01x02 - Alien in the Abyss

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amateur naturalist and I would like to

describe to you an extraordinary event

with which I am privileged to have

become involved

two local fishermen Daniel Squires and

Theo Pico were at Sea in a nearby Cove

with them was Theo's 12 year old son Tom

who spotted what he thought was a piece

of floating wreckage

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put fear in the heart of any seafaring

man

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the Monstrous creature that's what it

was struck the little vessel hard with

its beak and threw a tentacle around the

bow but with guile and courage Beyond

his years young Tom reached for an a*

the men escaped the clutches of this

malevolent sea monster and the severed

tentacle was brought to me

it was 19 feet long

I was in awe

I was now the possessor of one of the

rarest Curiosities in the whole Animal

Kingdom the veritable tentacle of the

hitherto mythical devil fish about whose

existence naturalists have been

disputing for centuries I knew that I

held in my head

the key to the great mystery and that a

new chapter would now be added to

Natural History

thank you

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there is a place

so cold and so dark

an Inky Abyss pricked by constellations

of alien light

a world more difficult to explore than

space itself

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this world is the Inner Space of our own

deep oceans

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and it's home to the last great mystery

of the sea a secret Submariner an enigma

an animal almost never seen alive and

it's my quest to try and pull the little

we do know about it together it's the

largest invertebrate predator on Earth

it's called architthus the giant squid

the giant squid is probably the last

great mystery in the sea it's like a new

dinosaur

but in fact we know more about dinosaurs

than we do about giant squid I can't

catch one it's real simple we can stand

on the shore and two kilometers away

in deep water these animals are living

their existence every day and it may as

well be aliens on the moon

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squid are common

there are more than 650 species they're

quick colorful undoubtedly beautiful and

they're all predators highly successful

animals which have stalked our seas for

500 million years

now we actually know quite a lot about

most of them but next to nothing about

the big one the one that got away

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125 years after that severed tentacle

was brought to Moses Harvey we are still

ignorant of all but the basics of giant

squid biology

we don't know how long they live how big

they get how fast they swim or how they

meet and mate

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the giant squid remains tantalizingly

Out Of Reach

still anchored in the centuries-old

Legends of ancient Mariners

the early North Sailors named this

creature with root-like arms Kraken

I now come to the sea monster called

Kraken

this creature is the largest and most

surprising of all the Animal Creations

if the fishermen find that the crazy

creature has a strong and peculiar sense

which it can emit at certain times and

by moons of which

to come he then opens his arms and

seizes and swallows his welcome guests

by the end of the 16th century images

and illustrations of sea monsters were

commonplace and they appeared in all the

good natural history books of the age

this one iconis alimalium was printed in

1560 and it contains plenty of species

that we're familiar with this is

stylized but undoubtedly a hammer-headed

shark just over the page here is a

lovely drawing of a dolphin

and then just a bit further back is this

charming illustration of a seahorse but

alongside all of these known animals is

a Fantastical fauna look at this it's a

seven-headed snake monster complete with

scales clawed feet and a curled tail and

then just a bit further back sea

serpents a giant dragon wrestling with a

crustacean and this bizarre frilled fish

and just a couple of pages back a whole

host of ship sinking leviathans and

judging by their spouting here I've no

doubt that these creatures were later

recognized as the world's great whales

but you know when this book was printed

there was no reason for people to

believe that these creatures couldn't

exist and in fact this whole volume

tells us something about the way that a

species moves through our own perception

initially as a mythical or legendary

animal and then through classification

as a known Zoological species

and if we take these great whales here

as a case in part they can actually tell

us quite a bit about why the biology of

the giant squid remains such a mystery

foreign

it's easy to imagine how those Intrepid

early seafarers would have been

terrified by the sight of animals so

much bigger than their ships

these humpbacks are actually one of the

smaller whales but when they breach amid

great veils of spray they're well

awe-inspiring seemingly the stuff of

Legend

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s spectacular popular animals didn't

