by Edith Widder
Nonetheless, I thought that once the documentary aired, the fervor would die down. But that wasn’t the case, as I discovered in 2019, when I took the Medusa on a very different voyage, a NOAA-funded science mission in the Gulf of Mexico that we called Journey into Midnight.
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Sönke, Tammy, and I were still rotating chief scientist duties for these Deep Scope visual ecology missions, and it was Sönke’s turn to take the lead. We were going out on the 135-foot R/V Point Sur. There was no submersible and there were no television people. Our exploration tools were the remotely operated vehicle Global Explorer, a midwater Tucker trawl, and the Medusa, rigged for drift mode.*21 We had assembled a fantastic team of folks, with the goal of exploring the open-water environment below 3,300 feet, the least explored zone of the ocean. To assist me with the Medusa for this mission, Nathan Robinson*22 joined our team.
We launched the Medusa on Monday, June 17, 2019, for its fifth and shallowest deployment yet on this cruise. The other four had all been below 3,300 feet. At 2,500 feet, this one was close to the same depth we had been at for the giant squid recordings off Japan (2,400 feet). We recovered the Medusa late on Tuesday, our teammates taking breaks from their own research to help haul in the line—participating in a friendly competition to see who could coil it into boxes the fastest. After dinner, Nathan began downloading the video.
Late into the night on Tuesday and through the following morning, Nathan and I traded off reviewing the recordings on his laptop. We had gone through more than twenty hours of footage when, a couple of hours into his shift, Nathan came to find me. Saying nothing, he signaled me to follow him, and I knew by the expression on his face that he had discovered something. I shadowed him into the lab and watched over his shoulder as he hit play.
At first there was nothing except marine snow drifting by horizontally, making it apparent that the Medusa was being pulled by the current. Then, from the left-hand side of the screen, a squid appeared. It was jetting along horizontally, arms first, keeping pace with the e-jelly. As wave action at the surface was transmitted down the tether, the Medusa and its attached e-jelly oscillated gently up and down, and in lockstep, the squid undulated up and down, too. It appeared to be visually tracking the e-jelly!
The attack, when it came, seemed almost casual. The squid bent its arms, held together in a spearpoint, toward the e-jelly, and when it made contact, the arms splayed apart, going every which way. The suckers of one glommed onto the side of the e-jelly while others stroked it and the bait bag attached next to it; tasting and testing and finding our offering unsatisfactory, it then let go and swam away.
Nathan and I started hollering like maniacs, bringing scientists and crew running from all over the ship. Again and again we played the sequence, trying to estimate the size and sort out other key taxonomic features. This would be only the second expedition ever to capture video of a giant squid in the deep sea. If the Medusa had really done it again, and in our own backyard, only a hundred miles southeast of New Orleans, that was a huge deal and a clear testament to the first time not being just luck. But before we made any announcements, we needed to be sure. We wanted to send the video clip to Mike Vecchione, the squid expert at the Smithsonian, for confirmation. To our extreme frustration, though, we couldn’t, because we were in a nasty squall and the internet was down.
We were discussing the best way to estimate the squid’s size when the lightning struck. It was an earsplitting crack that sent us all scrambling out on deck. The ship’s long-range antenna had been hit and blown to smithereens. The destructive force of a direct lightning strike is truly awesome. Electronic devices—computers in particular—are especially vulnerable, which is why, as soon as we realized we’d been hit, Nathan and I raced back to the lab to check on his laptop. One of the ship’s computers was fried, but Nathan’s, miraculously, was fine. Then, just as we were congratulating ourselves on having dodged a bullet, the ship’s captain came down from the bridge to warn us that there was a waterspout forming off our port bow—a big one. It was as if we had summoned Poseidon’s wrath for trying to reveal his leviathan to the world.
Thankfully, the spout gave us a miss, and the seas began to calm. We kept checking the internet connection and, in the meantime, went back to trying to estimate the length of the squid. Sönke described it as being like trying to measure an elastic band as it’s fired directly at you. Based on the known size of the e-jelly, we came up with a conservative estimate of maybe ten feet, but later, when I could do more careful measurements and calculations, I concluded that it may have been more than twice that.*23
Once the internet was working, we sent the video to Mike and then waited anxiously for his pronouncement. When he wrote back with a thumbs-up, we were ready to share the news. Sönke, Nathan, and I gave an interview to The New York Times over the Point Sur’s satellite link. At the same time, we posted the story and video on NOAA’s Journey into Midnight website and immediately it went viral. News agencies around the world carried the story and we were bombarded with more interview requests.
Based on the amount of coverage our sighting received, this was a far greater public response than had occurred after the Japan expedition. Because there was no documentary this time around, we didn’t have any of the cool B-roll footage to flesh out the story—like our on-camera reaction to the first sighting—but being able to share the discovery in near real time and not having to restrict the availability of the squid footage more than made up for that. It also gave us the freedom and opportunity to bring up important ocean issues in a context likely to reach a wider audience than the usual doom-and-gloom diatribes.
