitat. 

"Researchers were all surprised to see this squid as it was nothing like any of us had seen before," Valerie Cornet, a masters student at James Cook University in Australia who is currently conducting research with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, told Live Science in an email. The ram's horn squid (Spirula spirula) swims with its body in an unusual vertical position with its arms and tentacles pointed up; at the bottom end of the squid, two ear-shaped fins ripple in the water to keep the animal afloat. In the footage, the squid can also be seen zooming downward through the water column while remaining perfectly vertical. 

Schmidt Ocean Institute researchers spotted the squid using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) — an underwater machine that can be controlled from the ocean surface — while mapping the northern Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cape York in Australia. While the ROV was cruising at a depth of about 2,760 feet (842 meters), the team saw a small, cylindrical creature pop up on their video feed. 

Related: Sea science: 7 bizarre facts about the ocean 

The researchers' voices can be heard in the background of the video footage, making observations about the animal as they maneuvered the ROV closer:

"Yeah, that definitely looks like a squid."

"And an interesting one at that!"

"... a little shy!" one added, as the squid zipped downward through the water and out of frame. 

"The squid remained upright unmoving as we zoomed in closer to get a better view, but then started swimming off rapidly downwards," Cornet said. "We kept following it around for a couple minutes to study and comment on its unique shape and staring eyes."

The team later identified the cephalopod as a ram's horn squid, named for a coiled shell that sits inside the rounded end of its elongated body. The brown-red-hued squid typically measures less than 2 inches (35-45 millimeters) in length, and while at rest, it floats vertically with its arms pointing up and the mantle — the main body of the squid that contains the shell and internal organs — pointing down. The light shell is thought to give the squid buoyancy.

The squid also emits light from a bioluminescent organ located at the tip of the mantle; this may help the squid avoid predators by minimizing the appearance of its silhouette from above, Cornet said. 

"It is particularly interesting as it is rare to see this squid alive, but we often find its open coil shell washed up on beaches," Cornet said. "This is the first time filming the squid with its characteristic 'head down' position," she added.

Related: 24 underwater drones – The boom in robotics beneath the waves

S. spirula is the only living member of the genus Spirula, family Spirulidae and order Spirulida, as all other known members of these evolutionary groups have gone extinct, the Schmidt Ocean Institute wrote in a tweet announcing the discovery.

S. spirula specimens have been found as deep as 5,577 feet (1,700 m) underwater, and scientists think the squids lay their eggs at this depth and that the eggshells withstand over 1,100 pounds (0.5 metric tons) of pressure from the water above, she added. But because the squid hasn't been studied alive in the wild, little is known about its distribution or behavior, Cornet said.

For instance, "the social structure of this species is currently unknown," Cornet said. "It was previously thought that these were a type of schooling squid, but having discovered it alone, this may not be the case."

In addition to spotting the elusive squid, the researchers discovered a number of undescribed species of corals, sponges and jellies while mapping the Great Barrier Reef. What's more, they also found a never-before-seen coral reef that stands taller than the Empire State Building. Samples and footage gathered during the fruitful expedition will keep the researchers busy for years to come, Cornet said.

Originally published on Live Science. 

When a giant squid washed ashore on a South African beach, one woman's first instinct was to save its life.

"At first, I just wanted to get it back into the ocean," Adéle Grosse, of Cape Town, told Live Science in an email. "[But] on closer observation, one could see that it was dead."

Sightings such as this one of the giant squid (Architeuthis dux) — a carnivorous beast whose 1-foot-wide (30 centimeters) eyes are the largest known peepers in the animal kingdom — are rare, and typically happen only once every few years, said Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who was not involved with this squid's discovery, told Live Science. 

Related: Release the Kraken! Giant squid photos

Grosse said she and her husband found the giant squid's remains during a morning walk on Golden Mile Beach in Britannia Bay, in southwest South Africa, on June 7. "Oh my word, seeing it at first really took my breath away," she said. "Honestly, it looked like a majestic prehistoric animal."

It's unclear how the giant squid died, but "we had big swells the night before, and it was my understanding that the swell washed up this beautiful squid onto the beach in the early hours of the morning," Grosse said. "We looked for bite marks or injuries and could not really find anything."

After uploading a few images to social media, Grosse — who runs the #SeaLoveLight pages on Facebook and Instagram — was able to connect with Wayne Florence, curator of marine invertebrates at Iziko Museums of South Africa. Florence and his team collected the squid and are now storing it at a freezer facility until they can properly study its DNA and anatomy once the COVID-19 lockdown ends, according to a statement from the museum.

The squid was likely more than 13 feet (4 meters) long and probably weighed over 660 lbs. (330 kilograms), Grosse estimated. That's actually on the shorter side for a giant squid, whose females can reach up to 60 feet (18 m) long, according to a 2013 study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

It's so rare to see A. dux, whose tales of its size have inspired the Kraken, the fabled sinker of ships, as well as the killer creature described in author Jules Verne's 1869 serialized book "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," according to that study. It wasn't until 2004 that the giant squid was seen in its natural habitat, and 2013 that the first video footage of it was published. Just last year, another crew filmed a giant squid alive for the second time in history.

There are still many mysteries surrounding the behemoth, but scientists have learned a few tidbits over the years. For instance, these massive creatures usually hang out about 2,000 feet to 3,200 feet (600 to 1,000 m) below the surface, in underwater canyons and where continents or islands slope down into the deep sea, Vecchione said. These areas likely have plentiful food for the giants, including fish, other cephalopods (a group that includes squid, octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiluses) and even other giant squid, according to the 2013 study.

Giant squid have eight arms, as well as two longer tentacles that help them grab prey, Vecchione said. Each of these 10 appendages are covered with serrated suckers with powerful suction, Vecchione said. 

Grosse's photos show these legs surrounding a white cylindrical body part. This is the squid's beak, which likely popped out due to muscle relaxation when the squid died, Vecchione said. When a squid eats, it uses its beak to bite off little pieces of the prey. "The esophagus goes through the middle of the brain, so it has to bite pieces of food so that they'll be small enough to squeeze through the brain," Vecchione noted.

Vecchione commended the Iziko Museums of South Africa for planning to collect the squid's DNA. "One long-standing question is how many species of giant squids there are," he said. The 2013 study found that there was just one species of giant squid, based on an analysis of 43 tissue samples from different individuals.

The newfound squid will be the 20th in the collection at Iziko, which has the largest collection of giant squid in Africa. Iziko's largest squid is 30.5 feet (9.3 m) long, or more than twice the length of its latest addition, the museum noted in the statement.

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Originally published on Live Science.

A trio of divers off the western coast of Norway had a close encounter with a drifting gelatinous blob — a squid's egg sac as big as an adult human. 

A video captured and shared on YouTube on Oct. 6 by Ronald Raasch, a diver with the Norwegian research vessel REV Ocean, shows a diver slowly circling a spherical blob surrounded by a transparent membrane, with a dark mass suspended inside. 

As the diver swam around the blob, his flashlight lit up its interior. Inside were numerous tiny spheres — eggs holding baby squid, estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, according to the video description.

