The giant squid gets all the press. It’s got the Jules Verne backstory, the fights-with-whales reputation, and a plush version in every aquarium gift shop. But if you ask the people who spend their careers flying robots around the deep ocean which squid they’d actually love to bump into, a lot of them would pick something much rarer: the bigfin squid, an animal that’s been seen or collected about 70 times in all of recorded history.<\/p>\n
A crew from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) just joined that short list. While surveying the seafloor near Davidson Seamount, an underwater mountain 80 miles southwest of Monterey, California, the institute’s robot submersible Doc Ricketts<\/em> filmed one hovering at 10,751 feet, roughly two miles down. According to MBARI’s announcement<\/a>, it’s the first time anyone has confirmed a bigfin squid alive in the Northeastern Pacific.<\/p>\n And since no one gets to net a specimen at that depth, the team did the next best thing. It put lasers on the animal and came back with a number: 4.1 feet from the top of the body down to the arm tips.<\/p>\n First, a quick word on the robot. Doc Ricketts<\/em> is an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle, which basically means it’s a submersible on the end of a very long cable. Pilots sit in a dark control room on the ship above and fly it while the science team watches the same video feeds over their shoulders. ROVs have been earning their keep lately; a 5,500-pound one recently spent 64 hours sweeping the slopes off Wake Island<\/a> with sonar, hunting a sunken World War II destroyer.<\/p>\n So why lasers at all?<\/p>\n Because video by itself lies about size. The camera’s zoom angle is known, but the distance to whatever sits in the frame isn’t, and without that, a 4-foot squid 10 feet away and an 8-foot squid 20 feet away look pretty much the same. MBARI’s answer is a system it calls Laser Measure<\/a>. Three lasers ride on the body of the ROV’s main camera, aimed in a twisting pattern, and before a survey the robot’s own arm holds a checkerboard target in front of the lens so the whole setup can be calibrated, a job that takes about 15 minutes. Once that’s done, software can work out how far away the subject is and how it’s tilted, then measure just about any object in the frame.<\/p>\n There’s a detail the rest of the coverage skipped, though, as far as I can tell. MBARI’s page for the system says that when it gets tested against artificial animals of known size, measurement errors run 10 to 15 percent. So the squid’s true length sits somewhere around that 4.1-foot figure rather than exactly on it, and MBARI, to its credit, calls the number an estimate. Frankly, for a soft-bodied animal you can’t touch, drifting in open water two miles down, that’s a pretty respectable piece of measuring.<\/p>\n The hardware doing it isn’t small, either. MBARI’s spec sheet<\/a> puts Doc Ricketts<\/em> at 12 feet long and 10,500 pounds, with a 75-shaft-horsepower electro-hydraulic system, rated for dives of about 13,000 feet (4,000 meters, or roughly two and a half miles). It also carries two seven-function manipulator arms, a Schilling T4 with a camera built into its wrist and a Kraft Predator with force feedback, meaning the pilot can feel resistance when the arm grabs something.<\/p>\n Now the animal, because it’s arguably the strangest squid in the ocean. Two enormous fins ripple along a small teardrop body, and eight arms and two tentacles trail below it like spaghetti, each ending in a sticky white filament covered in tiny suckers. Those filaments can stretch to 20 times the animal’s body length, and the whole animal can reach 21 feet. The giveaway feature is the joint: the arms bend at roughly 90 degrees, like elbows.<\/p>\n Those elbows are exactly what MBARI Postdoctoral Fellow Ol\u00edvia Soares Pereira spotted on the control room screens, and by her account in the institute’s release, she screamed the animal’s scientific name, Magnapinna<\/em>, before the rest of it had even entered the frame. “Every dive into the deep brings an opportunity to see something new,” she said.<\/p>\n You’d think an animal that size would be reasonably well understood by now. It isn’t. MBARI’s profile of the species<\/a> lists its diet, in full, as “unknown.” The first specimens came up in 1883, scientists didn’t formally describe the squid until 1998, and no one’s ever collected an intact adult, only damaged juveniles. One was filmed at 20,380 feet down in the Philippine Trench, which makes Magnapinna<\/em> the deepest-dwelling squid on record.<\/p>\n This was also just MBARI’s second encounter in four decades of deep-sea work. The first came in 2001 off Hawaii, when the institute’s geologists ran into one while studying underwater volcanoes, so the lab went 25 years between sightings. Pereira, oddly enough, is having the opposite kind of year: she was on an Atlantic expedition this summer that turned up several of them.<\/p>\n My favorite part of this story is that the crew was out there to look at holes. The 10-day Seamount Hotspots expedition, which ran August 3 to 12 aboard MBARI’s flagship research vessel David Packard<\/em>, was chasing a different mystery: strange furrows in the muddy seafloor around Davidson Seamount that researchers suspect are dug by beaked whales feeding near the bottom. The team dropped hydrophone moorings at four sites to record whale clicks for a full year, set out baited time-lapse cameras, and sampled the water for whale DNA.<\/p>\n That DNA trick works because animals constantly shed cells into the water around them. Filter enough seawater and you can tell what’s been swimming through without ever laying eyes on it.<\/p>\n The squid just drifted through the shot. Pereira told ScienceAlert that spotting a rare animal at a site where whales may be feeding hints the squid could be using the spot for the same reason. MBARI keeps a busy stable of ocean robots for exactly this kind of work; just this week we covered two of its 242.5-pound autonomous drones tailing a drifting trap<\/a> off this same coast.<\/p>\n One thing MBARI’s release doesn’t give is the date of the dive itself; the institute only calls it a recent expedition. ScienceAlert puts the encounter on August 7, right in the middle of that cruise.<\/p>\n MBARI published the footage and its account of the sighting on September 2, three weeks after the David Packard<\/em> finished its 10 days at sea on August 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The giant squid gets all the press. It’s got the Jules Verne backstory, the fights-with-whales reputation, and a plush version … <\/p>\nSo how do you measure a squid you can’t touch?<\/h2>\n
No one knows what this thing eats<\/h2>\n
They weren’t even looking for squid<\/h2>\n