Captured live on video in its deep-sea element, for the first time, the Kraken of tall tales and sea shanties—Architeuthis, the giant squid—is coming into sharp focus, a flesh-and-blood reality. But why now?

Here be monsters: Neil Landman and I are crowded, along with some graduate students, into a storage room at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where Landman is curator-in-charge of fossil invertebrates. We’re gathered for an audience with Architeuthis, the giant squid. Before us, pickling quietly in a big, stainless-steel tank, is the stuff of sailors’ nightmares, the serpent-armed leviathan that drags hapless seafarers to their doom.

As Landman gaffs a tentacle and hoists it for me to touch, I half-expect the limp, dripping thing to lash out and grab me. Myth has a long half-life.

Bleached white by its preservative bath, the tentacle feels hard yet rubbery to the touch, like an overinflated bicycle tire—a bicycle tire studded with suckers the size of quarters, on stalks. Running my thumb around the inside of one, I feel the sawtoothed ring of chitin that gives the creature its fearsome grip. In life, its suckers leave proof of the fabled beast’s existence: ring-shaped scars on the hide of its archnemesis, the Sperm whale. A photo in a 1917 Smithsonian publication bears the poetic caption, “a piece of Sperm whale skin relating a battle with a giant squid, in sucker scar script.”¹

Time and again, marauding cephalopods rise out of the fathomless depths of our collective unconscious, from the 12-armed Scylla in Homer’s Odyssey, plucking men from passing ships like canapés off a waiter’s tray, to Pliny’s foul-smelling “polyp,” whose stupefyingly bad breath “tormented the dogs,”² to the beached “devil-fish” described in 1879 by the biologist Thomas Kirk. Quoting from an awestruck New Zealander who happened on the carcass, Kirk conjured a “repulsive-looking brute” with tentacles “as thick as a man’s leg,” “horrid goggle eyes,” and “a powerful beak,” reputed by the Maori natives to grab men and rip their insides out.³ (Duly chastened, the New Zealander vowed, “No more sea-bathing for me!”)

Yet, despite their antiquity (and ubiquity), accounts of many-armed abominations molesting humans are no more than old mariner’s tales, scientists insist. Consider the 1873 account, recounted by Richard Ellis in his book The Search for the Giant Squid, of a confrontation between Architeuthis and a small fishing boat in a Newfoundland cove. Legend has it that a quick-thinking fisherman in Conception Bay thwarted a giant-squid attack by lopping off one of the monster’s tentacles with an axe. There’s no denying that something happened: the animal’s severed limb provided incontrovertible evidence, in the words of an excited local, “of the hitherto mystical devilfish…whose existence naturalists have been disputing for centuries.”⁴ But contemporary teuthologists dismiss the “attack” as the death throes of a moribund animal, pointing out that virtually all giant squid encountered on the ocean’s surface are dead or dying. “There is not a single corroborated story of a [giant] squid attacking a man, a boat, or a submersible,” asserts Ellis.⁵

There are, however, irrefutable instances of jumbo squid behaving aggressively towards humans. In 1990, while diving with a film crew for the PBS series Nature, off the southern coast of Baja California, Alex Kerstitch, a University of Arizona biologist, was mugged by Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas). No giant like Architeuthis, Dosidicus is a mere jumbo, reaching a maximum length of six feet and weighing a hundred pounds at most. But it more than makes up for its comparatively smaller size with a muscle-bound mantle and a hair-trigger, Joe Pesci aggressiveness. Excited by the scent of the bait the crew was using to attract them, several squid grabbed Kerstitch by the legs, without warning, and took him on an elevator ride to hell, yanking him into the pitch-black depths. Others piled on, ripping off the scientist’s dive computer, collection bag, light, and, like any wilding gang, his gold neckchain.⁶ Then, just as suddenly, the creatures released Kerstitch, who swam back to the boat. Producer Howard Hall recalled,

[T]he squid mugging hadn’t really terrified Alex while it was happening. He was too busy to be afraid. But when he got back on board he began to wonder what if…? What if they held on just a little longer? In moments they might have dragged him down into abyssal depths. What if they ripped out his regulator? And his worst fear, what if that beak (much larger than the largest parrot’s beak) had grabbed his neck and ripped out a two-pound hunk of flesh? As he thought about it, his knees became progressively weaker. He decided he needed some rest.⁷