Related: Watch Rare Footage of Whales Blowing 'Bubble Nets' to Capture Prey in a Vortex of Doom

The REV Ocean divers spotted the egg mass during a visit to a submerged World War II shipwreck in Ørstafjorden, Norway, located about 650 feet (200 meters) from the coast. They were swimming back to shore at a depth of 55 feet (17 m) when they saw the blob drifting by, according to the YouTube description. 

Raasch described the blob as a "blekksprutgeleball" — "squid gel ball" in Norwegian — when he posted the video. And this was far from the first account of such an unusual object. Dozens of similar blobs have been sighted in waters near Norway, Spain, France and Italy, with reports dating back 30 years, said Halldis Ringvold, a researcher with Sea Snack Norway and the project leader for "Huge Spheres," an investigation of the spherical sacs.

Scientists were previously perplexed by the blobs, which are so delicate that they are difficult to approach closely and sample for testing, Live Science previously reported. Divers had reported seeing spheres along the Mediterranean and Norwegian coasts in 2017, and DNA analysis of samples from four spheres recently confirmed that they were egg sacs belonging to the southern shortfin squid (Illex coindetii), a 10-armed cephalopod found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Ringvold told Live Science in an email.

The newfound sphere is similar to previously documented egg sacs in its appearance, size and  location, "and I assume this is also made by Illex coindetii," Ringvold said. While the blob in the video appears to be about the same size as the diver swimming around it, these spheres typically measure about 3 feet (1 m) in diameter on average, Ringvold said in a statement.

"The dark mass is probably ink from the female squid, who injected it while making the sphere," he said. "At the very end of the video, it is possible to see the actual squid eggs. They are very small, round and transparent."

A shortfin squid egg measures about 0.07 inches (0.2 centimeters) in diameter when the embryo is ready to hatch, and females produce between 50,000 and 200,000 eggs, according to SeaLifeBase, an internationally managed database of marine life. Embryonic development typically takes 10 to 14 days when the water temperature is 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius), SeaLifeBase says.

The shortfin squid is part of the group Oegopsida, which is known to produce large, spherical egg sacs, Ringvold told Live Science. But for some species in this group, evidence of their egg masses is yet to be found. Researchers with the Huge Spheres project are therefore collecting photos and videos of sphere sightings, as well as tissue samples, to learn more about these elusive animals, Ringvold said in the email.

• Underwater Photos: Elusive Octopus Squid 'Smiles' for the Camera
• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures
• Gallery: Jaw-Dropping Images of Life Under the Sea

Originally published on Live Science.

Marine scientists have released a stunning video of a strange critter, the piglet squid, floating along with its tentacles waving above its head in the central Pacific Ocean near Palmyra Atoll.

They spotted the squid about 4,544 feet (1,385 meters) below the ocean surface, while aboard the exploration vehicle (E/V) Nautilus. That research ship, along with remotely operated vehicles and the expeditions themselves are funded by the nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust.

"What are you?" one of the voices in the video can be heard asking, as the small creature came into view. "Is that a squid? I think it's a squid. It's like a bloated squid with tiny tentacles and a little hat that's waving around. And it looks like it's got a massive, inflated mantle cavity. I've never seen anything quite like this before."

That's an accurate description of the piglet squid, which is also known for its siphon that looks a bit like the nose of a young pig. Piglet squids, like all cephalopods, have radically different bodies from animals of all kinds that we're used to seeing on land. Instead of having their limbs and head all connected to a central, organ-holding body —- as Sy Montgomery explained in her book, "The Soul of an Octopus" — their body (or "mantle") and limbs stick out of a central head. (And of course, they don't have any bones or an exoskeleton.) [Photos: Deep-Sea Expedition Discovers Metropolis of Octopuses]

The piglet squid's unusual mantle-to-legs ratio is, in part, a consequence of how it moves through the water. According to Nautilus scientists, that mantle is filled with ammonia, which the squid uses to control its buoyancy. Ammonia, as Live Science has previously reported, is a common enough chemical on Earth but dangerous to humans.

This Nautilus expedition is an effort to explore the deep ocean waters of the Marine National Monument, near Kingman Reef, Palmyra Atoll and Jarvis Island, which are among the most remote U.S.-controlled territories. Nautilus routinely turns up high-quality footage of unusual creatures.

• Underwater Photos: Elusive Octopus Squid 'Smiles' for the Camera
• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures
• Gallery: Jaw-Dropping Images of Life Under the Sea

Originally published on Live Science.

For only the second time in history, researchers have recorded footage of a live — and very curious — giant squid in the pitch-dark depths of its salty, deep-sea home. 

The short film, recorded in the Gulf of Mexico on June 18, shows the giant squid (Architeuthis) approach the faintly blinking lights on a decoy disguised to look like a bioluminescent jellyfish. (These giants are thought to eat smaller squid that feed on certain glowing jellyfish.) At first, the giant squid looks like a swimming slug until its eight legs unfurl, revealing its large suckers that it uses to inspect the device.

The moment the giant squid realizes that the lights aren't a jellyfish, it jets away. [Release the Kraken! Giant Squid Photos]

The fact that this giant squid was alive makes this encounter different from nearly every other time scientists have spotted these behemoths. Typically, the eight-legged creatures are not seen until they are found dead, trapped in deep-sea fishing trawls — the change in pressure and temperature when they are brought to the water's surface kills the animals — or mangled, washed up on shore.

"We're talking about an animal that can get to 14 meters [45 feet] in length," said Nathan Robinson, director of the Cape Eleuthera Institute, who was part of the team that recorded the video. "[The giant squid] has captured the imaginations of countless people, yet we have no idea what it's like, how it behaves or its distribution — where you find it. It remains this mystery. We know it's out there, we just know nothing about it."

Robinson credits the team, as well as the e-jelly with capturing the incredible footage. The e-jelly was developed by Edith Widder, CEO and senior scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA). When the deep-sea jellyfish Atolla wyvillei is threatened or attacked by a predator, it lights up like a burglar alarm. The e-jelly, which is part of the entire camera system called the Medusa, mimics this blinking light, with the aim of attracting giant squid.

Usually, when crewed, deep-sea submersibles or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) go underwater, they frighten away animals that live in the dim world of deep ocean. That's because these machines tend to be noisy, and shine bright lights on creatures that have never seen the light of day, Robinson said.

ORCA's contraption sidesteps these problems by sending down the Medusa, which is attached to the e-jelly. The Medusa can reach a depth of 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) underwater, where it records footage in ultra-low light with its highly sensitive camera and digital video recorder.

The Medusa and e-jelly combo helped Widder and her colleagues capture the first live footage of a giant squid in Japanese waters in 2012. This time, luck struck again ... and so did lightning.

Terrible weather

On June 19, one day after the footage was recorded, Robinson was reviewing the videos, which were taken deep underwater about 150 miles (240 km) off the Louisiana coast. Then, he saw the image of a weird tentacle stretch across the monitor. The rest of the research vessel's crew quickly gathered round the screen. They were fairly certain it was a giant squid — a juvenile at 10 to 12 feet (3 to 3.7 m) long — but they weren't 100% sure. [Gallery: Jaw-Dropping Images of Life Under the Sea]

Before the team could send the footage to a squid expert, lightning struck the ship.

