In Search of the Giant Squid, page 2
You've just come back from meeting with the expedition leader, Clyde Roper, in Washington D.C., right?
Yes, I was at the Smithsonian on Friday. The meeting was concerning a book I'm writing about the giant squid, which will include a discussion of this proposed expedition.
But if not that much is known about giant squid ...
There's not that much known, but there's a lot you can write about what's not known, why it isn't known and who doesn't know it.
To what do you attribute your abiding interest in the giant squid?
The single most fascinating thing about the giant squid is that it's never been seen by anybody. We know it exists because throughout history there have been at least a couple of hundred strandings, beachings or sightings. These animals wash ashore in Newfoundland, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, Norway, Iceland, Denmark. So we know they exist because there's this big ammonia-smelling thing on the beach, usually pretty well beat up and usually with the eyes missing. But to this moment, no living human being has ever seen a healthy giant squid. Not Jacques Cousteau, not Peter Benchley, not Bob Ballard, the man who discovered the Titanic. It emphasizes the mystery of deep-ocean exploration.
This is not yet a manned expedition, is it? What exactly is involved in this first stage?
No. It's really a series of disconnected attempts to put together an expedition. It's a question of going someplace with a submersible and then submerging yourself and hoping a giant squid comes by, which requires an awful lot of time, and ship time requires a lot of money. As of November 1996, they were unable to raise the 5 million dollars required to do this. That's a lot of change for just the possibility of seeing a giant squid. It's not like you're going to the aquarium and there's one floating around in a tank. The Pacific Ocean off the coast of New Zealand is very big and very deep. You can lower your submersible and look around but if there's a squid just a hundred feet away, you'll never know it.
The idea is, in January of 1997, to put a remote control television camera down at a sufficient depth and hope that something comes by, slightly different from the idea of lowering a human being so that the person can actually say, "I saw a giant squid." Then they go back with the tape and say to National Geographic, the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, to anybody who will listen, we now know where to go, so give us the $5 million and we'll bring back the most sensational underwater pictures ever taken. It's something that's going to happen; it's just a question of when.
Is this the first attempt directed solely at this creature?
No. There was an expedition that was intended to go to Bermuda I believe, but it never got sufficient funding, or maybe they didn't see anything. There are no records of giant squid from Bermuda.
How deep will the camera be lowered?
About 1500 feet. They've recently captured several giant squid in New Zealand waters, so they know approximately where to look.
Were they trying to capture those squid?
No, these squid were brought up by fishermen who were trawling for a fish called the orange roughie. This is over a fairly shallow area called the Chatham Rise, which is essentially an undersea plateau.
Do we have any idea what the depth range of the giant squid is?
Not really, because we've never actually observed them. We really don't know where they live; we only know where they die.
What will the expedition be likely to see down there?
Hopefully, part of a long form with an extremely large eye. Giant squid have the largest eyes of any living creature in the world, the size of a dinner plate. These are extremely complex and sophisticated eyes, too. The giant squid has no [bioluminescent] photophores, however, so it doesn't light up.
What about other creatures?
The ocean is more or less divided into layers. Some creatures live near the surface, some live in midwater, and some live at great depths. There are some that migrate toward the surface at night. I can't tell you what exactly can be found in this particular area, but since it's fairly shallow, it should be crowded. You could expect to find fishes, jellyfishes, smaller squid, sharks and of course, orange roughies.
Would there be any light at all?
No. Below 500 feet it's completely black. They would pick up other creatures in the lights and if they see a giant squid, they could expect to see light reflecting off its eyes, and off its body as well. We really don't even know what color a giant squid is.
Why do the squid have such complex eyes when they live in total darkness?
Well, probably because some of the things they eat have photophores and glow, so they use their eyes to locate prey. If you're hunting in the dark, it helps if your prey lights up.
Wouldn't the lights for the camera blind the squid?
Perhaps, but if they are attracted to their prey by luminescence, they might think that this big light might be a big meal.