Not for nothing do the Mexican fishermen call these creatures diablos rojos .⁸

Most scientists believe that Dosidicus is far more aggressive than Architeuthis. But even if the giant squid doesn’t earn its mythic status as a shipwrecking, man-eating behemoth, the unadorned truth about Architeuthis is sufficiently unsettling to enhance, rather than dispel, its reputation as the poster beast for sea monsters. It has three hearts, blue blood, and the biggest eyes in the animal kingdom— the size of ”volleyballs,” says Clyde Roper, a Zoologist Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution who is widely considered to be the world’s leading authority on Architeuthis. Giant squid have been reputed to attain lengths of 45 feet.⁹

Like Kubodera and Landman, Roper believes Architeuthis hunts by hanging motionless in the inky darkness, 600 to 1,000 meters down. When a fish or smaller squid swims by, they conjecture, the animallashes out with its two long tentacles, dragging its prey within reach of its eight shorter arms and, ultimately, the wicked-looking, parrotlike beak in the center of its thicket of limbs. The beak is sharp as a bolt cutter, its upper jaw scissoring neatly into the prognathous lower one. Shearing off chunks of living flesh, the squid uses a rasping, tongue-like organ called a radula, covered with tiny teeth, to push its food down its gullet. “There’s a school of thought that thinks these things are gentle giants,” says Landman, wryly. He’s not buying it. But like almost everything about Architeuthis, the question is open to debate: Steve O’Shea, New Zealand’s preeminent teuthologist, or squid scientist, O’Shea is unequivocally on the gentle-giant side of the battle lines.

As Ellis writes in The Search for the Giant Squid, Architeuthis is “the least-known large animal on earth, the last monster to be conquered.”¹⁰ Historically, much of what we’ve known—or thought we’ve known—about the giant squid has been nine parts gothic horror, one part fact, stitched together from fear, fantasy, and educated conjecture based on specimens that washed ashore or floated to the ocean’s surface, dead or dying.

Until recently.

Close encounters with real-life kraken are on the rise: in recent years, giant and even colossal squid have been caught—alive and in their element—in still photos and, on rare occasion, on hooks. “In terms of Architeuthis sightings, historically, all we’ve had are dead animals,” says Steve O’Shea, New Zealand’s preeminent teuthologist, or squid scientist. “Now, we’re seeing live animals being photographed and filmed. The progress that’s been made in securing footage of these animals, and in understanding their life history and biology, over the last few years is phenomenal, compared to where we were several years ago.”

Despite its status as the largest invertebrate on the planet, no one had ever seen, much less photographed, a live giant squid in its habitat until 2004. On September 30, at precisely 9:15 A.M., near Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, a 26-foot-long giant squid attacked a baitline that Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and his research team had rigged with a strobe and a digital camera, timed to snap an image every 30 seconds.¹¹ Within days, cephalogeeks all over the Web were posting links to astonishing photographs of the animal¹² vrooming up out of the deep and grabbing the bait “in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey within [their] coils…immediately after striking,” as the researchers put it.¹³

Since then, we’ve witnessed a flurry of megasquid firsts. In December 2006, Kubodera and his team outdid themselves by hooking an Architeuthis near the Japanese island of Chichijima, then videotaping the thrashing 24-foot animal as they dragged it aboard. (Unfortunately, it died from exposure to the warm surface water, not to mention being beached on the deck of the ship.)¹⁴ Then, in February 2007, a New Zealand fishing crew topped that: fishing for toothfish in the Antarctic waters south of New Zealand, they hauled up a 39-foot, 990-pound colossal squid—Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, by any other name—alive.¹⁵ It didn’t survive, but it was the most mature specimen of the biggest (and, some maintain, baddest) member of the order Teuthidaever recovered, not to mention the largest confirmed specimen of a cephalopod to date.¹⁶ (Why baddest? Because Mesonychoteuthis beats Architeuthis in the arms race, hands down: the clublike ends of its tentacles bristle with vicious, swiveling hooks, the better to grab you with.)

