Scientists captured the first-ever footage of a colossal squid in the deep sea after a 100-year search. It's a baby.
ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
- Scientists say they've captured the first footage of a living colossal squid in the deep sea.
- The colossal squid is the world's largest invertebrate, but the one in this video is a baby.
- The footage was captured by an underwater expedition near Antarctica.
The colossal squid, a mysterious creature lurking in the Antarctic abyss, has finally made a cameo, a cohort of scientists say.
You may have heard of the giant squid, which is famous from mariners' legends and for its epic battles with sperm whales.
The colossal squid is even bigger and more mysterious. It's so elusive, living in the deep ocean near Antarctica, that scientists didn't even know it existed until 100 years ago.
Since then, fishermen have filmed a few dying colossal squids at the ocean's surface. Scientists have found chewed-up colossal squid in whale and seabird stomachs.
Nobody had confirmed a sighting in the deep sea until now.
The footage below is the first to ever show a living colossal squid in its natural habitat, according to the researchers who captured it and two squid experts who verified it.
This animal is the world's heaviest invertebrate, growing up to 23 feet long and 1,100 pounds. The one in this video, though, is just under one foot long. It's a baby.
The video was captured on March 9 by a remotely operated subsea vehicle called SuBastian, operated by a crew aboard a research vessel called "Falkor (too)."
The researchers on the vessel were conducting a 35-day expedition near the South Sandwich Islands. It was a mission of the Ocean Census, which is an international scientific collaboration to search for new marine life.
Kat Bolstad, a squid researcher at the Auckland University of Technology, helped verify the footage. She had previously reassembled a dead colossal squid caught by a fishing vessel.
"For 100 years, we have mainly encountered them as prey remains in whale and seabird stomachs and as predators of harvested toothfish," Bolstad said in a press release.
Another Antarctic expedition in 2023 captured footage of what scientists thought may have been a juvenile colossal squid, but researchers were uncertain.
Bolstad and others were able to identify the baby in this video as a colossal squid because they could see hooks on the middle of its eight arms. That's a distinctive feature that differentiates colossal squids from other species in the glass squid family.
Colossal squids are unique in other ways, too. They have hooks on their two tentacles, too, and those hooks can rotate 360 degrees to grab onto prey. They also have the largest eyes of any animal ever studied — living or extinct — probably to help them see in the depths of the ocean.