by Edith Widder
That imagined near miss stuck with me, though, and once we were back on the ship, I found I was suffering from severe separation anxiety, envisioning the whole slew of ways I might never see the Medusa again. Buck agreed with my desire to have a plan B, so after the Triton was back on deck he helped round up some spare gear and then accompanied us in the Zodiac back out to the float, where we attached a second float, a VHF tracking beacon as a backup for the satellite beacon, and a strobe, all of which made it possible for me to sleep that night. I dreamed about the Medusa drifting through the dark depths with its far-red lights and intensified camera probing the darkness.
The next morning it was my turn to dive in the Triton. The plan was simple: Drop down below the edge of darkness and then sit with the e-jelly on the end of a long pole in front of the sub and watch for attacks by way of the intensified camera and red-light illumination. As I nestled into the cushy starboard seat, my excitement was acute. It wasn’t just the possibility of seeing a giant squid but the unprecedented opportunity for long-term unobtrusive observations in the midwater that had me amped up.
Even if we didn’t find a giant squid, I was absolutely sure we would see something amazing. Which is why, as the hours ticked by and we kept seeing a whole lot of nothing, I became more and more dismayed. The waters were empty—some of the most barren I’ve ever been in. They were crystal clear, with hardly any marine snow and even less bioluminescence. It made no sense. Where was the food web needed to support giant squid and sperm whales?
Maybe things would look different on the Medusa footage. We were scheduled to pick it up right after my dive, but it took a while to recover, because it had drifted so far north from where we were diving. Once we retrieved it and got it back on deck, I was enormously relieved to see it had taken data, but when we did a quick scan through the video, there was almost nothing—a siphonophore and a couple of shrimp. The next two submersible dives, first by O’Shea and then Ku again, were equally discouraging. There was palpable gloom surrounding the Japanese organizational meetings held in the lounge every evening. NHK had made an immense investment in this endeavor, and there were many careers riding on the outcome.
My second dive in the Triton was on July 3. In the interim we had deployed and recovered the Medusa a second time, now with the e-jelly in place, which had been left off the first deployment because it still needed to go through a pressure certification. I had taken a quick look at the video the night before and seen that the water looked as empty as on the first deployment. Wen-Sung planned to review the footage in detail while I was in the sub. At least during this dive I saw some bioluminescence, including some flashback, but not much else. We were back on deck by 3:30 p.m. I did an interview on the fantail for NHK, talking about the bioluminescence I had seen, and then I retired to the mess to rehydrate with a cup of tea.
Steve O’Shea tracked me down there to say, “Wen-Sung found something on the video he wants you to see.” He didn’t seem that excited, so when I sat down next to Wen-Sung I was expecting a jelly or shrimp that needed identifying. The Discovery team was filming us, which was not unusual. Wen-Sung pulled up a couple of pretty unexciting sequences and then a long stretch of empty water, and I was thinking a whole lotta nothing when suddenly, three enormous squid arms swept into view from the right-hand side of the monitor. My heart did a somersault as they cascaded across the screen between the e-jelly and the camera lens: thin tips at first, widening into thick, muscular arms that arched and flexed, simultaneously powerful and supple. They weren’t round in cross section but triangular, with two rows of protruding suckers running along the base of the triangle. Under the red-light illumination with the black-and-white camera, they looked as white as Moby Dick.
I shouted, “Oh my God!” and looked around for Ku to confirm this was the real thing. The holy grail! The first video of a giant squid filmed in its natural habitat? Ku, O’Shea, and Wen-Sung were grinning like jack-o’-lanterns and we all basically lost our minds, jumping around and yelling and hugging.
There were actually three separate sequences of the squid entering the frame. The first two were only four minutes apart, the third more than an hour later. In two of the recordings, we saw only its arms up close, but in the third the whole animal was visible, hanging in the distance—a dim grayish outline—arms and tentacles splayed out like a half-open umbrella. Years and years of unsuccessful hunts for giant squid, and the first time the Medusa is deployed with the optical lure it scores three sightings! It was the sweetest victory I had ever known. To be able to explore in this new way—attracting rather than repelling such a famous, long-sought quarry—and have such an unqualified success was beyond my wildest imaginings.
After seeing how much the squid overfilled the screen, I decided we needed to try and get the e-jelly farther away from the camera, so Wen-Sung and I replaced the two-foot-long aluminum strut holding the e-jelly with a three-footer. On the next Medusa deployment, we scored yet another giant squid sighting. This one was three miles away from the first, and five days later. We didn’t know whether it was the same squid or a different one.
The mood on board was teetering on giddy. This being a television production, there was now a lot of emphasis on getting B-roll of the Medusa during launch and recovery. There was also greatly increased hope that we might actually still film a giant squid from the submersible, using the same approach as with the Medusa—red illumination and an optical lure—but with the added benefit of high-resolution color cameras.
