"This squid was not damaged and looked lively . . ."

December 28, 2015 10:51 AM

Architeuthis Dux: Giant Squid observed in Toyama Bay, Japan. [SLYT] The story from CNN. This one was 12 feet long; they can grow to 60 feet.

"[The squid] was captured on video by a submersible camera, and even joined by a diver, Akinobu Kimura . . . who swam in close proximity to the red-and-white real-life sea monster." "My curiosity was way bigger than fear, so I jumped into the water and go close to it," he told CNN.

[Kimura adds:] "This squid was not damaged and looked lively, spurting ink and trying to entangle his tentacles around me. I guided the squid toward to the ocean, several hundred meters from the area it was found in, and it disappeared into the deep sea."

posted by spitbull (67 comments total)

That video is absolutely incredible, thanks!
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:56 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

These things are amazing.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:02 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

"My curiosity was way bigger than fear..."

And your balls are even bigger. Well done.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:03 AM on December 28, 2015 [5 favorites]

I had to resist deploying the "TentaclePorn" tag.
posted by spitbull at 11:03 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

"...and trying to entangle his tentacles around me."

Holy crap.
posted by sutt at 11:04 AM on December 28, 2015 [5 favorites]

How can someone effectively swim with the added buoyancy from balls of that size? That is the coolest thing ever, but dude. Literal horror from the deep.
posted by cmoj at 11:04 AM on December 28, 2015 [5 favorites]

Or littoral, as the case may be.
posted by spitbull at 11:05 AM on December 28, 2015 [24 favorites]

lets keep this thread clean folks this is a normal animal doing regular animal things and not at all a messenger trying to warn us.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:08 AM on December 28, 2015 [19 favorites]

What a large and beautiful squid! Thank you for posting this!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:17 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Beautiful
posted by smidgen at 11:20 AM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

Giant Squid (Architeuthis) footage, gleaned from Discovery Channel's "Monster Squid" broadcast on January 27, 2013.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:21 AM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's kind of beautiful.
posted by edheil at 11:31 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's so hard so get a sense of scale from the video (or from the other Discovery Channel video). I wish someone would just take some selfies with the giant squids to I could get a feel for how big these are.
posted by sleeping bear at 11:34 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

spurting ink and trying to entangle his tentacles around me

nope nope nope nope nope
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:36 AM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]

How can someone effectively swim with the added buoyancy from balls of that size?

Y chromosomes impart courage! Women are cowards!
posted by shakespeherian at 11:39 AM on December 28, 2015 [15 favorites]

Hah, the pull quote sounds like the flipside of what Slothrop sez about Grigori in Gravity's Rainbow: "this octopus is not in good mental health"

Which is a good thing!
posted by chavenet at 11:42 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

i would like it if giant ocean things remained in the ocean and hid all the time and never ever rose up to ententacle us ever

thank
posted by poffin boffin at 11:43 AM on December 28, 2015 [7 favorites]

We're going to need a bigger couch . . .
posted by spitbull at 11:43 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Y chromosomes impart courage! Women are cowards!

Women can have testicles, whether literal or figurative.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:49 AM on December 28, 2015 [5 favorites]

Mod note: I'm sure everybody's balls are very nice, but maybe let's talk about the squid instead.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:51 AM on December 28, 2015 [41 favorites]

Female Squid Put on Fake Testes to Avoid Male Advances
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:55 AM on December 28, 2015 [16 favorites]

We're going to need a bigger ball of rice.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:56 AM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

Goddamn it, can't someone just go out for some sushi without ending up on CNN? And I categorically deny trying to ententacle anyone. Hmph.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 11:56 AM on December 28, 2015 [43 favorites]

In fact, fried squid balls are a thing in the Philippines.
posted by spitbull at 11:58 AM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Giant squid don’t actually hurt people do they? I’m not understanding something...
posted by bongo_x at 12:13 PM on December 28, 2015

What a gorgeous creature. Yet another reason to get SCUBA certified.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:17 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

What a gorgeous terrifying creature. Yet another reason not to get SCUBA certified.

Yeah, totally.
posted by Aizkolari at 12:22 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bongo, some species of squid can be quite aggressive (Humboldt squid, for instance, which are pretty big without actually being Giant Squid(tm)). We hardly ever get to observe this species in the wild, so I'm not sure if we know what their aggression level is.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:25 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

some species of squid can be quite aggressive

Really? Wow, to my eyes squid, giant or not, are the opposite of scary. Like a scary mushroom.
posted by bongo_x at 12:28 PM on December 28, 2015

that sounds like something a secret squid infiltrator would say tbh
posted by poffin boffin at 12:29 PM on December 28, 2015 [11 favorites]

Like a scary mushroom.