"This all happened during a lightning storm," Robinson told Live Science. "As we were crowded round watching this footage, we heard a huge crack. We ran outside — there's a plume of black smoke bleeding out from the back of the boat because our antenna had literally exploded. And then we immediately ran back inside because we were like, 'Oh my, what if that just fried all of our computers?'"

One of the computers on board was fried, but thankfully, not Robinson's, which stored the giant squid footage. And if that wasn't enough excitement, about 30 minutes later, a water tornado, known as a water spout, threatened their ship.

Finally, the storm ended and their internet connection was restored. The team sent the footage to one of the world's leading squid experts, Michael Vecchione, an invertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who confirmed that it was a giant squid.

The footage may be short, but every piece of knowledge scientists can learn about the giant squid — the animal with the largest eyes in the animal kingdom — rests on these rare recordings. The footage was captured just a few miles from the Appomattox deepwater oil rig, meaning that the giant squid's environment might be polluted, the researchers said.

"At present, we know so little about them that there's no way we can protect these animals," Robinson said. The more researchers learn, the better able they'll be to help protect the giants.The expedition, which was organized by Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke University in North Carolina, was funded by the Office of Ocean Exploration and Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You can read more about the adventure in a blog posted by Johnsen and Widder.

• Underwater Photos: Elusive Octopus Squid 'Smiles' for the Camera
• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures
• Infographic: Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench

Originally published on Live Science.

Divers visiting New Zealand's south coast of Wellington were looking for a nice spot to go spearfishing Saturday morning (Aug. 25) when they spotted one of the ocean's most impressive creatures of the deep: a dead, but fully intact, giant squid.

"After we went for a dive we went back to [the squid] and got a tape measure out, and it measured 4.2 meters [13 feet] long," one of the divers, Daniel Aplin, told the New Zealand Herald.

A representative from the New Zealand Department of Conservation told the Herald that the divers most likely found a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and not a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). [Photos of the Stunning Deep-Sea Squid Feeding]

Both species of squid are formidable sea creatures, with giant squid typically reaching 16 feet (5 m) long, according to the Smithsonian, and the colossal squid reaching over 30 feet (10 m) long, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Scientists know very little about these deep-sea-dwelling species, because the animals are so rarely seen. Most observations come from the occasional specimen washing ashore, as in this case, or getting accidently captured by fishers.

The enormous tentacled creature's cause of death is unknown. Aplin told the Herald that the squid appeared unscathed except for a scratch that was so tiny that the diver "wouldn't think that's what killed it." When the divers checked the squid out again after their dive, they thought it had shrunk a little, but no animals had decided to make a meal out of the dead beast, Aplin said.

He called a friend from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) who arranged for the squid to be collected, the Herald reported.

Aplin is an employee of Ocean Hunter Spearfishing & Freediving Specialists, and posted his photos of the giant squid on the company's Facebook page, which elicited a wealth of commentary. "Imagine that swimming past!" wrote one commenter. "Who's up for calamari?" wrote another.

Original article on Live Science.

"There's a challenge for you — what is THAT?"

Unusual deep-sea creatures seen for the first time can sometimes stump even a seasoned expert in marine biology. And in a recent video of an ocean dive in the Gulf of Mexico, an expert's off-camera exclamation revealed his surprised response to the appearance of a squid that had contorted itself into such a peculiar shape that it barely resembled a squid at all.

On April 17, the inverted, folded-up squid made its on-screen debut for the cameras of an expedition submersible. Its posture was so peculiar that Mike Vecchione, a research zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), dubbed the contorted cephalopod "the most bizarre squid I've ever seen." [Gallery: Exploring the Gulf of Mexico]

The dive was part of an ocean exploration mission to investigate deep-sea habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. The expedition is being conducted by the NOAA research vessel Okeanos Explorer and is taking place from April 11 through May 3.

From aboard Okeanos, scientists send deep-diving remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to capture high-resolution video of marine communities and to map the geography of habitats on the bottom of the ocean. Okeanos researchers share frequent updates from the dives, including photos and video, posting them on the mission's website.

Video shared to YouTube by the Okeanos mission shows the squid as it drifted upside down in the water near an undersea mound, at a depth of about 2,790 feet (850 meters). While the species is difficult to identify from the footage, it is thought to be in the Discoteuthis genus, NOAA representatives said in a mission update.

In the video, the mystery squid's body seems to be curled inward very dramatically, arms folded in, as if in a defensive pose, but with four limbs extended stiffly outward. What little could be seen of its body and limb shape somewhat resembled squids in the Psychroteuthidae genus, Vecchione said in the video. But while its curled-up defensive posture is common in squids, in this case it was so extreme that "it doesn't even look like a squid anymore," Vecchione added.

During the same dive in which Okeanos scientists spotted the "twisted" squid, they also spied other strange creatures. At a depth of around 2,215 feet (675 m), a blind lobster (Acanthacaris caeca) reared back on its tail, spreading its pincers wide in a pose that is common for the species. And a "very grumpy-looking," flattened, frond-trimmed goosefish (Lophiodes beroe) — a type of anglerfish — appeared at around 2,100 feet (640 m), with prey-attracting lures beckoning from the center of its face.

Highlights from past Okeanos expeditions include a fish that "walks" on the seafloor; a pale, "ghostlike" octopus that may represent a new genus; and one of the only observations of a hungry sea star midmeal, munching on a sea lily dinner.

For now, the species and behavior of the tightly clenched squid remain intriguing puzzles for scientists.

"It's a remarkable observation," Vecchione said in the video. "I wish I could tell you what it was."

Original article on Live Science.

A marine expedition exploring life in the deep sea near Australia recently captured footage of an incredible scene: a squid's sneak attack on a smaller squid.

The two animals appeared on camera seemingly out of nowhere during the ship's video observation of a baited line. A squid that swiftly swam into the frame and grasped a piece of bait quickly and unexpectedly found itself to be the prey, when a second squid shot into the picture and embraced the smaller cephalopod in its tentacles.

The life-and-death struggle was visible for only a few dramatic seconds before the wrestling squids wriggled out of sight. [See Amazing Photos of Squid]

The scene played out March 19 at 11:51 a.m. local time, at a depth of 456 feet (139 meters), in front of an underwater camera mounted on an Australian research vessel dubbed Investigator. On April 3, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) shared the footage on YouTube, but at the time, information was not available about which squid species were tussling, a CSIRO representative told Live Science in an email.

Australia's Marine National Facility deployed the ship to an area of the Southern Ocean located southwest of Tasmania to collect data on the distribution of marine life inhabiting the top 3,300 feet (1,000 m) of the water column, theCSIRO representative noted.

Researchers on board the vessel are testing a new type of technology called a profiling Lagrangian acoustic and optical probe (PLAOS), which is designed to improve acoustical sampling of sea creatures that are difficult to collect, such as gelatinous animals and microscopic life. By documenting the movements, activity and diversity of sea life in these depths, scientists will gain a better understanding of the role these life-forms play in the ocean's carbon cycle, the CSIRO representative said.