It happened only a few days later, during Ku’s dive. As bait, he was using a three-foot diamondback squid that local longline fishermen had caught. To optimize its presentation, it was attached to the sub with almost fifteen feet of monofilament, and its body cavity was stuffed with a few blocks of syntactic foam, making it only slightly negatively buoyant so that it would sink slowly through the water. It was also now rigged with an optical lure, in the form of a deep-sea squid jig that flashed blue, green, and red. The other passenger in the sub was NHK cameraman Tatsuhiko Sugita, known as “Magic Man” because of his talent for doing magic tricks, with which he had impressed us all at a couple of parties. The pilot, Jim Harris, had just come on board the day before to replace another pilot who was leaving. It was his first dive for this expedition.
The day started off uneventfully. Launch and recovery of the sub had become so routine that there were few people out on deck to see Ku, Jim, and Magic Man off for their early-morning launch. The excitement started after lunch, when I heard that Jim had notified control that they had filmed a giant squid. I rushed to the control room to try to get more details, and as soon as I entered, I could feel the tension. Floodlights were on and all cameras were rolling, apparently filming the reaction shots of those in the control room—but reactions to what?
At the moment, nobody seemed to be saying anything and I still wasn’t clear on why they were continuing to film. When they said they had filmed the squid, I assumed the encounter was just a few seconds, but apparently it was still going on. When I asked, “For how long?” the response, “Fifteen minutes so far,” left me incredulous—it had to be a miscommunication. But then I heard Jim’s voice over the comms, saying “Still filming.” In total, they filmed the giant for twenty-three minutes! There was no direct video feed from the submersible to the ship, so we had no way of seeing. I was mystified about what could have been going on for that length of time.
Everyone turned out on deck to greet them for their triumphant return. With all the excitement and talking at once, it took a while to extract the salient details, but the gist of it was that they went down with only the red lights on and with Jim carefully matching the drop rate of the sub to that of the bait squid—no thrusters, just ballast control. As they sank past the edge of darkness, the red light was too dim to see the bait squid except on the intensified camera, so Jim said he had used the small flashing jig light to judge the location of the bait. Th
ey were around two thousand feet deep when the giant attacked.
We had to wait till that evening in the lounge to see what they were trying to describe with words. Under the red-light illumination, we could see the squid attack, spreading its eight arms wide to engulf the bait at the head end, farthest from the sub. While the camera was picking this up, Ku was in the submersible, peering into the darkness, but could see nothing. Excited and desperate to get a better look at what was going on, he turned on his white flashlight. When that didn’t scare the squid away, he decided to risk turning on the submersible’s white lights. Watching the screen, I felt like I was right there with him. When the lights came on and the screen whited out, I was holding my breath. Then, as the camera’s automatic gain control kicked in, the squid came into high-resolution focus. It was magnificent. And utterly at odds with what I was expecting.
The most striking first impression was its metallic coloration, which seemed to shift between brushed bronze and polished aluminum. That was a complete surprise, since the dead and dying specimens seen in the past were all red. And the coloration kept shifting—from predominantly bronze to mostly silver. The arms had a very distinctive triangular shape and undulated in the current. Their color was grayish white, with randomly spaced bronze horizontal stripes almost like a bar code.
The eye staring at us was enormous and alien. It was almond-shaped, with a huge area of white surrounding what looked like a narrow iris and a very large black pupil. It was an eye you could get lost in. Initially the eyeball was rotated in its socket such that it seemed to be looking away from the sub, possibly to avoid the bright lights, but later it looked directly at the camera. When it did, Ku said, “It looks rather lonely.” But my assessment was that it was hungry, which I think is why it wasn’t scared off when the white lights came on. Animals have hierarchies of behaviors, and in the case of this squid, I believe once it started feeding, the biological imperative to eat overpowered its instinct to flee.
It was vertical in the water, with its head up, fins flapping slowly while it held the bait squid inside the base of its thick, muscular arms, the ends of which were bent up and to the side as it dropped through the water. We estimated that the length from the tip of the tail to the ends of the arms was about ten feet. That meant that if its tentacles were fully extended, it would be more than twice that length, making it as tall as a two-story house.
We watched the screen with rapt attention. Still, the squid continued munching on its feast while Jim adjusted the drop rate on the sub to keep falling in tandem with the squid as Magic Man filmed it with the high-resolution cameras, getting both long shots and close-ups. He filmed until the end of the tether, at three thousand feet, stopped their descent, at which point the giant apparently sensed a change that caused it to drop what was left of its feast and jet away into the darkness.
