Giant Squid, Elusive Creature of the Deep, Gets a Vivid Close-Up (opens in new tab)

>> They can be as big as a bus, or even bigger, and yet the elusive giant squid has hardly been spotted swimming alive in the ocean.

It's hard to read past such a false statement. A couple of their arms are perhaps longer than a small bus, but nowhere near "bigger". It isn't even the biggest squid (see the Colossal Squid).

Articles mentioning footage of live specimens should also note that they are almost universally ill, near death when filmed. They do not belong near the surface. Despite their size, these are short-lived and delicate animals prone to injury.

Also, live specimens have been captured as far back as 2002. So all this talk of "first time" footage is a little disingenuous. Researchers had them swimming in tanks aboard ship more than a decade ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110710133329/http://animal.dis...

Beautiful! Things like this are one of the upsides of the proliferation of cheap cameras - rare sights that would previously go unreported or disbelieved can be easily captured. (Though it's not doing wonders for my holdout belief in Bigfoot.)

Science question here: what's the slit between the squid's mantle (upper body) and the eye? Is that an injury?

I was recently at a museum in Adelaide, Australia, which featured a scale giant squid exhibit. Story goes the museum cleared out a shaft for a new elevator but apparently the British manufacturers made a sizing mistake and an entirely new shaft and elevator had to be made, the question being what to do with the old one. Apparently a friend of the museum just happened to have a giant squid model on hand and donated it. The entire display stands at a length of four stories.

Imagine that, coming to the ground floor and seeing the ends of the longest tentacles. You walk up three stories and you still haven't even reached the full height. Then imagine literally running into one of those incredibly long tentacles at ocean depths far beyond the faintest traces of sunlight. Terrifying.

First photos of a live specimen snapped in 2005 and only a few sightings since. It really reinforces that not all of nature has been discovered by humans and there is still much need for exploration.