by Edith Widder
Still, they made a sketch of what it looked like and managed to retrieve the tail end to corroborate their account. It was enough evidence for a paper on their observations to be presented at the French Academy of Sciences. The renowned writer Jules Verne saw this report and incorporated it into the novel he was then penning, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, describing a bloodcurdling battle with the Kraken that only served to heighten its legendary fearsomeness.
No science-fiction writer could ask for a more fantastic alien to terrorize readers. Besides having eight muscular arms and two insanely long tentacles—all appearing to grow straight out of a massive cone-shaped head—this monstrosity was also equipped with a parrotlike beak to rip flesh, serrated suckers to perforate and lock on to the slimiest of prey, a jet propulsion system that works equally well in forward or reverse, three hearts that pump blue blood, and gargantuan eyes the size of a human head—bigger than those of any other animal on Earth.
Our fascination with big stuff sets in at an early age. Big dinosaurs, big machines, and big sharks, among so many other things, become obsessions for some kids. Perhaps it’s a natural response to a time in life when your imagination is most fertile and almost everyone is bigger than you.*1 Marine scientists are intrigued by giants, too, not just because they are cool, which they definitely are, but because they are so at odds with most of the life that inhabits the depths. When outsized life-forms appear, an obvious question is how do they manage to find enough nourishment to grow so big in a place where food is so scarce?
Deep-sea gigantism is manifest in a fantastically odd assortment of creatures. There are crustaceans like the giant isopod, a pill bug the size of a Tonka truck, and the Japanese spider crab, which has a claw-to-claw leg span of over twelve feet. There’s a seven-arm octopus that is as long as a Volkswagen Beetle. (Only the females grow that big. The males are much smaller but compensate with an unusual sexual modification that gives the species its name: One of its eight arms is specially modified for sex and hidden from view, neatly coiled in a sac beneath the right eye.*2) There are also giant sharks like the Greenland shark that can grow up to twenty-four feet long; the giant oarfish, which is the world’s longest bony fish, reaching a maximum recorded length of twenty-six feet; the giant squid, which reaches lengths of at least forty-three feet; and lots of giant jellies, including a siphonophore discovered in a submarine canyon off the coast of Australia that is believed to be the longest ocean creature ever recorded, at 150 feet long.
Some giants live on or near the bottom, where food raining down from above accumulates, producing a greatly enriched nutritional environment compared with the open ocean. The isopod and the spider crab, for example, are scavengers that feed on carcasses and organic matter landing on the seafloor. When food is plentiful, they thrive and grow. When food is scarce, their metabolism allows for long periods of starvation. To be able to go without eating for not just weeks but in some cases months provides a major advantage in a food-poor existence.*3
The Greenland shark adopts a similar strategy, cruising slowly above the bottom, consuming both live fish and animal remains, including seals, moose, and reindeer.*4 If you never stop growing, then the longer you live, the bigger you get. The Japanese spider crab can live as long as a century and, based on carbon dating, it’s believed that Greenland sharks may live for up to four centuries. So it’s not just their size that astounds; it’s their longevity, because that kind of life span suggests there are titans cruising the depths now that were alive when the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower!
But what about the giants that inhabit the deep midwater, where the primary food is fecal pellets and marine snow? Here the food content is so dilute, it’s the equivalent of a few grains of rice in a cubic meter (264 gallons) of seawater.*5 To survive on such a diet, animals have to sieve through an enormous quantity of liquid—anywhere from one hundred thousand to ten million times their own body volume per day! Many smaller animals, like copepods and krill, accomplish this by setting up a feeding current—they beat their appendages to draw water toward their mouths, where they scan for particles. But larger animals need to compensate for the fact that feeding efficiency decreases with increasing size. One way to do so is to greatly expand their capture volume by deploying huge mucus feeding webs or other food-gathering contrivances.
Mucus is the duct tape of the ocean—it holds the marine universe together and can be used for all manner of strange constructs. My favorite are the insanely elaborate mucus “houses” constructed by tadpole-like creatures called larvaceans. A larvacean a couple of inches long can construct a mucilaginous McMansion that is more than three feet across. The most distinctive architectural feature of the “house” is its filters, which look like the two lobes of a brain, with parallel crests and furrows resembling a white lace Elizabethan neck ruff. By beating its muscular tail, the larvacean forces water through these food-concentrating filters. When the filters become clogged with critters too large for the larvacean to consume, the house is discarded. Some species produce as many as forty houses per individual per day.*6 Discarded houses and feeding webs then become a food source for larger creatures, like the seven-armed octopus, that are willing to tolerate a lot of mucus in their diets.
Jellyfish and their ilk, a group known as gelatinous zooplankton,*7 have bodies composed of more than 95 percent water. Because seawater surrounds and supports them and they live where there is no turbulence, they can expand their feeding volume to an enormous extent, with all kinds of fragile structures that would be impossible in air. The closest facsimile to such constructions on land would be a spider’s web. A 150-foot-long siphonophore, for example, can deploy a deadly curtain of stinging tentacles that “fish” for prey such as small crustaceans and fish. Stinging cells called nematocysts immobilize and kill their victims as the tentacle pulls the meal into one of its many stomachs for digestion. It’s a food-gathering strategy ideally suited to the midwater. Jelly giants appear in an impressive variety of forms, as do their predators, which include leatherback turtles, the largest of all living turtles, which can grow to over seven feet long and weigh more than 1,500 pounds; ocean sunfish, which can reach weights over 2,200 pounds; and our friend the seven-armed octopus, which finds jellies as yummy as mucus.
