Friday, March 29

This is the first video of a giant squid hunting in the depths of the ocean and it has been achieved by a Spanish team


In the old Shetland dialect, ‘krekin’ is still a forbidden word. ‘Krekin’, ‘Krake’, Krajken’… are all loanwords from the Old Norse term they used to name misshapen and twisted trees: because that’s what huge inverted trees with terrifying roots coming out of the water looking for something to hold on to, something to destroy.

Since then, from the texts of Aristotle or Pliny the Elder, from the Nordic legends, from the descriptions of Francesco Negri or the Basque sailors, we have been fascinated by the elusive giant squid. But until now we have never seen one of these monsters hunted in its natural habitat.

A very elusive monster. And it is very difficult to see a giant squid where they live. And, in part, our own fault. Our underwater vehicles full of lights, sounds and moving parts are specially equipped to capture all those slow animals that inhabit the mesopelagic. But giant squid are not in that club: they are fast and ‘intelligent’ animals that shy away from danger and therefore shy away from us.

Stay still. To solve these problems, a team of researchers led by Nathan Robinson, from the CSIC’s Institute of Marine Sciences, has come up with a different solution: create a passive submerged platform between 557 and 950 meters in the Gulf of Mexico and wait patiently (equipped with a camera) for the squid to feel comfortable and act normally. The camera in question was optimized to work with wavelengths close to red because squid eyes, as an adaptation to abyssal depths, use shorter wavelengths to see in the dark.

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Bait, cameras and action. It was only necessary to attract these animals and, for this, they used a foul jellyfish designed to imitate the blue bioluminescence that certain jellyfish emit in case of danger. This is interesting because, although squid are not thought to consume jellyfish on a regular basis, they are thought to be attracted to these distress signals: “they could mean that the jellyfish is being attacked by something the squid wants to eat.”

And, finally, they found them in 2019 (although due to the pandemic it could not be published until a few months ago). Not only that, they discovered really very curious behaviors: for example, the giant squid pored over the platform for six minutes before attacking. This suggests that they are active hunters who use visual cues to search for food.

Discovering the bottom of the sea. Although it seems strange, the sea is still a great unknown. Little by little, and more and more, we are getting closer to its secrets and mysteries. And they are amazing.

Image | Will Turner

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