While it may seem unexpected for a squid to fall victim to one of its own kind, it's relatively common for squid to dine on squid, according to a 20-year study that observed more than 100 squid in the Gonatus genus in waters off the coast of California. The study was published in the October 2016 issue of the journal Deep Sea Research Part I.

In that study, scientists found that the species Gonatus onyx had a noted affinity for cannibalism. After observing video of 109 individuals, the researchers estimated that about 42 percent of the squids' diet on average consisted of other G. onyx squid.

Original article on Live Science.

As its name implies, the cockeyed squid has some peculiar peepers: One is small and black, and the other is exceptionally large and yellow. Now, scientists think they know the reason for the squid's wonky eyes: They help the squid spy on prey and predators in the ocean's so-called twilight zone.

By observing the squid in underwater videos, the researchers found that the creature used its large eye to look upward and its small eye to gaze downward, helping it keep a constant lookout for potential meals and threats surrounding it, the researchers said.

"Eyes are really expensive to make and maintain," lead study researcher Kate Thomas, a graduate student of biology at Duke University, said in a statement. "You want eyes just big enough to do what you need to do, but you don't want to have any bigger eyes, because then you are just wasting resources." [See Amazing Photos of Squid]

This squid species' mismatched eyes have long puzzled scientists since its discovery about 100 years ago. Cockeyed squids (Histioteuthis heteropsis) are born with eyes that are the same size, but the left eye rapidly enlarges and becomes semi-tube-shaped during juvenile development, sometimes reaching twice the size of the right eye, the researchers said.

"You can't look at one and not wonder what's going on with them," Thomas said.

To investigate, Thomas and her colleagues watched 152 underwater videos of cockeyed squid in Monterey Bay taken by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) over the past 30 years. The researchers noticed that H. heteropsis swam in a strange upside-down position, with its head down and its tail up.

Intriguingly, the squid's large, left eye consistently looked upward, and its small right eye steadily stared downward, the researchers found. Visual simulations showed that the large eye likely looks for shadows of marine life swimming overhead, while the small eye scans for flashes of bioluminescence below it, Thomas said.

They came to the "bioluminescent" conclusion because it would be almost impossible for the downward-pointing eye to see silhouettes with the sun's dim light shining above, the researchers said.

Moreover, whereas expanding the size of the large, upward-pointing eye improves its ability to see in dim light, increasing the size of the downward-facing eye doesn't affect its sensitivity to discern bioluminescent flashes against a dark backdrop, they said.

"The eye looking down really only can look for bioluminescence," said the study's senior author, Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke University. "There is no way it is able to pick out shapes against the ambient light. And once it is looking for bioluminescence, it doesn't really need to be particularly big, so it can actually shrivel up a little bit over generations. But the eye looking up actually does benefit from getting a bit bigger."

Twilight zone

This visual adaption likely helps H. heteropsissurvive in the so-called twilight zone, a region from about 660 feet to 3,200 feet (200 to 1,000 meters) under the water's surface, the researchers said.

Little sunlight reaches this area, making the twilight zone dim and a monochromatic blue color. Many animals have adapted to this crepuscular place by developing bioluminescence, or the ability to glow, the researchers said.

"The deep sea is an amazing natural laboratory for eye design, because the kinds of eyes you need to see bioluminescence are different from the kinds of eyes you need to see the basic ambient light," Johnsen said. "In the case of the Histioteuthis, this cockeyed squid, they chose one eye for each."

The results will be published online Monday (Feb. 13) in the journal Philosophical Transactions B.

Original article on Live Science.

The deep-sea diving Gonatus squid has a hearty appetite, even when it comes to eating its own kind, a new study finds.

The cannibalism finding came about during a 20-year study (1995–2015) in which marine researchers used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to study and video-record the eating habits of more than 100 different squid of the Gonatus genus in Monterey Submarine Canyon, off the California coast.

In particular, two species of Gonatus squid — Gonatus onyx and Gonatus berryi — showed a voracious appetite for munching on their own species, the researchers said. In fact, after looking at video they took of 109 squid eating meals, researchers found 42 percent of the prey G. onyx ate were other G. onyx squid. [See Amazing Photos of Squid]

In addition, the researchers — Henk-Jan Hoving, an evolutionary ecologist of Marine Fishes at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, and Bruce Robison, a senior scientist and midwater ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California — never observed G. onyx feeding on G. berryi, but G. berryi routinely fed on G. onyx.

Why cannibalism?

Cannibalism isn't uncommon in the deep sea, but this is the first time that scientists have proof that Gonatus squid engage in cannibalistic behavior, the researchers said. [See Video of the Cannibal Squid in Action]

They stressed the importance of having live-video evidence (in addition to stomach contents) of the cannibalism, since looking only at stomach contents of squid caught in trawling nets can be misleading. That's because squid and other marine creatures in trawling and jigging environments often become stressed and engage in unnatural behaviors, including cannibalism.

Though ROV lights and noises may also disturb marine creatures, in this study the researchers found that most of the prey capture happened before ROV the arrived, the researchers said.

The cannibalism isn't too surprising, as these squid need to eat nonstop, they said. Gonatus squid grow quickly, and have a metabolism that tops other cephalopods, including the octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus, the researchers said.

What's more, the squid's cannibalistic behaviors may help it reduce competition for food and mates, because if a squid eats a cousin that eats the same diet, there will be more food, as well as more mates, available, the researchers said.

Moreover, Gonatus squid spawn only once in their lifetimes, after which the female broods her batch of 2,000 to 3,000 eggs for up to nine months before dying. The female is unable to feed during this time, and relies on stored fats from earlier meals to survive, the researchers said. (Photos released in 2005 showing the brooding represented the first known instance of parental caring in squid.)

Ocean menu

When Gonatus squid aren't busy dining on each other, they can be found eating deep-sea fishes, including lanternfish and owlfish. 

To take down prey, the squid are equipped with two specialized feeding tentacles lined with suckers and large hooks. The hooks help the squid secure its prey, even if its choice dinner is larger than the squid itself, the researchers said. For instance, in 2014, scientists captured video of a Gonatus onyx squid in an hourlong battle with a much larger owlfish. The squid was victorious after using its sharp beak to cut through the fish's backbone.

The findings were published in the October 2016 issue of the journal Deep Sea Research Part I.

Original article on Live Science.

A purple squid with eyes so googly it could easily be mistaken for a character in the movie "Finding Nemo" was recently spotted by scientists off the coast of Southern California.

The so-called stubby squid (Rossia pacifica) is a species of bobtail squid native to the northern Pacific Ocean. These adorable sea creatures can be found in waters from Japan to Southern California, and typically dwell along the ocean floor, at depths of around 984 feet (300 meters), though they have been spotted as deep as 4,260 feet (1,300 m), according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

The stubby squid's giant eyes, that "look painted on," delighted the scientists aboard the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus. In a live stream of the Nautlius' undersea explorations, one researcher said the googly-eyed squid looks "like some little kid dropped their toy." [Photos: See the World's Cutest Sea Creatures]

"On that watch it happened to be a lot of geology folks or ecology folks, so a lot of the commentary was of course more like 'What is this thing, it's so cute!' and sometimes we have less of that when we see rocks," Samantha Wishnak, a science communication fellow aboard the E/V Nautilus, told Live Science.