Even among this menagerie of oddities, the giant squid stands apart as an outlier. First of all, there’s the question of its age. How long does it take an animal to grow to the height of a four-story building? As a general rule, squid have short life spans—three to five years—and exhibit rapid growth. Based on counts of what are thought to be daily growth rings in giant squid statoliths (balance organs equivalent to the human inner ear), it is speculated by some that giant squid can reach adult size in approximately one and a half years. That’s equivalent to doubling in size every two and a half weeks.
On the other hand, rather than laying down growth rings daily, as seems to occur in most squid, it’s possible that Architeuthis lays down a growth ring after every feeding episode. Carbon dating of statoliths suggests a life span of fourteen years or less,*8 which makes its rate of growth more plausible, but still impressive in a food-poor environment. This is especially true because the giant squid suffers from an evolutionary quirk that precludes gorging.
Evolution is full of examples of trade-offs that have led to some fundamental shortcomings, a consequence of incremental improvements on preexisting systems rather than a holistic design. For example, the reason thousands of people die every year from choking on food is that we use the same passageway for eating as we use for respiration.*9 Squid have a very different kind of choking hazard on account of their gullet passing through a small hole in their donut-shaped brain. Consequently, if they try to swallow too large a bite, the result could be brain damage!
Stomach contents of dead giant squid indicate a diet that depends on fish and other squid. These represent concentrated food sources, but if energy must be expended to
hunt them down and if, once captured, they can only be nibbled rather than gulped, it raises a lot of questions about the energy cost and return for food acquisition. As a result, there has been much debate about whether Architeuthis is an active predator that hunts prey or a sluggish sit-and-wait predator that conserves energy by drifting passively.
One of the giant squid’s most notable features is its eyes, especially when you compare them with the eyes of its primary predators, sperm whales. Seen up close, a sperm whale’s eye looks impressive: It’s as big as a billiard ball. By contrast, the eye of a giant squid is five times larger—bigger than a basketball! Given the metabolic costs of growing and sustaining such a sensory organ, it’s clear that vision must play a vital role in the life of Architeuthis, one that presumably involves detecting bioluminescence for either locating prey or avoiding predators, or both.
One hypothesis is that such large eyes help giant squid escape capture by sperm whales. Although scars from giant squid suckers found on sperm whale skin indicate that the squid put up a fight, the number of giant squid beaks discovered in sperm whale guts suggests that the balance of power resides firmly with the whales.
While the toothed whales use reflected sound to locate their prey, the squid are thought to cheat death by using their enormous eyes to detect the bow wave of light created by whales swimming through a bioluminescent minefield. In that context, the enormous eye size makes sense, as the enhanced sensitivity it provides is directly linked to survival if it gives enough warning of an attack to allow time for evasive maneuvers.
Presumably, their large eyes might be similarly valuable for detecting the movements of large prey and homing in on bioluminescent burglar alarms. But how could we ever know for sure without direct observation?
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Given its enormous size and peculiarities, it is little wonder that such a fantastic, mysterious creature as the giant squid has been sought for so long. Getting footage of it in its natural habitat became the holy grail of natural history cinematography, and there were many efforts, including two major multinational expeditions off New Zealand in 1997 and 1999. But all attempts failed, resulting in several documentaries that ended with the chief scientist standing at the bow of the ship watching the sunset as the narrator intoned a moving tribute to the tribulations of exploration.
Because of the prohibitive costs involved, there had been no serious financial backing available to try again until 2004, when Japanese squid scientist Tsunemi Kubodera captured the first still images of a live giant squid in its natural habitat—the deep sea. He outfitted a baited fishing line with a still camera programmed to take a picture every thirty seconds. He had been going out on Japanese fishing vessels for almost three years, to locations where he believed the squid might be found. The images he finally succeeded in capturing were a series of stills of a giant squid attacking bait on a hook at 2,952 feet.
When he released the images, the seismic public response helped motivate the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), with assistance from Discovery Channel, to finance the most ambitious attempt ever undertaken to film the giant squid in its natural habitat. And how I came to be part of that historic expedition was directly related to the success of the Eye-in-the-Sea.
After the triumph of the first Deep Scope mission, in 2004, I reapplied to the National Science Foundation, this time to produce a moored version of the Eye-in-the-Sea. Instead of having to deploy and recover the camera after only a day or two of recording, this was to be a semi-permanent installation in the Monterey Canyon. MBARI was taking the lead on developing what was essentially a power strip on the floor of the canyon, where scientists could plug in their gear and operate it remotely from shore via a thirty-two-mile cable.