Now comes the first video footage of a live Architeuthis in the vasty deep—2,000 feet below the Pacific, 620 miles south of Japan, in an area where Sperm whale hunt the giant squid. In June and July 2012, an expedition jointly funded by The Discovery Channel and Japan’s public-broadcasting organization, NHK, went in search of the vanishingly elusive animal. The scientists heading the team, Kubodera, O’Shea, and the marine biologist Edie Widder, conducted 55 dives in two submersibles. Using Widder’s ingenious “e-jellyfish” lure, which mimics the bioluminescent displays of the Atolla jellyfish, together with her innovative “Medusa” video technology, which marries a noiseless floating camera to a “far-red” light source invisible to most sea creatures, researchers were able to capture otherworldly images of a squid approaching the bait.¹⁷

Chromatophores flashing from iridescent silver-gold to gunmetal blue, the animal danced in the dark, an emissary from a sunless, starless void. “The eye was very human-looking, but the whole creature just looked like an alien,” said Leslie Schwerin, a Discovery Channel producer who accompanied the research team.¹⁸ (The Discovery Channel will air the video as part of its show, “Monster Squid: The Giant is Real,” on January 27 at 8 P.M. Eastern Time.) “The color was utterly different than any of us expected,” Widder told NPR. “The one that had been brought to the surface [by Kubodera]…was red, and a lot of deep-sea squid are red. But this was a spectacular silver and gold. It just looks like it was carved out of metal, it‘s just completely breathtaking."¹⁹

The kraken of tall tales and sea shanties is coming into sharp focus, a flesh-and-blood reality. But why now?

Ellis thinks our increasing ability to peer and pry into the world’s most remote nooks and crannies has something to do with it. “We are only now learning how to investigate the ocean without sending a man down in a bathysphere or a research submersible,” he told me. “The use of robot cameras enables researchers to cover greater swaths of dark ocean without endangering themselves. The more we do it, the more surprises we get.” (His new e-book, The Little Blue-eyed Vampire from Hell, is about one such surprise, first described in 1903 but only recently videotaped in its bathypelagic haunt in 1992: Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the freakish little squid with the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, proportionally speaking; light-producing photophores dotting much of its body, like deep-sea Christmas lights; and of course that awesome name, worthy of a Norwegian death-metal band.²⁰) Stealth—made possible by far-red lighting and noiseless cameras—is also a factor, says Widder, in increased sightings of giant squid and other figments of the oceanic unconscious.

Yet, as O’Shea points out, it’s commercial interests such as the oil industry, rather than scientific researchers, that are leading the charge in undersea exploration. “Deep-sea oil exploration is why we’re seeing footage from ROVs [remotely operated underwater vehicles] of Magnapinna [“—another species of squid, a “spindly thing” with “inordinately long arms,” which attains lengths of 20 feet] —at depths of four-and-a-half-thousand meters in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Nonetheless, some of the most dramatic still photos and video footage of megasquid are the fruit of painstaking labors by devoted teuthologists on a Mission from God to capture this thing on film and, with luck, in the flesh. “Dr. Kubodera spent three years—26 week-long expeditions—before he got the first photographs, and he did it in an area where he knew giant squid had to exist because that was the migration route of sperm whales,” says Roper. “He just kept going back, putting down cameras and waiting for things to happen and, you know, you do that enough, it’s gonna happen! Then, he went right back out to the same area, set a great big baited lure, and was able to snag one. He put in phenomenal effort over a very long period of time and he was successful; that’s what it takes.”

O’Shea believes that the media, by heightening public awareness of the animals, have played a prominent role in amateur sightings of megasquid. He cites edutainment programming such as the Discovery Channel documentary “Chasing Giants: On the Trail of the Giant Squid” (in which he figures prominently) and museums’ use of Architeuthisspecimens as a guaranteed draw, second only to Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs. (“Every time a colossal squid goes on display, we have another bloody media frenzy,” he says, with the unmistakable air of a scientist suffering from chronic kraken fatigue syndrome).