The scientists on watch during the squid sighting also initially misidentified the stubby squid as a cuttlefish, which the squid is closely related to. Wishnak said the E/V Nautilus team was able to rule out cuttlefish, as the species is not found in the eastern Pacific Ocean. With a few other ideas for what the species might be, the researchers on board collaborated with scientists ashore and at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and MBARI, to identify the stubby squid.

Stubby squids are nocturnal hunters, so Wishnak said it was exciting to see the animal in its "somewhat natural behavior" rather than hidden in the sea floor.

"They actually have this pretty awesome superpower, they can turn on a little sticky mucus jacket over their body and sort of collect bits of sand or pebbles or whatever they're burrowing into and make a really nice camouflage jacket," Wishnak said. "When they go to ambush something and prey on something, they're able to sort of turn off that mucus jacket."

Other stubby squid sightings by divers have resulted in the same "deer in the headlights" kind of reaction, Wishnak said. The animals are used to being in darker waters, camouflaged from view.

"I think what we encountered was a squid who was not expecting to see us in any way," Wishnak said.

The E/V Nautilus is currently on a four-month expedition to explore the eastern Pacific Ocean. Next, the ship will move from the coast of Southern California to the San Francisco Bay. The vessel's mission is to explore the oceans and seek out the unknown, and is operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, a nonprofit organization founded by oceanographer Robert Ballard.

Recent discoveries on this expedition have included a mysterious purple sea orb and a sighting of the world's largest bony fish, the Mola mola.

Original article on Live Science.

Steeped in mystery, the elusive, deep-sea-dwelling giant squid, with eyes the size of basketballs, may be larger than it has gotten credit for. In fact, the monster cephalopod may grow to be longer than a school bus, researchers say.

Specimens recognizable as giant squid (Architeuthis dux) have been found washed up onshore since at least 1639. However, these sea monsters — which some people say inspired the legend of the giant kraken, though not all scientists agree — are so elusive that they were largely thought to be mythical until they were first photographed alive in their natural environment in 2004.

Ever since giant squid were discovered, there has been considerable speculation as to how large they can get. In a previous analysis of more than 130 specimens, scientists said that none exceeded 42 feet (13 meters) in length. Suggesting that giant squid could grow larger was "a disservice to science," they said. [Release the Kraken! See Photos of Giant Squid]

Still, prior studies estimated that hundreds of thousands of giant squid may live in the ocean, which would suggest that there are plenty of chances for giant squid to grow larger than previously suggested, said Charles Paxton, a fisheries ecologist and statistician at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Now, a statistical analysis from Paxton suggests that giant squid may plausibly reach 65 feet (20 m) in total length. This new study extrapolated the maximum sizes this species might reach by both examining a variety of categories of data and examining as much data taken directly from specimens of the creature as was available.

"I've been interested in the last few years about investigating the hard science behind sea monsters," Paxton said.

The data Paxton analyzed included 164 measures of mantle (body) length; 39 measures of standard length, which included the lengths of their bodies as well as the lengths of the longest of their arms; and 47 measures of total length, which included the lengths of their bodies as well as the lengths of the tentacles. (Tentacles are squid limbs that often end in teeth and hooks, and are usually significantly longer than squid arms.)

Paxton also examined 46 instances where beak, or mouth, size was measured along with mantle length. He found that beak size could help predict mantle length, confirming previous studies.

All in all, Paxton found that it was statistically plausible that giant squid could have mantle lengths of about 10 feet (3 m) and total lengths of 65 feet, "and that's a conservative analysis," he said.

"I am extrapolating here, and extrapolation can sometimes be a bit sketchy," Paxton said. "But I think these are fairly safe extrapolations. I genuinely think that giant-squid size has been underestimated."

Paxton noted that there are claims that giant squid can grow to be 100 feet (30 m) long. "I don't think giant squid can get that big, but while a measurement of a giant squid total length of 19 meters [62 feet] can be questioned, I'd say it certainly wasn't impossible," Paxton said.

Some scientists have suggested that squid parts may stretch over time, leading to overestimates of the animal's size.

To help resolve that question, "there are people in New Zealand and Spain who fairly regularly collect specimens of giant squid, and I'd like them to see just how stretchy they are postmortem," Paxton said.

Another study, reported in 2015 in the journal PeerJ, suggested that it's human nature to exaggerate the sizes of the ocean's giants. The study found that people overestimate measurements for whales, sharks and squid.

As to why giant squid might grow as large as they do, "perhaps it makes them less likely to be eaten by sperm whales," Paxton said. "It'd be interesting to find out if they do ever reach a size where they cannot ever be eaten by sperm whales."

Paxtondetailed his findings online May 17 in the Journal of Zoology.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Three extremely rare fossil specimens of an extinct squidlike animal provide new evidence of the 10-armed creature's body structure and suggest that it may have been a swift swimmer, a new study finds.

The fossils represent Acanthoteuthis, a genus of squid relatives that lived during the Jurassic period and measured between 9.8 and 15.7 inches (25 and 40 centimeters) long. What makes the specimens so exceptional is their preservation of soft body parts like the animals' fins and feeding structures, which are usually lost to time. Now, an analysis of the new material reveals never-before-seen organs, offering scientists their first glimpse of features that suggest how Acanthoteuthis may have lived, millions of years ago. 

Acanthoteuthis is a cephalopod, part of the ocean-dwelling group that includes modern octopus, squid and cuttlefish, with an evolutionary history spanning 500 million years. But even though cephalopods have been around for a long time, unlike many other extinct animals, they don't leave much of themselves behind in the fossil record. Their soft bodies don't preserve well, and the isolated bits that do fossilize tell only a partial story of what the living animal might have looked like. [See Photos of a Vampire Squid from Hell]

Acanthoteuthis belongs to a group of cephalopods called belemnites, which are particularly abundant in the fossil record — or at least a small part of them is. Belemnites had tough internal shells capped by hard parts called "rostra," which preserve well, as roughly bullet-shaped fossils. Rostra fossils are plentiful, and marks on them can even reveal traces of where the belemnites' fins attached to the mantle, the cone-shaped, muscular part of the body that forces water through a siphon for jet-propelled swimming.

Making an impression

So what kept these specimens in such good condition and preserved so much of their bodies? Christian Klug, co-author of the new study and a curator at the Paleontological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich, said the reason had to do with the site in Solnhofen, Germany, where the fossils were found.

"Solnhofen and its surroundings are world-renowned for exceptionally preserved fossils," Klug told Live Science in an email. "These fossils were embedded in fine-grained sediments in more-or-less quiet water lagoons between coral reefs. Additionally, microbial mats stabilized the sediments, guaranteeing perfectly flat bedding." Rapid burial and certain chemical conditions in the soil would also have played a part in the preservation, Klug added.  

The discoveries of the well-preserved Acanthoteuthis specimens were certainly very special, and Klug and his colleagues were eager to see what the fossils might reveal. "Since we knew that the material was important, we figured we should get the most out of it," he said.

