Hunting the Real Kraken, the Giant Squid

For two thousand years, sailors swore a monster lived in the deep. A vast, many-armed thing that could wrap a ship in its arms and drag it under. Science called it a myth, a sailor's superstition. They were wrong. The kraken was real, and it has a name: the giant squid. This is the story of how the most legendary monster in the ocean turned out to be a real animal, and how it took humanity almost its entire history to finally point a camera at it and watch it look back. It begins with the evidence the sea kept leaving behind: parrot-like beaks by the thousands in the stomachs of sperm whales, ring-shaped sucker scars raked across the whales' skin, and tangled carcasses washed up on the beach. In eighteen seventy three, off Newfoundland, a boy hacked a nineteen-foot tentacle off a creature that attacked his small boat, and a minister named Moses Harvey photographed the first intact specimen. Science finally had to give the monster a name. The giant squid is a hunter built on an impossible scale. Close to forty feet long, with eight arms, two long feeding tentacles lined with toothed suckers, a beak that can bite through wire, and one of the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, as wide as a dinner plate. That eye exists for one reason: to catch the faint glow of its only real predator, the sperm whale, descending out of the dark. The two largest hunters in the deep ocean have been at war beneath our ships for as long as there have been ships, and no human has ever seen it happen. For more than a century, the giant squid was an accepted fact of science that no one had ever seen alive. Every specimen was a corpse. It lived too deep, in permanent darkness, and our machines were too loud and too bright. It always saw us coming. Then, in two thousand four, the Japanese scientist Tsunemi Kubodera lowered a baited camera nearly three thousand feet down off Japan and captured the first photographs of a living giant squid. In two thousand twelve, the American scientist Edith Widder went further: a quiet, red-lit camera called the Medusa and a glowing lure called the electronic jellyfish drew a giant squid into view for the first-ever video of one alive in the deep. In two thousand nineteen, the same trick worked again in the Gulf of Mexico, the first time the animal was ever filmed in United States waters. And still we know almost nothing. We have filmed a living giant squid only a handful of times. We have never watched one mate, lay its eggs, or hunt. Its colossal cousin, hauled up in the Antarctic and dissected on a live broadcast, carries an eye wider than a human head, the largest of any animal on Earth. We have mapped the surface of Mars in finer detail than the deep ocean where these animals live. The kraken was never a myth. It was simply hiding somewhere we could not follow. Welcome to Blues Below, where we explore the ocean's deepest mysteries one story at a time. Subscribe for more deep ocean documentaries on the creatures, wrecks, science, and expeditions that hide in the dark parts of the sea. Chapters: 0:00 The Monster in the Dark 1:01 The Kraken 2:28 The Evidence 4:04 What It Is 5:49 The Battle 7:28 The Ghost 8:53 The First Photograph 10:21 Finally on Film 12:14 Still in the Dark Sources and reference: NOAA Ocean Exploration (2019 Gulf of Mexico giant squid footage and deep-sea Okeanos Explorer imagery); Edith Widder and Nathan Robinson; Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2005); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (colossal squid examination); Smithsonian Ocean; and public-domain historical art including Pierre Denys de Montfort (1801), Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the 1874 Moses Harvey photograph, and Olaus Magnus. #GiantSquid #Kraken #DeepSea #Architeuthis #ColossalSquid #OceanExploration #BluesBelow #SpermWhale #Bioluminescence #DeepOcean #SeaMonster #OceanDocumentary #MarineBiology #ScienceDocumentary #OceanMystery