For most everyone on board, that footage was the climax of the expedition and obviously the capstone for the documentaries. But for me, there were two more high points still to come. The first was another recording of a giant squid made during the fifth Medusa deployment. This sequence was high drama—a full-on attack where the whole giant squid was visible as it swooped in with arms and tentacles held together like a spearpoint.*19 It seemed to be going for the e-jelly, but then at the last instant it arced up and over it, spreading its arms wide to embrace the Medusa, thereby exposing its mouth directly to the camera lens. It was exactly the behavior you would expect to see from a secondary predator responding to a burglar alarm: The squid initially homed in on the light display, but at the last moment diverted its attack to the big thing next to it, which it presumably viewed as the primary predator that had elicited the alarm.
The second high point occurred about a week before the end of the expedition. I was still trying to get a handle on how these waters could sustain giant squid and sperm whales and yet appear so devoid of any other life. I had done one bottom dive and established a general paucity of life down there as well, so upwelling of nutrient-rich water wasn’t the cause. My best guess was that there must be plankton-rich eddies spinning off from the Kuroshio Current, which flows along Japan’s southeast coast. Also known as the Japan Current, it is similar to the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, an enormous river in the ocean that transports tropical water northward. Swirling off from the eastern edge of these currents are isolated rings or eddies that can be more than a hundred miles in diameter and constitute unique ecosystems. These eddies provide rich hunting grounds for predators and seemed to me to be the most likely food source.
I had assumed we would have access to satellite data on the expedition, but that turned out not to be the case, so there was no direct way to pinpoint an eddy in real time. Nonetheless, I had been campaigning for a dive farther north, which is where the Medusa had drifted when it recorded those giant squid sequences and where we would be most likely to encounter an eddy. I also wanted to dive at night, with the hope that we could record some bioluminescence. When I finally got that dive, I was rewarded almost immediately with intense bioluminescence at 550 feet, produced by a thick layer of krill. There was also impressive flashback luminescence in a broad layer between 1,200 and 2,100 feet. Here, at last, were the food-rich waters needed to sustain these giants.
Even better, just below 1,000 feet, the largest squid I’ve ever personally seen from a sub sped by so close that I felt like I could have reached out and touched it. At first, given its size, I thought it was a giant squid, but then I realized it was something equally thrilling for me—the octopus squid (Taningia danae). They are so named because, although juveniles have the usual two tentacles plus eight arms, mature specimens, which can exceed seven feet from tail to arm tips, generally lack the tentacles. What they have instead are two of the largest and brightest bioluminescent light organs found in any animal. Located at the ends of two of its arms, they are the size and color of lemons, although the light they produce is blue.
For this dive, we were replicating the protocol that Ku had used, but this time with a bait squid and the e-jelly. The big payoff to that approach came an hour and a half after that first sighting when we saw it again, or another just like it, at 1,338 feet. This time, the octopus squid attempted to grab the bait squid and tugged so hard on it that we felt the jolt in the sub. Contact! An exhilarating, dramatic end to my final science dive of the expedition.
On our last day on our dive site, we held a memorial service for Mike deGruy, with those who knew him gathering on the fantail at sunset. He should have been there for this enormous victory. People shared stories of Mike and talked about the phenomenal positive energy he brought to the world. I intended to speak, but when my turn came, the words caught in my throat. I felt bad about that in the moment, but later found a way to make up for it when I gave a TED talk, “How We Found the Giant Squid,” which I dedicated to Mike. It’s been viewed over five million times.
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Giant Squid: The Monster Is Real was the title that Discovery Channel proposed for its documentary, which was scheduled to air six months after our return. Ku, O’Shea, and I objected vehemently to this characterization, on the grounds that of course it’s real—scientists have been studying dead specimens since the mid-1800s. And, just as important, it’s not a monster!
Like so many of history’s terrors, once confronted, this fabled behemoth turned out to be a rather shy giant, unaware of its fame and scurrilous reputation, hiding in the dark depths, instinctively avoiding the bright lights of our exploration platforms possibly in the same way it escapes from the broad-field illumination stimulated by attacking toothed whales.
Further evidence of its mischaracterization was visible when we recovered the sub after Ku’s dive. The bait squid was still attached. Incredibly, given the twenty-three minutes the giant squid had been feeding on the diamondback carcass, there was still a lot of it left. Looking at the marks on the mantle, they seemed mor
e like dainty nips than bites, completely at odds with the flesh-ripping horror so often depicted.
Clyde Roper, the famed giant squid hunter, who was brought in to see and comment on our footage for the documentary, was incredibly gracious about our success. He also helped our case by adding his objections to Discovery’s choice of title. Finally, a “compromise” was brokered. They capitulated by changing the title from Giant Squid: The Monster Is Real to Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real. Their rationale was that “monster” in this context was being used as an adjective referring to its size rather than its morals.*20
NHK and Discovery managed to keep our achievement a secret right up until their documentaries aired in 2013. Promotions started just before the air date, and there was major public interest, with numerous giant squid parties and celebrations across the country for the premiere. I know because people sent me pictures of their giant squid piñatas, cakes, art, and tattoos inked in honor of the unveiling. I was, frankly, stunned by the intensity of interest from the public at large.