Synchrotron scanning, a powerful X-ray technique frequently used to visualize delicate fossils, yielded disappointing results that were too low-contrast to reveal much detail, Klug said. So they turned to ultraviolet (UV) imaging. Klug said study co-author Helmut Tischlinger's expertise with UV photography was a vital part of the process, sometimes taking days of experimentation with different filters to get the images just right. His efforts revealed morphological details that were previously invisible. [Images: 'Kraken' Trolled the Triassic Seas]

Tischlinger's UV images showed the hyponome, a funnel that directs the water jets from Acanthoteuthis' mantle cavity; the esophagus; and statocysts, which are sensory organs responsible for maintaining balance and detecting movement and change in direction.

A strong swimmer

Two other details — the collar, and mantle structures made from cartilage — were especially important, Klug said, because they provide clues about the swimming abilities of Acanthoteuthis. Generally speaking, Acanthoteuthis' fins and bullet-shaped body, much like modern squids', suggest that it would be a good swimmer, rather than relying on ocean currents to carry it where it needed to go. But the structures revealed in the UV photos indicate a muscular mantle and cartilage support system that would have strengthened the connection between the mantle and the water jet and head, and would be directly involved in rapid swimming, Klug said.

Other structural evidence suggested to the researchers which ocean depths Acanthoteuthis could have inhabited. Calcified structures in the statocysts — the balance-managing sense organs — resembled structures found in pelagic squid, which occupy the water column, the part of the ocean between the bottom and the shore. The researchers concluded that Acanthoteuthis probably inhabited the same ocean region.

"We are unable, however, to determine more precisely in which water depths they lived," Klug told Live Science, adding that they probably couldn’t have dived deeper than 219 to 328 yards (200 to 300 meters) below the ocean surface, or the shell chamber inside their mantles would have imploded.

The findings were published online Jan. 5 in the journal Biology Letters.

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A squid with shiny, bioluminescent "spotlights" tipping two of its arms and what look like waxy red lips shared a close encounter with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in deep ocean waters near Hawaii.

And the underwater face-to-face was captured in a spectacular video by cameras attached to the ROV, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.

The squid even attached itself to the vehicle and "hung out there for several minutes," according to a dive update posted on NOAA's Okeanos Ocean Explorer website.

Though initially identified by a scientist on the vessel as a "whiplash squid," the cephalopod was actually a Dana octopus squid, or Taningia danae. That animal is similar in size to a whiplash squid, but lacks the two long feeding tentacles that are common in most other squids. [See Images of the Shiny Dana Octopus Squid]

The deepwater star of the video is estimated to measure between 3 and 7 feet (1 and 2 meters) in length. Broad, flexible fins extend from the squid's mantle; as they furl and flap, these fins steer T. danae through the water.

On the underside of the mantle protrudes a shape resembling a red-lipped mouth. It's really a siphon, however, used to eject water from the mantle cavity behind the eyes and propel the animal in reverse, said Scott France, a marine biologist and co-science-lead on the NOAA expedition, whose voiceover describes the squid on the video.

While the Dana octopus squid may lack a squid's trademark trailing tentacles, it makes up for them in spectacular lighting equipment, with two of its muscular arms ending in lidded light organs called "photophores." About the size of lemons, these photophores are the largest known light-producing organs in the animal kingdom, said Mike Vecchione, a zoologist at the NOAA National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution and a curator of cephalopods at the National Museum of Natural History, both in Washington, D.C.

In two video clips — one dated Sept. 19 and one dated Sept. 24 — an octopus squid swims close to Deep Discoverer, a remote-controlled marine-exploration vehicle operated from the Okeanos Explorer vessel, part of NOAA's Hohonu Moana Expedition that's exploring deep waters off Hawaii. And both clips show the squid's photophores lighting up, as the lids covering them were lifted.

Flashing these high beams could be a defensive move, Vecchione told Live Science. In the darkness of the ocean depths, a sudden flash of light could temporarily blind a predator, giving the squid a chance to escape, he said.

Vecchione suggested that the squid might also use light flashes to startle prey, making them freeze just long enough for the squid to grab hold.

According to Vecchione, the squid's flashing at the ROV could support another hypothesis about how ocean creatures use bioluminescence, lighting up as a way to attract a bigger predator to attack the more immediate threat.

The Hohonu Moana Expedition lasted from July 10 to Sept. 30, investigating deep-sea ecosystems and capturing video and images of the strange underwater life — big and small, drab and flashy — that inhabits them.

Follow Mindy Weisberger on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Tonight in New Zealand one of just two intact colossal squid, at the New Zealand Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, is undergoing a live autopsy. The giant sea beast was recently caught in the Ross Sea.

Scientists, including Aaron Boyd Evans, a post-graduate researcher at Auckland University of Technology, will be involved in the autopsy.

Before beginning the autopsy, scientists had to defrost the beast, and just to deliver the colossal squid from the freezer to a tank of cold water, several scientists, a forklift and a hose were needed. Once thawed, scientists were able to unfold the squid in its tank and take body measurements, including the length of its mantle, tentacles, fin and gladius (a rigid structure that supports the mantle).

One surprise was the sex of the colossal squid. "We were excited to find that out ourselves," Kat Bolstad, of Auckland University of Technology, said during the live autopsy. "As it turns out this one is a female, so it's got some eggs at the end of the mantle."

The only other intact colossal squid is also female, and apparently not much is known about the males of this species, according to the statement by the New Zealand Museum. That female specimen was examined in 2008.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Lasting feelings of pain or anxiety after an injury may seem perplexing, but they serve an evolutionary purpose, research suggests.

Squid that behave more vigilantly after even a minor injury are more likely to survive than their more brazen counterparts, a new study reveals. The findings suggest that persistent pain may be more useful than once thought, according to the study published today (May 8) in the journal Current Biology.

This study provides the first direct evidence to suggest that animals developed heightened sensitivity— which promotes pain in some animals — in response to natural selection, particularly to avoid predators, said study researcher Edgar Walters, a biologist at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. [5 Surprising Facts About Pain]

No pain, no gain

To study the evolution of lasting pain, Walters and his team studied how squid interact with their predators, black sea bass.

When squid feel threatened, they perform a step-by-step series of defensive behaviors, even if the predator is far away, the researchers said. The scientists observed squid and black sea bass swimming in laboratory tanks, and compared how healthy and injured squid responded to different levels of perceived danger.

The squid could still get around with an injury to one of their arms, but this put them at a disadvantage because the bass would preferentially hunt the injured animals, and from further distances, too. When bass were hunting injured squid, the prey became more vigilant, acting more defensively than their uninjured slimy brethren.

Next, the researchers treated squid with an anesthetic that prevented them from feeling pain when injured, and the animals failed to display defensive behavior that would have kept them alive.

The sensation of pain that made the squid hyper-vigilant could be analogous to the same feelings in humans, the researchers said — although the squid may feel something completely different from human pain. Still, the squids' response to injury offers a new perspective for understanding human responses to pain.

