A Colossal Squid Video? That’s A Big Deal

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, we’ll check in on brain-computer interfaces, implanted devices that are helping people with paralysis communicate in new ways. Plus, a project to link cat behaviors to their genetics.

But first, if you know one thing about this program, you know that we love a good cephalopod. So when we got word this week that scientists had recorded the first ever confirmed footage of a live colossal squid in its deep sea environment, swimming around in the South Atlantic Ocean near the South Sandwich Islands, we knew we had to dive in.

Joining me now to talk about the sighting is Dr. Kat Bolstad. She’s one of the squid experts the researchers sent their videos to for identification, and she’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Kat, welcome to Science Friday.

KAT BOLSTAD: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to hear you love a good cephalopod. I do too.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Where is this found? Who found this?

KAT BOLSTAD: This footage was collected by Schmidt Ocean Institute on their new vessel, Falkor (too). And they were on a partnership voyage with Ocean Census using their remotely operated vehicle, Sebastian, to search for new species and habitats in the deep sea around the South Sandwich Islands.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so this is a species that we really mostly know from dead specimens. We’ve never seen one alive in its natural habitat. It was cool for me. What was it like for you as a squid expert to see this?

KAT BOLSTAD: It was thrilling for me on a couple of levels. So the glass squids are some of my very favorite squids, just because of how spectacular they look. They have these transparent bodies. They look like little glass sculptures, which is where the common name comes from. And seeing a glass squid is always a fantastic experience because of how beautiful they are.

On another level, I love that this is the first glimpse that the world is going to get of the mighty colossal squid. If and when we see an adult, there will be some of that monster hype, some of that stuff of nightmares, some of that Kraken from the deep sea. That is not going to be involved in this particular footage. And they’re a great example of some of the beauty of deep sea animals that we don’t get to see when dead specimens are what we have to examine. So for me, I was over the moon, and for a number of different reasons.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The colossal squid is not the same as the giant squid.

KAT BOLSTAD: Correct. The colossal squid and the giant squid are two completely different animals from completely different families. The giant squid is found in temperate oceans. Colossal’s in the Antarctic. And a healthy giant squid will never be seen near the surface, and that’s partly because there is a big temperature gradient that would cause them to go through temperature shock on the way up.

Now, in the Antarctic, because the water temperature is between 2 degrees Celsius and minus 2 degrees Celsius right throughout the water column, that temperature barrier doesn’t exist. So although the colossal squid probably lives in the deep sea pretty much all the time, it is possible on occasion for it to come to the surface.

And so when these large individuals have come up next to fishing vessels, sometimes they’re entangled in the lines. And these large specimens get collected and brought back for science because it’s clear that they won’t survive once released.

And they’re large, they’re deflated, they’re missing some of their skin. They’re a very impressive animal. We are quite certain that when we see one alive, it will be much more magnificent than it is laid out on a table in the lab. But I actually love that our first sighting of this animal alive that we’re able to confirm is a small one.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A baby?

KAT BOLSTAD: Eh– mm, it’s a young individual.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

KAT BOLSTAD: It’s not quite a baby. So babies have some different features that have been lost by this stage, but quite a small one.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Listeners, you can see a video of this juvenile colossal squid on our website at sciencefriday.com/colossal. OK, so when did you first hear about it? Where were you? Was there a moment where you first heard about it?

KAT BOLSTAD: There was a moment. It was a very specific moment. So a friend and I have been working on actually building a deep sea camera system with the intent of being better at filming large, deep sea squids, which are famously wary of disturbance in their environment. They’ve got great vision. They probably know that we are there with our light, noisy technology a long time before we know they are there. So we must be missing many, many opportunities to see these animals just by being scary with the gear we put in the water.

So my friend Thom Linley from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, who is a deep sea fish expert, we put our heads together. He has built deep sea camera stuff before. And we came up with an idea to build a camera system that is not only stealthy, and so hopefully not offensive, but actually interesting maybe to a large colossal squid so that it might even come to look at the camera, not make us have to find it in the vast expanse of the deep sea.

And we had just been on a voyage down the Antarctic Peninsula, putting this camera system in the water. And the day that we got back on shore, having not yet filmed the adult colossal squid–

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

KAT BOLSTAD: –we were alerted to the fact that this little clip had been opportunistically collected by Schmidt the day before. So we got off the ship. We had packed up all our gear. We had said goodbye to everybody. We went and checked into a weird Airbnb in Southern Argentina, and then we got this footage.

And it was not instantaneously able to be confirmed that it was a colossal squid, but it was very likely already. And the more I looked at it, the more certain I was. And then we got the high-res version, and I could see the key features. And I was like, yeah, they’ve got it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Which were– what are the key features?

KAT BOLSTAD: So what we’re looking for is a combination of hooks and suckers on the squid’s arms and tentacles. So a very quick clarification. Squid have eight shorter arms that have suckers and/or hooks all the way along their length and two longer tentacles where those structures are grouped at the ends. That’s the difference. Octopuses never have tentacles, by the way.