In our blog on the NOAA website, Sönke and I pointed out that our sighting had occurred at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico oil field, which produces nearly two million barrels of oil per day. In fact, we were so close to the Appomattox deepwater oil rig, one of the largest and deepest drilling platforms on the planet, that we could see them burning off methane every night at sunset. The human imprint on the planet, resulting from our continued dependence on fossil fuels, extends even into the lair of the legendary Kraken!
In interviews, I tried to emphasize how little we have actually explored of our own planet. Based on the large quantities of giant squid beaks found in sperm whale stomachs and given how readily we filmed them with the Medusa, it appears that giant squid aren’t rare; they’re just shy. We only knew about their existence because they happen to float when they die.*24 How many other amazing creatures are down there that we don’t know about because what little exploring we have done we’ve done wrong?
And how many other terrors have been simply misidentified? For centuries, the Kraken was reviled as a terrifying monster, but on closer inspection it proved to be not monstrous but magnificent. For most of human history we have viewed nature as a monster to be battled and beaten into submission. In Moby-Dick, Ahab refused to give in to nature’s dominance, symbolized by the great white sperm whale, which he saw as evil. For contrast, Melville offers up the viewpoint of another whaling captain, one who lost an arm to Moby Dick just as Ahab lost a leg, but nonetheless viewed the creature as lacking malice, and counseled Ahab to leave the whale alone. In the end, Ahab’s egocentric obsession was his downfall. The whale destroys Ahab, his ship, and all but one of his crew. As our numbers and our destructive power on the planet grow, I fear that if we persist in seeing nature as a monster to be subdued, we risk Ahab’s fate.
Skip Notes
*1 Mammoth fantasy figures can inflict sweet revenge on big bullies, as exemplified by Calvin’s Tyrannosaurus rex alter ego in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson.
*2 According to the Manly Man’s Guide to Fashion for Manly Men, this is the latest trend, superseding color-coordinated pocket squares.
*3 One giant isopod in a Japanese aquarium supposedly went on living while refusing
solid food for five years!
*4 As far as we know, the Greenland shark has no relation to the Landshark of Saturday Night Live, so presumably the moose and reindeer fall through the ice.
*5 Compare the calorie count of one cubic meter of seawater containing ten grains of rice (about one calorie) with a cubic meter of beer, which would be seventeen kegs, or about 421,000 calories!
*6 Larvacean tips for successful house flipping: (1) low-cost construction materials, (2) complete remodel in less than an hour, (3) DIY decorating with bioluminescent granules installed in species-specific patterns in house walls.
*7 A disparate group of soft-bodied, usually transparent animals that includes jellyfish, comb jellies, siphonophores, salps, larvaceans, and some worms and mollusks.
*8 But this depends on assumptions about depth range and temperature exposure that leave the actual number very much in doubt.
*9 Which is why you should take small bites, chew your food slowly, and learn what to do in a choking emergency. No kidding!
*10 Cue the violins.
*11 Named one of Time magazine’s first Heroes for the Planet in 1998, Sylvia Earle has spent her career working tirelessly for ocean conservation. I have many reasons to be grateful to her, but my fondest memory is of when I was diving Wasp. The light meter I was supposed to be testing was still on shore, and the sea state was deemed too wild to risk trying to deliver it by small boat to our research vessel. Sylvia, having overheard my ship-to-shore pleas to get it transported, broke in to volunteer as courier. I believe it was the first time we spoke.
*12 Pronounced degree. I was familiar with Mike from his National Geographic series Perfect Shark, where he had done a segment on the bioluminescent cookiecutter shark and showed an animation depicting my hypothesis of how the shark’s “dog collar” might function as a lure.
*13 This was before Discovery Channel went over to the dark side with Megalodon and Mermaids. My reticence was based on my experience from the Cuba expedition.
*14 The documentary, released in 2014, was James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge 3D. Also killed in the crash was Australian filmmaker Andrew Wight.
*15 In her previous incarnation, she had been the support ship for the French research submersible Nautile.
*16 On research vessels that have locker space, you’re lucky if you get any hangers, probably because they get scarfed up to jury-rig fixes on broken gear.
*17 A quick-toggle shackle-release mechanism.
*18 For this dive the scientist’s seat was filled by a Japanese scientist who was an expert on the acoustic imaging system that was being tested as an alternative method of observing without white light.
*19 In the documentary they showed this out of order, before the recording from the submersible.
*20 It was remarkably reminiscent of the Cuba expedition, when Discovery magically altered the meaning of “forbidden” by changing the title from Cuba: Forbidden Waters to Cuba: Forbidden Depths.
*21 This was its first deployment in the midwater since the Japan trip.
*22 If you ever saw the video that launched all the say-no-to-plastic-straws campaigns, that was Nathan Jack Robinson pulling the straw out of the turtle’s nose. At the time of our mission, Nathan was the director of the Cape Eleuthera Institute, in the Bahamas. When the Medusa isn’t needed for an expedition, I loan it to CEI for its deep-sea shark research and to help foster a new generation of explorers—high school students from the CEI-affiliated Island School, which provides these teens the opportunity to participate in real science.
*23 Although no flagons were involved, skepticism is warranted.