If scientists can understand more about the natural purpose of pain sensitivity, they might be able to find ways to treat pathological pain in humans, the researchers said.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Eyes and wings are among the most stunning innovations evolution has created. Remarkably these features have evolved multiple times in different lineages of animals. For instance, the avian ancestors of birds and the mammalian ancestors of bats both evolved wings independently, in an example of convergent evolution. The same happened for the eyes of squid and humans. Exactly how such convergent evolution arises is not always clear.

In a new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers have found that, despite belonging to completely different lineages, humans and squid evolved through tweaks to the same gene.

Eyes are the prize

Like all organs, the eye is the product of many genes working together. The majority of those genes provide information about how to make part of the eye. For example, one gene provides information to construct a light-sensitive pigment. Another gene provides information to make a lens.

Most of the genes involved in making the eye read like a parts list – this gene makes this, and that gene makes that. But some genes orchestrate the construction of the eye. Rather than providing instructions to make an eye part, these genes provide information about where and when parts need to be constructed and assembled. In keeping with their role in controlling the process of eye formation, these genes are called “master control genes”.

The most important of master control genes implicated in making eyes is called Pax6. The ancestral Pax6 gene probably orchestrated the formation of a very simple eye – merely a collection of light-sensing cells working together to inform a primitive organism of when it was out in the open versus in the dark, or in the shade.

Today the legacy of that early Pax6 gene lives on in an incredible diversity of organisms, from birds and bees, to shellfish and whales, from squid to you and me. This means the Pax6 gene predates the evolutionary diversification of these lineages – during the Cambrian period, some 500m years ago.

The Pax6 gene now directs the formation of an amazing diversity of eye types. Beyond the simple eye, it is responsible for insects' compound eye, which uses a group of many light-sensing parts to construct a full image. It is also responsible for the type of eye we share with our vertebrate kin: camera eye, an enclosed structure with its iris and lens, liquid interior, and image-sensing retina.

In order to create such an elaborate structure, the activities Pax6 controlled became more complex. To accommodate this, evolution increased the number of instructions that arose from a single Pax6 gene.

Making the cut

Like all genes, the Pax6 gene is an instruction written in DNA code. In order for the code to work, the DNA needs to be read and then copied into a different kind of code. The other code is called RNA.

RNA code is interesting in that it can be edited. One kind of editing, called splicing, removes a piece from the middle of the code, and stitches the two ends together. The marvel of splicing is that it can be used to produce two different kinds of instructions from the same piece of RNA code. RNA made from the Pax6 can be spliced in just such a manner. As a consequence, two different kinds of instructions can be generated from the same Pax6 RNA.

In the new study, Atsushi Ogura at the Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology and colleagues found that Pax6 RNA splicing has been used to create a camera eye in a surprising lineage. It occurs in the lineage that includes squid, cuttlefish, and octopus – the cephalopods.

Cephalopods have a camera eye with the same features as the vertebrate camera eye. Importantly, the cephalopod camera eye arose completely independently from ours. The last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates existed more than 500m years ago.

Pax6 RNA splicing in cepahlopods is a wonderful demonstration of how evolution fashions equivalent solutions via entirely different routes. Using analogous structures, evolution can provide remarkable innovations.

Malcolm Campbell receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and from Genome Canada.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Thanks to its sharp beak, a small red squid emerged victorious after an epic hour-long battle with a much bigger owlfish, all caught on video last November in Monterey Bay, Calif.

The black-eyed squid paralyzed the owlfish by cutting through the fish's backbone, according to Bruce Robison, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Robison narrates a video of the fight between invertebrate and vertebrate, captured by MBARI's remotely operate vehicle Doc Ricketts on Nov. 11, 2013.

The Doc Ricketts discovered the struggling marine creatures at about 1,475 feet (450 meters) below Monterey Bay as the vehicle was rising toward the surface, said Susan von Thun, an MBARI senior research technician. Scientists watched the scene play out for 50 minutes before the ROV had to continue its journey, Von Thun told LiveScience. [See video of the squid-fish tussle.]

"They were sinking rapidly the whole time, and we think that's part of [the squid's tactic," Von Thun said. "We see a lot of feeding events and often times the squid gets startled and lets go, but this guy held on for the whole time that we watched it."

By the time the ROV left, the squid and owlfish had dropped to a depth of 1,970 feet (600 m), Von Thun said.

An owlfish can flee a squid's grabby tentacles by shedding scales, slipping the grip, or by flicking their tails to dart out of reach, Robison said in the video. But the squid in this video is hugging the owlfish too tight for escape. Slowly, the squid twisted the fish inside its tentacles, biting over and over until it finally subdued its prey. The squid also held its tentacles over the owlfish's gill slits, perhaps in an attempt to suffocate the fish.

Dubbed owlfish by MBARI, the fish seen in the video is also known as a smelt, species Bathylagus, and is about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) long. The squid, a Gonatus onyx, is about 4 to 5 inches (10 to 12 cm) long.

Editor's note: This story was updated Jan. 15 to correct the spelling of Bruce Robison's name.

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Updated at 7:23 p.m. ET.

A giant squid, whose oversized eyes and gargantuan blob of a body make it look more mythical than real beast, washed ashore Tuesday (Oct. 1) at La Arena beach in the Spanish community of Cantabria.

The beast measures some 30 feet (9 meters) in length and weighs a whopping 400 pounds (180 kilograms); and according to news reports, it is a specimen of Architeuthis dux, the largest invertebrate (animals without backbones) on Earth.

The giant squid is currently at the Maritime Museum of Cantabria, according to El Diario Montanes.

Perhaps fortuitously, an underwater photographer happened to be in the area at precisely the time the squid washed ashore. "I felt privileged to be among a few, these animals rarely can be seen, because they live at great depths and very few appear on the coast dead," Enrique Talledo told LiveScience in an email.  "Its appearance is similar to a sea monster, well-adapted to life in the depths."

Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan's National Science Museum in Tokyo, and his colleagues, captured the first live footage of an Architeuthis giant squid in its natural habitat in 2012. The video revealed the elusive creature off the Ogasawara Islands, about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of Tokyo at a depth of around 2,066 feet (630 m); the three-man crew aboard a submersible followed the giant squid down to 2,950 feet (900 m). [See Amazing Photos of Giant Squid]

"It was shining and so beautiful," team leader Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, told AFP at the time. "I was so thrilled when I saw it first hand, but I was confident we would because we rigorously researched the areas we might find it, based on past data."

In addition to boasting record-large size, the giant squid also sport the animal kingdom's largest eyes, which can be as big as a human head, according to the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology. These enormous peepers likely allow the squid to see in the deep-sea where minimal light is available. Though little is known about where these squid live, scientists say the giants likely reside in cooler waters, as research has shown their blood doesn't carry oxygen well at high temperatures.

Like other cephalopods, a group that includes squid, octopuses, cuttlefish and their relatives, Architeuthis is thought to have an extensive nervous system and complex brain.

Steeped in mystery and legend, the deep-sea giant is said possibly to have inspired the Norse legend of the sea monster the Kraken and even Greek mythology's Scylla, a sea monster said to live in a narrow channel of water opposite its monster counterpart Charybdis.

Editor's Note: This article was updated with a photo and information from an underwater photographer.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

The females in one species of squid may have a natural defense for escaping unwanted male attention: special light-reflecting cells that can create the illusion of testes.