To be able to observe unobtrusively for not just a day but months at a time would be a dream come true, so I was elated when, on this go-round, the reviewers gave the proposal an enthusiastic thumbs-up. The project manager for developing and building this new system was Lee Frey, the young engineer who had been so instrumental in getting the Eye-in-the-Sea operational at the outset. During those early days, he had to scrounge for parts and figure out inexpensive workarounds, but now that we had a budget of over half a million dollars, Lee was able to engineer a far more elegant system, with all the bells and whistles I had dreamed about.
In this new version, the camera was on a pan and tilt that could be controlled from shore, and there were three fold-down platforms that we still called CLAMs: one to hold a current meter and temperature probe; one to hold the e-jelly, a hydrophone, and bioluminescence sensors; and one to hold other experiments like bait that could be delivered by an ROV. It had both red and white lights that could also be controlled from shore and a set of parallel ranging lasers for gauging size.
The deployment of the camera in October 2009 went flawlessly, and when the ROV plugged it in for the first time, all of its systems came online without a glitch. After years of frustrations and setbacks, it felt like a miracle. But to Lee it wasn’t a miracle at all. That would have required a deity; this just required the next best thing, a damn good engineer.
As soon as the system was activated, it automatically began recording, at which point our observations of life in the deep sea went from a paltry intermittent trickle to a gushing fire hose. I had anticipated this, and so a portion of the engineering budget was going to MBARI computer engineers to develop an automatic image recognition system that could identify the outlines of certain animals and flag the places on the recordings where there was movement, so we didn’t have to spend hours scanning through video in which nothing was happening. The challenge, though, turned out to be that something was always happening.
There was a continuous flurry of marine snow and almost always a fish or crab or floppy sea pen in sight, and although they weren’t extravagant in their behaviors—sometimes remaining in one place for hours at a stretch—that was valuable information for figuring out their energy needs. The computer engineers kept working on possible analysis techniques, but in the meantime I was trying to raise the funds I needed to bring the video stream to the web, making it the first deep-sea webcam. This was finally made possible through the graces of one incredibly generous and forward-thinking donor.
The animal behavior we were able to witness over the eight-month operation of the Moored Eye-in-the-Sea was the first long-term, unobtrusive observation of day-to-day life in the deep sea. We ran a variety of experiments. Those using the optical lure produced the most spectacular results, as we discovered just how attractive the e-jelly was to Humboldt squid. Again and again, when we ran the pinwheel display, we recorded Humboldts executing high-speed attacks. As soon as they realized there was no food associated with the light show, they would jet away, sometimes registering their displeasure in a cloud of ink.
There was one interesting exception to this routine, executed by what I dubbed the Einstein of Humboldt squid. For some reason, this squid recognized there was something off right from the get-go, and he approached with caution, hovering above the e-jelly, arms spread open, seemingly looking for the predator that was triggering this alarm call. Seeing none, he retreated, only to try again, and then again. After the third attempt he stayed away longer, presumably refiguring his approach, because on the fourth try he came in from the side instead of from above, but still finding nothing tasty, he gave up and jetted away.
Once I had the data streaming to the web, opportunities to observe such behavior proved to be highly addictive, not just to a handful of deep-sea biologists but to a wider and surprisingly diverse portion of the public. Word got out, and the interest was not just national but international; one father-and-son team in Italy watched the feed more than I did and had all sorts of interesting observations and questions. And after the camera was removed, I received many unexpected requests for its return, the most surprising one coming from a hospital that said it was the most wa
tched internet feed on its cancer ward. Based on my own hospital experience, I can imagine why.
For a modern audience, often characterized as screen-addicted zombies who expect instant gratification, our deep-sea webcam would have epitomized eye-rolling boredom. Black-and-white video of a deep-sea flatfish sitting still on the bottom next to a floppy sea pen that was barely moving in the current, with occasional flocks of marine snow floating by, is not electrifying stuff. It’s gripping theater only if you are able to step outside yourself and really think about what you’re seeing. There is nothing like fighting for your own existence to make you appreciate the miracle of life. Once you do, then “watching and wondering” about life becomes a thoughtful, mind-absorbing exercise, heightened by the fact that at any moment you might witness something—an animal or behavior—that no one has ever seen before.
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This moored version of the Eye-in-the-Sea was a success. But it required an electrical power source cabled from shore, a hugely expensive and logistically challenging proposition. Funding was on the decline, and the opportunities for more such installations seemed bleak. The deployment of the earlier battery-powered version of the Eye-in-the-Sea was also becoming a challenge because of the expense of using either a submersible—assuming you could even find one—or an ROV to deploy and recover it. As a result, at the end of our 2007 Deep Scope mission, Justin Marshall, Sönke Johnsen, and I imagined a new kind of platform, which we called the Medusa.
The concept was to design something small enough that it could be dropped off the side of a ship; when it was time to recover it, an acoustic signal would release a sacrificial weight and it would pop to the surface, where it could be snagged and pulled aboard. Since it was based on the Eye-in-the-Sea, we agreed that Lee Frey was the perfect engineer to honcho the project and make it into the latest and greatest world-beating undersea camera; now we just needed to find some funding.*10