You should play The Last of Us some time.
posted by cortex at 12:30 PM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think part of what's so neat about Giant Squid is their aforementioned elusiveness. We've known that they exist, or must exist, for as long as we've been killing and studying sperm whales, but to only capture them on video as late as 2012? That's nuts.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:36 PM on December 28, 2015 [6 favorites]

Having read this during my formative years, I probably would have run screaming in the other direction. Claws inside suckers, no thanks.
posted by Existential Dread at 12:50 PM on December 28, 2015

Woomy!
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:00 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

The video is indeed beautiful.

Giant squid don’t actually hurt people do they? I’m not understanding something...

I've seen paintings and read stories of them attacking whaling ships, but I have always thought those were legends rather than fact.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:05 PM on December 28, 2015

I wonder if being bright orange does them any good at the inky depths they normally inhabit, or if that's just a fluke, like color doesn't matter, so why not orange? Natural selection is weird.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:11 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

a pretty great pre-video title. lots of history, mythology, early sightings...
posted by j_curiouser at 1:18 PM on December 28, 2015

A) Amazing.

B) As a non-cephalopod-eater, I'd gladly help round up my squid-eating fellow humans if that becomes necessary at some point in the future.

C) Whenever I'm swimming in deep water, say where I can't see the bottom, I have a stark, very real fear of a tentacle reaching down from the depths and pulling me down. After seeing this, I might never go into the ocean again.
posted by signal at 1:22 PM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

Red light does not reach ocean depths, so deep-sea animals that are red actually appear black and thus are less visible to predators and prey.
posted by Solomon at 1:23 PM on December 28, 2015 [10 favorites]

With regards to squid attacking humans, they do but only when provoked and in self defence. I recall seeing a documentary once of some squid fishermen (squidermen?) who had scars from the suckers on their arms. These guys were obviously trying to remove the squid from the water, with lures, which would understandably piss them off.
posted by Solomon at 1:27 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

> Really? Wow, to my eyes squid, giant or not, are the opposite of scary. Like a scary mushroom.

Rare Sperm Whale Encounter Shows Giant Squid Battle Scars

Photo
posted by rtha at 1:28 PM on December 28, 2015 [4 favorites]

This one was only 12.1 feet long, but the species can grow to 43 feet.


NOPE
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:28 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

let it be known that:

1. I am in favor of all squid, but especially giant ones.
2. I stopped eating cephalopods a while back, because they're smart.
3. Somewhere in the depths of my dropbox account there is still a file containing my abortive attempt to write an alt-history novella wherein the Cold War, rather than being between the U.S. and the USSR, is instead between the U.S. and an extraordinarily large omnitentacled sea monster that had figured out how to build nuclear weapons.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:39 PM on December 28, 2015 [8 favorites]

Watching this was so much more rewarding than working!

Somewhere in the depths of my dropbox account there is still a file containing my abortive attempt to write an alt-history novella wherein the Cold War, rather than being between the U.S. and the USSR, is instead between the U.S. and an extraordinarily large omnitentacled sea monster that had figured out how to build nuclear weapons.

I would read this.
posted by brain.eat.brain at 1:46 PM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

Red light does not reach ocean depths, so deep-sea animals that are red actually appear black and thus are less visible to predators and prey.

Cool. I had assumed that no light whatsoever would penetrate the depth where giant squid are known to live, but I guess any light at all, no matter how faint, you want to not be reflecting down there where god knows what's looking to eat you.
posted by Devils Rancher at 1:46 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, man, what a cool video. Amazing to see one of these creatures casually swimming around in such a clear video.

Because Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris books are almost deliberately calculated to burrow into your brain and never leave, I can never see squid anymore without thinking of the King Squid, a possibly-alien, possibly-fungal-hybrid creature that the eponymous city's residents hunt in an annual event of great significance. Significant to both the city's hunting fleets and to the squid themselves, who seem to gather to hunt the hunting fleet as much as vice versa.

I mention this mostly to say that I'm not sure the King Squid is any weirder than the actual, non-fictional giant squid we have in our world. The fact that our squid are so much more aloof, I think, actually makes them substantially more weird and mysterious. We know enough about cephalopod intelligence to know that not it's completely ridiculous to wonder just what that squid in the video is thinking, but we don't know nearly enough to guess at the answer.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:49 PM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

Just tried to watch the video again, but it appears to have been removed. Bummer.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:52 PM on December 28, 2015

I stopped eating cephalopods a while back, because they're smart.