*24 This is because they have ammonium in their body tissues, which is unusual except in a few deepwater squid, and why you don’t have to worry about seeing “all-organic, free-range Kraken” showing up on your menu now that we know how to find them.
Chapter 14
TALKING TO CANNIBALS
The first Humboldt squid emerged from the gloom at 1,090 feet. It was arcing diagonally downward from left to right, arms first; large triangular fins curled over its back, barely moving. The appearance of speed without effort stemmed from its highly efficient jet propulsion system. I got only a tantalizing glimpse before the squid plunged into the blackness below the Deep Rover’s red lights, but the impression was of mass and strength.
The next squid appeared at 1,475 feet. This one came out of the dark above us, targeting the electronic jellyfish affixed to a long pole in front of the sub. The Humboldt knifed in with all eight arms held together in a sharp point and then at the last second curled its arms back and spread them apart to engulf the e-jelly. Big and powerfully built, its body almost filled the field of view vertically. Discovering a piece of machinery instead of prey, it immediately reversed course by flapping those enormous fins while rotating the direction of its funnel. “Now we’re talkin’!” I whooped.
This was really going to work! The idea was to use the e-jelly to draw in Humboldt squid so they could be filmed for the latest version of the BBC nature documentary series scheduled to air at the end of 2017 as Blue Planet II.*1 In terms of TV appeal, these squid have it all; they are big, aggressive, Shaq-sized predators with an extensive behavioral repertoire, including a phenomenal capacity for visual communication. Not only can they use their whole body like a billboard, strobing colors and patterns in the blink of an eye, from red to white and back again, by contracting muscles around tiny pigment sacs called chromatophores, but they also have photophores that emit blue light, suggesting a capacity for an entirely different kind of light show.
We were hunting off the coast of Chile in a stretch of ocean that is part of the biggest invertebrate fishery in the world. Humboldt squid are the basis of this reputation. There are so many squid in these waters that they are harvested at the rate of hundreds of thousands of tons per year, putting food on dinner tables around the world. Your restaurant order of calamari with parsley and garlic may well be a portion of one of these seven-foot-long predators, which feed in swarms to the point of frenzy and are known to be so aggressive they’ll attack and eat each other in the process.
To film the squid, we were using the same ship, the Alucia, and the same two submersibles from our Japan expedition: the three-person Triton and the two-person Deep Rover. In this case, the two observers in the Triton were BBC producer Orla Doherty and cameraman Hugh Miller. The Triton was outfitted with not one but two high-resolution cameras, one with ultra-low-light sensitivity, both mounted on the front of the sub. Deep Rover carried pilot Toby Mitchell and me, along with powerful external lights, both red and white, for illuminating whatever the Triton’s cameras were filming. This entailed coordinating our filming efforts such that Toby would line up the Deep Rover to backlight or side-light whatever Orla and Hugh were trying to film, in order to ensure maximum contrast and minimum backscatter.
My official title for this expedition, according to the ship’s roster, was chief scientist. Orla simply referred to me as “the squid whisperer.” I felt honored by the latter title, and undeserving of the former: Having been chief scientist on many submersible expeditions, I am all too familiar with the stress and exhaustion that normally accompany that moniker. Usually it involves writing grant proposals, acquiring the permits for operating in foreign waters, assembling the science team, coordinating travel and accommodations for said team, managing interactions between the science team and the ship and submersible crews, and trying to get everyone to play nice. On this expedition, though, I had none of those responsibilities. BBC and its collaborators, Alucia Productions, had assumed those duties, which meant I could just focus on the fun stuff: exploring.
As for “squid whisperer,” after so many years of trying to decipher the language of light—fr
om the early failures in Wasp and then Deep Rover, through the triumphs with first the Eye-in-the-Sea and then the Medusa, to that thrilling moment at the close of the Japan expedition when I not only saw but felt that large octopus squid attack the e-jelly—this had the ring of welcome validation.*2 On this expedition, I would not only have the opportunity to repeat that in-person thrill, possibly many times over, but I was also hoping to observe a form of bioluminescence communication never witnessed before.
My scheme for enticing the Humboldt squid into the range of our cameras was the same one we used off Japan: dangling the electronic jellyfish out in front of the sub while we and our cameras observed unobtrusively, using red light. I hadn’t brought the Medusa for this mission, so everything depended on what we were able to see and record from the subs.
Our first dive site was thirteen miles offshore, where the bottom depth was about three thousand feet. We had launched at four p.m., with the goal of exploring the water column both before and after sunset. My prediction was that we would find the squid at that sweet spot where sunlight relinquishes its hold, at which point I imagined the squid would be poised to begin their evening vertical migration to the surface.
Shortly after we began our descent, I realized I needed to revise my expectations as to depth. These were very different waters than I was used to. Here, the top two hundred feet contained a blanket of plankton so concentrated and thick that it swallowed up the sunlight. By the time we reached three hundred feet, the light was nearly gone. In the crystal-clear waters of the Bahamas, where I have made hundreds of submersible dives, we never saw daytime light levels this dim until we were below two thousand feet.