A lot of the articles written about this expedition refer to it as an
attempt to track the giant squid to its "lair," which calls to mind the cave which the squid is described as inhabiting in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." But these creatures don't live in caves, do they?
No. Well, we don't know for sure, since we've never observed them, but if they're like all the other species of squid in the world, they're free-swimming. An octopus will crawl over the ocean floor, but not a squid. They're built for speed; they look like rocket ships. Smaller squid dart around in the water, but we don't know if the giant squid do. That would really be something, a 60-foot animal shooting through the water.
Are they fast-moving?
Again, we don't know. Some people think that they just float around waiting to encounter prey. Others think they're more aggressive. All of the dead ones that have washed up have had empty stomachs, so we don't even know what they eat. In "Beast," Peter Benchley described the giant squid as being a fast, powerful predator that zooms through the water looking for things to grab with its claws. The giant squid has no claws.
But don't they have to be able to move quickly to evade sperm whales, who prey on them?
Yes, but the sperm whale is not an especially fast swimmer. Another thing we don't know is how the sperm whale hunts the giant squid. Look at the whale. It has a huge nose and under that a narrow lower jaw. The sperm whale's mouth — with teeth only in the bottom jaw — isn't very well-adapted for chewing or biting, but it is ideal for grabbing things, pincer fashion. There's a theory, which I favor, that the whale can emit a focused sound beam that in some way disables or even kills the squid, and that's how they catch them. Other people believe that the whale dives down and hovers, waiting for the squid to come by. But that could take quite a while, and even though a sperm whale is a prodigious breath-holder and can hold its breath for an hour, that doesn't seem terribly practical. Also, something as big as a sperm whale, an animal that can weigh 60 tons, needs to eat a lot of food, and it can't get much if it has to wait for a squid to swim by. For the most part, sperm whales eat other kinds of squid, not giant squid. And it takes a lot of squid to feed a million sperm whales.
I've read in your book that the weight in squid (of all kinds) eaten by sperm whales each year is equal to the weight of the entire human race.
Yes. That's mostly smaller squid. If a million sperm whales ate only giant squid, there would have to be a million zillion giant squid, and that doesn't make sense, because if there were lots and lots of giant squid, we would probably have seen [a live] one by now. These whales can't get by on an 8-inch squid. The energy it takes just to dive down is greater than the whale could get from eating a small squid, so the whale has to have some way of immobilizing or at least slowing down its prey. Keep in mind that the whale is a mammal and has to hold its breath, while the squid can stay under indefinitely. That's why I favor the theory that they disable their prey with some kind of sonic disturbance.
Then the squid would be stunned and floating, and they could just scoop them up?
Stunned or dead. That would explain the vast numbers of squid beaks found in the stomachs of whales. One whale was found with 28,000 squid beaks in its stomach. He couldn't catch all of them one by one. They've talked about attaching a camera to a sperm whale in order to film it as it dives to see if we can film giant squid that way. National Geographic did something like this with a great white shark, and it was wonderful because you didn't have divers in cages. The shark was doing the filming.
Attaching a camera to a huge predator like the sperm whale sounds like a pretty tall order.
But there have been reports of the whales swimming quite close to boats, and baby whales coming right up alongside. As long as it doesn't involve sticking a harpoon into the whale, of which there is a long history in the relationship between humans and whales ... Whales have a very thick layer of blubber and attaching the camera might not hurt much. Still, getting that close to an angry, 60-ton, male sperm whale is not something to take lightly.
What would you most like to learn about giant squid from this expedition?
Just about everything I've mentioned before. What they look like alive, how they move, what they eat. Not that we can learn that much from photographing them or seeing them. It's more the experience of seeing something that no other person has seen before.
Would you go down in a manned submersible to see the squid, in spite of possible accident or even attack?
If I thought I could see one of these creatures, I'd go down there on a bicycle.
CALL OF THE WILD:
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