Same. I'd no more eat octopus than I'd eat dolphin.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:05 PM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

The video is available in the CNN article linked above too. Sorry about that!

Here is another YouTube link too.
posted by spitbull at 2:15 PM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

I once got inked by a small (baby? idk) furious octopus (body about the size of a honeydew, maybe?) when I dropped a big rock onto what I guess was its house and it was very unpleasant from a stinky ink point of view but also because their eyes are capable of conveying a great depth of emotion and I am 100% sure it wanted not only my death but the death of all my kind.

also the legs were very wiggly and threatening and on that day i learned that you can in fact scream underwater
posted by poffin boffin at 2:21 PM on December 28, 2015 [12 favorites]

Yes, Humboldt squids can be dangerous: Diver Mauled in Squid Attack
posted by ShooBoo at 2:24 PM on December 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

Same. I'd no more eat octopus than I'd eat dolphin.

For whatever illogical reason I'm ok eating those tiny calimari-sized squids, but I've quit octopus entirely after reading one too many articles about how smart they are.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:28 PM on December 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

i would think if anything we should eat MORE of them in self defense

however i would probably eat a human child so ymmv
posted by poffin boffin at 2:31 PM on December 28, 2015 [7 favorites]

The video has been removed by the user :(
posted by lollusc at 2:49 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

As mentioned above you can find it in the cnn link in the post. Yay squid!
posted by futz at 3:25 PM on December 28, 2015

I love (eating) squid and octopus but stopped because of the stories about their intelligence and then I found out that the lifespan of even the largest is only about 3 years...so I'm sort of ok with it again. Not sure what that says about me.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:35 PM on December 28, 2015

I, for one,welcome our new cephalopod overlords!


Slinks back to 2003
posted by briank at 3:46 PM on December 28, 2015

These things are truly monstrous. Unholy demons sent from the abyss by Satan himself. Did you look into its dead eyes? The bone crushing beaks capable of amputating a limb, 10 tentacles of death wrapped around dragging you down, the blinding cloud of oily ink disabling your ability to flee. They must be destroyed, every last one of them.

I'd no sooner eat one than I'd eat a Hitler.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 4:12 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

So you wouldn't go back in time and eat Baby Hitler? You are not a heroic person.
posted by gingerest at 4:55 PM on December 28, 2015 [6 favorites]

Amazing video! I never thought we'd get such a great look at them.

Humboldt squid are terrifying.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:57 AM on December 29, 2015

When I was a little kid my older brother singlehandedly ruined swim lessons for me by telling me giant squids ate people -- I became so terrified of the very tentacle-y lane lines that just getting in the pool was an ordeal.

Still not much of a swimmer, but at some point I started to read more about Architeuthis in self-defense and they became one of my favorite animals. I always hoped we'd get documented live sightings someday but this and the 2012 video are above and beyond.

Fun fact: the even beefier colossal squid has hooks on its tentacles, some of them swivelling. Sweet dreams!
posted by bettafish at 3:04 AM on December 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Really? Wow, to my eyes squid, giant or not, are the opposite of scary. Like a scary mushroom.

Have you perhaps confused squids with something else, like celery or something? Squids have beaks. Beaks! And many don't just have suckers, but hooks. I mean...
posted by Sys Rq at 10:26 AM on December 29, 2015

Well, I have learned in this thread that some squids can cause some harm, so if I run into one I will be cautious. But even as a little kid I thought mythical giant squid were meant to be scary because they were big enough to cover a ship, not that there was something inherently scary about squid.
posted by bongo_x at 11:44 AM on December 29, 2015

Save a cow, eat a Hitler.
posted by AdamCSnider at 9:40 PM on December 29, 2015

Sleeping bear, a few of these have washed up on shore around here and wound up on display. When I studied biology as an undergrad, the beak of one was a lab specimen that we got to play with. It fit very nicely around my wrist.

Another full preserved one is on display at a museum here. The tank is around three feet deep, four feet wide and twenty five feet long.
posted by peppermind at 10:05 PM on December 29, 2015

Just checking in to add that the New York Times now has the story and the video, so this ought to be a stable link.
posted by spitbull at 6:25 AM on December 30, 2015

Good thing about modern times, is that we now get cameras recording important events all over.
posted by jeanfrancois248 at 8:45 AM on December 30, 2015 [1 favorite]