Of course, he adds, the Web spreads word of giant- or colossal squid sightings at viral-outbreak speed, whipping up Architeuth-ophilia and alerting everyone from commercial fishermen to boating enthusiasts to beachcombers of the existence of such creatures. “In 1925, [the British malacologist G.C. Robson] recorded two specimens [of Mesonychoteuthis] from the stomach contents of a harpooned whale down in the Antarctic,” says O’Shea, “and then probably the ‘70s was the next time these things were hauled aboard: the Russians caught quite a number of them when they were trawling for Patagonian toothfish. So it was in the Russian literature, but who on earth was going to pick up on that!? But in the ‘90s, when Google takes over, all of a sudden everybody is aware of these things, especially when you call them something like ‘colossal squid.’ Catchy name!”

Another, obvious explanation for the upspike in megasquid encounters is the fact that longline and bottom-trawling fishing technologies are plumbing—most marine scientists would say plundering—the ocean’s deepest places. For example, longline boats are venturing, increasingly, into Antarctic waters, where Mesonychoteuthisis known to feed on Antarctic toothfish.

“The depths to which we fish are increasing,” says O’Shea, “and we are encroaching into new environments with huge trawls and long lines. Is it any wonder that in the process of this invasion fishermen are capturing new, inconceivably bizarre animals?”

Roper joins the chorus. “The animal is not increasing in population density,” he says, noting that the best evidence, based on an exhaustive study of giant squid beaks retrieved from the stomachs of whales, indicates that Architeuthis numbers in the “multiple millions.” (Mesonychoteuthisis less studied, making population estimates for that animal guesswork at best).

Like O’Shea, Roper attributes the megasquids’ higher media profile to the fact that “we humans are now going to places where it exists.” Typically, Architeuthis can be found in the neighborhood of 400 to 900 meters, from the mesopelagic to the upper bathypelagic zones, he says; Mesonychoteuthis lives further down the water column, “probably 800 to a thousand meters.” According to Roper, “a lot of the deep-sea fishing nets, now, are going down to a thousand to 1200 meters.”

Not only are we reaching deeper into the ocean, he says, but we’re extending our geographic reach as well. Fisheries now extend “way down in the southern ocean, down around Antarctica. Until recently, there was no fishery down there, but with the traditional fish populations pretty well decimated, fishermen have to go farther afield, [and] they have to go deeper and deeper.” This, he explains, is why big squid are turning up in what is known as “by-catch”—the accidental capture of species other than the ones you’re fishing for (the vast majority of which are dumped overboard, dead).²¹

For Roper, the recent uptick in big-squid sightings and captures is part of a larger, more ominous story. As our exploitation of the world’s oceans extends into their nethermost depths, could there be potentially catastrophic consequences? Could monster squid be the canaries in the coal mine?

Roper decries the bottom-trawling techniques that indiscriminately scoop up deep-sea creatures with “life cycles of 30, 50, 100 years,” seriously compromising a population’s ability to sustain itself. He offers the parable of the orange roughy, which grows slowly, matures late, and can live to the age of 130:²² “orange roughy spawn in coral forests on the edge of seamounts, where soft and hard corals grow to 35 feet. And along come the trawls and they essentially clear-cut everything. They’ve got gigantic rollers, and they just wipe out the forests.”

O’Shea, whose laconic New Zealand style tends toward the blunt, puts the case even more pointedly. Bottom trawling amounts to “raping the seabed,” he says. “If you’re working on seamounts or deep-sea reefs, your weights are large steel balls, which smash over the seabed to keep the lower part of the net above the rock itself. You can have stands of coral in New Zealand that can be 20 meters high from the seabed. The base of the coral can easily be two thousand years old, although the live part of the coral, the terminal branches, will be recent, perhaps from the last couple of decades. This is a huge amount of structure, providing habitat for myriad encrusting animals and smaller fish species. You can trawl through that, destroying two thousand years of growth at once—complete annihilation of everything that’s on the seabed, [including] coral communities that are millennia old, all for the purpose of taking out a couple of fish.”

Doubling back to the subject of squid, O’Shea observes that trawl nets are decimating 78 out of 86 species of New Zealand squid—all of those species whose fragile, free-floating egg masses are easily destroyed by trawl nets. He worries that trawling “will contribute to the complete collapse and loss of these species.”

