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Elusive Giant Squid Gets Vivid Close-Up
Giant Squid, Elusive Creature of the Deep, Gets a Vivid Close-Up
They can be bigger than a bus, and yet the elusive giant squid has hardly been spotted swimming alive in the ocean.
It became a little less mythical on Christmas Eve, however, when a fisherman spotted the creature, known as an Architeuthis (pronounced ark-uh-TOOTH-us), gliding near the water’s surface in Japan’s Toyama Bay, northwest of Tokyo.
Video footage captured the ballet of pink and white tentacles, the squid’s enormous mouth and saucerlike eyes at one point encompassing the lens.
A local diver, Akinobu Kimura, swam with the creature. “My curiosity to get closer and to see the details on every part of its body was greater than my fear,” he said.
Mr. Kimura said he had seen giant squids in the first two months of 2015 and knew they couldn’t move very quickly, but he was still caught by surprise. “At one point, it wrapped tentacles around me and I lost control of my body,” he said. “The suckers stuck to my hand, and when the squid pulled away, it hurt.”
More giant squids are making appearances in Japan’s coastal waters, though most are dead. John Bowers, a professor specializing in oceanography at Hokkaido University, said evidence of more than 50 have turned up in the past two years, specifically in warmer waters, where giant squids struggle to maintain blood flow and become sluggish.
The last time a giant squid was captured on video, though less vividly so, was during a scientific expedition in 2012. Photos of the creature in the wild were captured for the first time in 2005 by Japanese researchers, stirring excitement among those who had long sought to glimpse a giant squid in its natural habitat.
“This has been a mystery for a thousand years,” Richard Ellis, author of “Monsters of the Sea,” said of the photographs at the time. “Nobody knew what they looked like in the wild.”
Architeuthis, which can grow more than 40 feet in length, is among the largest invertebrates on earth. The squid spotted in Toyama Bay was said to be on the small side, at about 12 feet long.
These giant beauties are best admired in their natural habitat, not as Sushi on our plates. How about going for a meat-free meal at http://KindMeal.my while admiring them gracefully navigating the seas?
Source: http://nyti.ms/1ID0xld
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