Like many of its cousins, the opalescent inshore squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) of the Eastern Pacific Ocean is equipped with shimmery cells on its body that can change color for camouflage and communication.

But while studying the species, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) noticed that some opalescent inshore squid had bright iridescent rainbow stripes underneath their fins. [See Stunning Photos of Deep-Sea Squid]

"Sometimes most of the squid in a batch would have them, sometimes none," Daniel DeMartini, a UCSB doctoral student, said in a statement. "After a while we started to realize the rainbow stripes were only seen in the females."

In investigating the phenomenon, DeMartini found all females were capable of producing these colorful stripes. A peek at the underlying tissue under a microscope showed that it was full of iridocytes — the cells that give these squid their iridescent, rainbow markings. What's more, these patches of iridocytes were packed with layers of a light-changing protein known as reflectin, making them six times brighter than other blotches of the color-changing cells, the researchers said.

As these rainbow streaks emerged on the squid, so did a bright white patch on the squid's body that was made up of leucophore cells, which also contain reflectin proteins but only give off white light.

The researchers say this is the first time "switchable" leucophores have been found in squid. Experiments showed that the white-colored cells turn on in response to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, just as iridocytes do.

"This discovery reveals a fundamental relationship between the switchable leucophores and the tunable color-producing iridocytes, suggesting they share a mechanism at the molecular level," DeMartini said.

DeMartini noted that the white stripe looks very similar to the white testes seen in male squid. Turning on these leucophores could help females look like males to avoid attention from notoriously aggressive males, the researchers say.

Scientists are interested in studying the color-changing properties of squid cells as a possible model for bio-inspired adaptive optics. They also hope to learn more about how cephalopods communicate.

Recently, researchers strapped an underwater camera on the elusive jumbo squid to watch it flashing its colors in its natural habitat. The squid seemed to make alternating red-and-white color signals when they encountered another individual of their species, the researchers observed, though it was not clear what the signs might mean.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Not all squid are made alike, and the first-ever footage of one sluggish deep-sea species demonstrates just how varied these elusive animals can be.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi — a small, translucent squid measuring up to about 6 inches (150 millimeters) long — inhabits the deep ocean between 1,600 and 5,000 feet (500 and 1,500 meters) below the sea surface. Researchers have previously only studied it based on dead, often broken specimens captured in research trawls and the stomach contents of predators.

But now, scientists based at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, Calif., have captured the first-ever video footage of the species in its natural environment and the second-ever full-body specimen, dramatically improving biologists' understanding of how the animal lives. [See Photos of Stunning Deep-Sea Squid Feeding]

Graceful feeder

Most squid feed by rapidly lashing and ensnaring prey with suckered feeding tentacles, but G. bonplandi lacks both tentacle suckers and the musculature required for speedy tentacle-whips. Instead, the smooth, flat tip of its single feeding tentacle languidly undulates through the water like a sea-worm, seemingly in an effort to lure prey, such as small shrimp and other crustaceans. The team reports their findings today (Aug. 27) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "It's definitely an interesting and unexpected tactic," said study co-author Henk-Jan Hoving, who worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MBARI during the study and is now a researcher at Geomar in Kiel, Germany.

While several other squid species are known to use sucker-alternatives to capture prey, none have been found seemingly to lure prey with their tentacles in this way.

The group happened upon the surprising behavior while conducting unrelated deep-sea surveys with an underwater robot called a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Equipped with sampling arms, lights and cameras, the ROV cruises through the water-column while tethered to a research vessel, transmitting video footage to scientists onboard who maneuver it to hover around, record and sometimes capture specimens of interest.

The team recorded and captured one G. bonplandi individual from the Monterey Bay in 2005, and video-recorded, but did not capture, six additional individuals during later cruises in the Gulf of Mexico. In total, the team gathered more than 25 minutes of behavioral footage.

Weird feeding tentacle

Having preserved and dissected the captured specimen to better understand the anatomy of its feeding tentacle, the researchers found that it did not contain the musculature needed to rapidly extend and retract it in the way that most other squid do. The video footage of the live specimens showed the feeding tentacle flapped and undulated, but it did not demonstrate how exactly the movement might lure prey. The team speculated the undulations may attract prey by stirring up bioluminescence in the water or by sending vibrations through the water column that mimic the squid prey's own prey. [Under the Sea: Amazing Photos of Deep-Sea Squid]

Richard Young, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Hawaii and a leader in cephalopod research, is excited by the findings and said both of these behavioral explanations sound plausible.

"It's really a very, very interesting finding," Young told LiveScience. "It just makes us want to know more."

Young noted that the squid's remarkably thin tentacle is prone to breaking, unlike the sturdier tentacles of most other squid, which could suggest that G. bonplandi uses its arms rather than its tentacle to transport prey to its mouthpart. However, more work would be needed to verify this and understand the full extent of the squids feeding behavior.

"There is a lot of stuff we don't know going on in the deep sea, and there are only so many assumptions we can make," Young said.

While underwater vehicles such as ROVs provide invaluable opportunities to observe an otherwise inaccessible world, they also introduce inherent complications in behavioral studies by stirring up water and flooding light on animals accustomed to living in darkness. MBARI engineers are currently working to improve ROV design, and Hoving hopes that future advancements in low-light and low-disturbance ROVs will facilitate more detailed and accurate understanding of deep-sea behaviors.

"It's a very exciting time, because we can combine these advances in technology with exploration of the deep-sea, revealing more and more peculiar behaviors of animals," Hoving said.

The team hopes to follow up their work on G. bonplandi, but this will depend on future chance encounters in the vast expanse of the deep sea.

Editor's Note: The author interned in the MBARI Communications Office during the winter of 2013, but is no longer involved in that work.  

Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow Live Science on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi lives between 1,600 and 5,00 feet (500 and 1,500 meters) below the sea surface.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi , close-up

Researchers have previously only studied the squid based on dead, often mangled specimens captured in research trawls and the stomachs of predators.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi , full body

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to capture the first-ever video recording of the animal in its natural environment.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi , feeding part I

The video captures the squid's feeding behavior, which involves a long, thin feeding tentacle that strangely lacks the suckers that most other squid species use to entangle prey.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi , feeding part II

The researchers believe that the tip of the tentacle – which flaps and undulates – somehow lures prey, but are still unsure exactly how this works.

Grimalditeuthis bonplandi

The researchers hope to encounter more Grimalditeuthis bonplandi in the wild to more closely study its behavior, but this will depend on future chance encounters in the vast expanse of the deep sea.

Squid Club

The end of the feeding tentacle of the deep-sea squid is spread flat with the squid's fourth arm supporting the base of the tentacle stalk. The so-called trabecular protective membranes (tr) of the feeding tentacle (b) can flap to propel the tip.

Tentacle Muscles

An analysis of the anatomy of the feeding tentacle of Grimalditeuthis bonplandi revealed it didn't contain the musculature needed to rapidly extend and retract in the way that most other squid do. Here the tentacles of G. bonplandi (a, c) and the squid Chiroteuthis calyx (b, d), showing a cross-section (a, b) and longitudinal section (c, d) of the tentacle stalk.