Why should we care about a few less calamari, give or take a couple zillion? Two words, says O’Shea: “Trophic cascades,” the downside of that Circle-of-Life thing that gives us a feeling of interconnectedness with nature. “What are the cascading effects of this through the food chain?” says O’Shea. Nobody knows. We do know, however, that scientists are finding more and more whales—“sperm whales, pygmy sperm whales, pilot whales, all toothed whales”—suffering from “extreme ulceration of their stomachs.” Why? Because they’re not getting enough squid in their diets. Turns out squid are not only food to toothed whales but a source of water as well, since they don’t drink salt water. Thus, “they’re both hungry and thirsty,” says O’Shea; the ulcers, he speculates, may be caused by powerful digestive acids gnawing holes in their stomach linings.

But there’s a glimmer of hope. O’Shea “takes his hat off” to the New Zealand fishing industry, which “has volunteered 30 percent of the New Zealand EEZ [Exclusive Economic Zone, the territorial sea zone within 200 miles of the country’s coastline] as no-bottom-trawling zones.”²³ Roper is heartened by the prohibition on trawling “in a huge section of the Southern Pacific” following the Republic of Kiribati’s designation, in 2006, of a vast expanse of atolls, reefs, and deep-ocean habitat as a marine reserve,²⁴ and George W. Bush’s transformation, that same year, of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands into a national monument—a stroke of the pen that created the world’s largest marine sanctuary, a protected area bigger than California.²⁵ In 2009, President Bush added a huge swath of the American-controlled Pacific Ocean to that endowment.²⁶

As always, however, there’s a buzzkill: cheered as they are over such protected zones, marine scientists can’t help pointing out they make up the merest fraction of the world’s oceans.²⁷

At a moment when the commercial looting of the deep, with a little help from pollution and global warming, is banishing the notion that the seas are too immeasurably vast to be damaged by mere man, Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis are as portentous as they were in pre-modern times. The kraken that once reminded us of Hamlet’s words to Horatio, about the limits of human knowledge, still has stories to tell us, premonitory visions of the silent seas that wait for us if we don’t scrap the obsolete beliefs of the industrial age: the vision of nature as an inexhaustible resource, fuel for the engines of capitalism; the frantic cycle of hyperproduction and overconsumption that has piled high our landfills and spawned a self-assembling monument to our civilization: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating mass of mostly plastic debris that’s twice the size of Texas and weighs an estimated 3.5 million tons.^{28 29} According to a 2006 report by Greenpeace, marine species are mistaking refuse such as plastic bags and Styrofoam fragments for jellyfish and other prey. Inevitably, many of these animals, such as birds and sea turtles, die because they can’t pass plastic; they starve to death, their stomachs filled with trash.³⁰

O’Shea has found plastic in the stomachs of giant squid. “The oceans are very sick,” he says. “The predictions that I have, in terms of published reviews, maintain that we will see the collapse of all commercial fisheries by 2025. Any fish that you’re getting on your plate when you go down to the supermarket will be gone by 2025,” commercially extinct though not absolutely extinct. “It’s going to be another 25, 30 years after 2025 before levels might have climbed up again to justify some sort of commercial fisheries. But during the intervening years, we’ll have had to go for an alternative food source and I don’t think that people are going to be so interested in completely annihilating the oceans all over again.”

“If we continue to go the way that we’re going as a global society, virtually all life forms are threatened, in one way or another,” says Roper. “It’s not gonna happen tomorrow, and if we wise up and respond quickly enough, it doesn’t have to happen. But we really, really do need to become better stewards of the oceans.”

In Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken,” the monster rises from the abyss at the end of the age, when “fire shall heat the deep.” Perhaps real-life sea monsters like Architeuthis and its colossal kin are surfacing in the public imagination to warn us that, in an increasingly virtual reality where the wild is something we click away from when we’re bored, we’re more entangled in nature’s incalculably complex systems than we know. Only a few degrees of separation, ecologically speaking, lie between us and nature’s darkest places, its most alien things.

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Mark Dery is a cultural critic who never shrinks from the opportunity to write about Teuthida.

His books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. He edited the trailblazing anthology of digital-culture criticism, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and popularized the culture jamming phenomenon through his widely reprinted monograph, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. His latest book is the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams.

He is at work on a biography of the author, illustrator, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey (Little, Brown: 2014).

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