So on a colossal squid, there are hooks at the ends of the tentacles, which were clearly visible in the footage. And what we were looking for is also hooks in the middle of the arms, because the colossal squid is the only squid that we know of that has suckers near the beak, then hooks midway along the arm, and then suckers again toward the arm tips. And once we confirmed that those hooks were present midway along the arms, we knew it could only be colossal squid.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Elbow hooks and suckers.

KAT BOLSTAD: Sure. Elbow hooks. Why not?

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

KAT BOLSTAD: Now, now there is a squid called the elbow squid, though. Magnapinna, the bigfin squid. And if you look up footage of Magnapinna or bigfin, you will see what I mean by elbow squid. And that’s a whole other story.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How big was this juvenile squid that was caught on camera, and how colossal do they get?

KAT BOLSTAD: So this animal was probably– we estimate about 30 centimeters, or just under a foot long. And they can grow, we think, to lengths of probably seven meters or about 20 feet. But we know that they can get larger than the ones that we’ve seen so far because beaks from larger individuals have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales. And so sperm whales actually are one of our best sources of information for colossal squid, because it makes up the vast majority of the sperm whale’s diet in the Antarctic.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

KAT BOLSTAD: Yes. By volume and by weight, the vast majority of sperm whale diet in the Antarctic is colossal squid.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, you mentioned these are different from giant squid. They live in different areas, different species. Which one is cooler?

KAT BOLSTAD: Oh, what a question.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

KAT BOLSTAD: All right. Oh. Am I going to commit– am I going to commit to which one is cooler?

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’re really hesitating here.

KAT BOLSTAD: Well, I will say that the colossal squid has more interesting features than the giant squid. The giant squid is very cool for a lot of reasons. It is the longest squid. It gets up to 13 meters or nearly 40 feet. Weighs less than the colossal squid, though, so it’s a very long, skinny one.

But apart from that, it doesn’t have the hooks. It’s probably not that active an animal. It is incredibly beautiful in life, though. The first footage of the giant squid was very surprising, because it’s this beautiful, golden, silvery, iridescent color that, again, looks nothing like the deflated, trawled specimens that we would see in the lab.

The colossal squid is intriguing because it is quite an unusual member of the family that it lives in, partly in that it grows so large, and partly for some other features. It has these enormous eyes. It has light organs. It has these hooks that swivel 360 degrees on the ends of the tentacles. So in terms of talking points and interesting features, I will go with colossal squid, although I have a lot of love for the giant squid as well.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] What do you really want to know about these animals?

KAT BOLSTAD: Hmm. Well, there are a lot of things that we only hypothesize or we’re beginning to think we might know. We actually don’t know very much about what they eat themselves. We know some of their predators, but we don’t know what role they are playing in the food chain as predators themselves. Apart from observations of them attacking hooktooth fish, they very rarely have anything in their stomachs. So when we analyze the stomach contents, we don’t see very much.

We don’t actually know the lifespan. So someone last year published a study looking at growth rings in the beak and estimated their maximum lifespan might be about 5.2 years, which is quite long for a cephalopod, but would be a very fast growth rate for an animal this size.

It is certainly possible. The issue is that for a lot of deep sea squid, the rate at which these growth rings are laid down hasn’t been confirmed. So we are hypothesizing that it’s on a daily basis, but it may not be. And if it isn’t, then that interpretation of those growth rings changes quite a lot.

And the other thing I will say is all of the large specimens we’ve seen so far have been female. And admittedly, that’s not that many specimens, but we don’t really know what the males will look like. We don’t know if they reach similar sizes to the females. In some squid species they do, and some they don’t.

Do they have exactly the same light organs and armature, or are they different in some way? So that’s also something that would be great to know more about.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You know, to me, one thing that’s just amazing about this story is we’ve only had really glimpses of this squid. It’s so huge. It just seems amazing that there are still animals, especially animals this big, that we’ve really never seen in the wild, seen alive in their habitat. What do you make of that?

KAT BOLSTAD: Well, one of the things I love about the colossal squid is the fact that it is an enormous wild animal that never, in its entire natural lifespan, will encounter humans, and just has no idea that humans even exist. So that’s just a great reminder for us that we’re not the center of everything for everything on the planet, although we have an outsized impact on the environment, of course. But just to remember that there are huge things out there that just have no concept of us at all.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I love that as an ending thought. I’d like to think of us less too.

KAT BOLSTAD: [LAUGHS] Wouldn’t we all? Yeah. If I could spend all my time thinking about squid and not thinking about people, that would be great.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s Dr. Kat Bolstad, an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Thanks for talking with me today.

KAT BOLSTAD: Thanks, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You can see a video of this juvenile colossal squid on our website at sciencefriday.com/colossal.

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