What Lies Beneath
Researchers Discover Huge, Unusual Squid at Deep Ocean Bottom
And it won't scare easily.
Scientists estimate the strange, unidentified squid, which seems to prefer the cold, dark waters more than a mile under the ocean's surface, has been spotted eight times in the past 13 years. But the sightings by manned and unmanned submersible vessels have always been unexpected and brief — too brief for observers to understand what they've seen.
The creature has never been captured — dead or alive — and scientists are stumped as to how to classify it.
Everywhere, But Rarely Seen
"We've never seen anything like it," said Michael Vecchione, an expert in squids and head of the National Marine Fisheries Service lab in Washington.
The fact that the strange animal has been sighted at similar depths in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans indicates the animal, though rarely seen, may be widely distributed — and not so rare.
"It makes you think where have we been and where have they been all this time," said Clyde Roper, an invertebrate biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington who has spent years in search of another highly elusive animal, the giant squid.
Vecchione, who authored a paper on compiled accounts of the animal in this week's issue of Science, says one possible relative of the strange squid could be the family known as Magnapinnidae or "bigfin" squids.
Bigfin squids (named after their large fins) were recently discovered at shallower depths of about 650 feet below the surface of the Eastern Pacific Ocean and have wormlike extensions growing from the tips of their arms and tentacles.
Since only juvenile bigfins have been recovered, Vecchione suspects these could be the young version of the new squid. He says the bigfin's nubby ends might be what develops into the long, spaghetti-like appendages seen in the unidentified adult squid.
It 'Hovered There and Didn't Budge'
The new creature does not look or behave like most squid. Instead of having eight arms and two longer tentacles, this animal's 10 stringy limbs are the same length. Rather than using jet propulsion, it relies on its enormous flapping fins to swim.
"He sort of looks like Dumbo when he's swimming," remarked David Clague, a geologist with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institution who observed the animal through a remote probe's camera in May.
Also puzzling is the animal's apparent indifference to brightly lit submersibles. Normally, no light reaches below 500 feet in the ocean. For those who have encountered the animal at these cold, gloomy depths, its behavior can be unsettling.
"The submersible has a lot of bright lights and most animals flee when they see it," recalled Joan Bernhard, a microbiologist at the University of South Carolina who was inside the submersible Alvin as it probed more than a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico. "But this guy just hovered there and didn't budge."
Even when the Alvin capsule brushed some of the animal's limbs, it hardly reacted. Bernhard said: "It didn't move, but eventually it kind of said, 'OK, I'm out of here.' And flapped away slowly."
Only once among the eight sightings did the animal seem significantly startled. Clague was on board a research vessel about 20 miles off the coast of Hawaii when his team's robotic probe captured the strange animal on its video lens and became entangled with the squid's long, thin arms.
"We saw him panic as he was trying to swim away," said Clague of the squid. "He knew he was hooked on something. When he finally untangled himself he made good headway — back into the darkness."
Sticky, Stringy Limbs
After watching a video of the encounter, Vecchione concluded the squid's thin limbs could be sticky since they literally appeared "stuck" to the submersible as it tried to swim away. Sticky arms and tentacles, says Vecchione, could prove useful for capturing tiny crustaceans as they float by.
Also helpful could be the tiny suckers revealed by some of the undersea images on the animal's upper appendages.
But Vecchione emphasizes these are only "educated guesses" and he still has countless questions that can only be answered by more observations or by capturing the animal.
"I'd like to learn what it eats, what eats it, how it reproduces and how it finds a mate way down there in the open water," he said.
But future encounters might remain rare since there are relatively few opportunities for researchers to explore the deep offshore waters that this mysterious animal seems to inhabit.
Earth's 'Inner Space'
According to Roper's estimates, about 90 percent of all living space on Earth is in oceans, but less than 1 percent of the ocean deep has been explored. Part of the problem is only six submersibles exist in the world that can go more than a mile down.
Cost is also an issue. Expenses for using the deep sea submersible Alvin, for example, can run $25,000 a day, so when researchers do venture down deep, their time is limited and focused.
When William Sager, a geologist at Texas A & M University, came across the new squid while cruising in a submersible more a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, he was looking for organisms that feed off of methane — a sign that could lead to new oil drilling sites.
"It was dumb luck. Suddenly we were looking at this most remarkable, odd squid I'd ever seen," he said. But after five minutes of staring at the animal, Sager's team moved on. As he said, "There's a lot of pressure to get your mission done."
Roper points out that space exploration is much more costly than deep-sea exploration, and yet many more people have been to space than to Earth's own ocean deep.
"I'm not saying we shouldn't explore outer space," said Roper. "I'm just saying it's time we explored our 'inner space' more. Virtually every time we dive deep down we come back with very rare or new stuff."
-- Anonymous, December 20, 2001