remain as scary sea monsters for very

long for the very simple reason that

they're mammals like us so they have to

emerge from this relatively inaccessible

environment the sea to the surface in

order to breathe air so we got to see

them and we got to know them and it was

probably then that we learned to exploit

them for the first time for their oil

for their blood and for their bones and

this led to the development of a

ferocious industry which by the end of

the 1960s had brought some of these

whale species to the brink of Extinction

foreign

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but now they're back

three decades of active conservation has

reversed the fortunes of our whales for

some they've been endowed with an almost

spiritual status for others they were

living barometer of our planet's Health

across the seas expectant eye scour the

horizons for those Telltale puffs of

spray a close encounters like this are

quite Unforgettable

the whale has completed a journey from

blood curdling Beast to Cherished icon

but one of the mysterious Kraken since

Moses Harvey first described the

tentacle back in the 1870s there have

been over a hundred reports of dead or

more bun giant squid but these have been

only fragments or badly decomposed

specimens and the giant squid has never

revealed itself in the same way as the

whales for the simple reason that we

haven't been able to observe it living

in its own deep ocean environment

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but that doesn't mean that it's never

been seen alive

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the most striking encounter yet

documented was made earlier this Century

by J.D Starkey from a trawler in the

Indian Ocean

as I gazed fascinated

circle of green light glowed before me

this green and blinking orbite soon

realized was an eye

suddenly I knew that I was gazing

at almost point-blank range at a

colossal squid

I'm not squeamish

but this cold malevolent

unblinking eyes seem to be looking

directly at me

I've never seen anything so

coldly hypnotic and intelligent before

or since

I moved towards the bow

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there in a pool of light words tentacles

they were two foot thick the suckers

were clearly visible

my heart was going like a sledgehammer

alone on Deck I was not so much afraid

as excited as if this was an opportunity

to see something rarely seen by man

I walked aft

gradually the truth dawned I had walked

the length of the trawler more than 60

feet

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the giant Lake gazing up at me then

after 15 minutes it seemed to swell

as its valve opened and without any

visible effort

zoomed Into the Night

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now it strikes me that this very real

animal is still bound up in myth and

romance but to stand any chance of

getting closer to it we need some good

hard science in Baja Mexico I met Dr

Clyde Roper to glean a few facts about

this most elusive creature

I asked him how squid work what we can

learn from squid Anatomy about squid

lifestyle

these are decidicus Humboldt squid

caught for the pot by local fishermen

well these animals moved by jet

propulsion they're The Originators of

jet propulsion when the animal uses its

funnel

um the water is squirted right out

through in a big jet fashion

comes right out through the the tube the

mantle contracts and sh**t water out in

this direction for example and in that

case the animal Jets backwards then it

is very maneuverable and can bend its

funnel back along its belly and when it

squirts water out in this way the animal

will jet forward for example when it

wants to capture its prey now to many

people looking at this animal here it's

going to look no more than a pile of

jelly but those arms and those tentacles

are in its native environment quite

dexterous aren't they all squids have

have tentacles and at the ends of these

long muscular almost like bungee cords

uh a whole collection a cluster of

suckers

the the feeding tentacles as we call

them are used for capturing the prey and

they sh**t out together they usually are

even held together lock together they

sh**t out capture the prey pull the prey

into the am Crown then the arms take

over and move the prey or the food

towards the mouth and uh squids and and

octopuses have a wonderful mechanism of

their mouth in fact is a beak almost

like a like a bird's beak this entire

ball is a mass of muscle and uh if I

move them back and forth here

in that kind of emotion that will give

you a bit of an idea of how they work

these animals will bite chunks of prey

they do not swallow the prey at all they

bite chunks out and then swallow it

ramming the chunks of food down their

throat with a tongue with a lot of teeth

on it

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Clyde is here in the sea of Cortez with

fellow squid expert Dr Rono door

as we can't expect to observe giant

squid in the wild our theories about

their behavior have to be compiled by

studying much smaller ones

so this evening though after decidicus

but first we've got to catch one

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I'm not optimistic this year's El Nino

weather has played Havoc with their

Fishery

but eventually in the early hours we

strike it lucky

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What's Happening Now Ron

the square the center of magnesium

and he'll fall asleep

lawn specialism is Locomotion how

powerfully and how quickly squid can

move he's devised an ingenious radio

tagging system which enables him to

retrieve data from animals swimming

underwater

through trying to get the anesthesia

flushed out of him I don't know maybe

what we need is a lot of water Maybe

is like artificial respiration

so that the animal will recover

okay good

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we all handle a squid and uh all right

he's ready he's ready to go in all right

good

so Ron what is this visual data actually

transform into in terms of that Squid's

movement at the moment well one of the

interesting things about jet propulsion

is when you simply respire breathe you

are actually pushing yourself forward so

squid squeeze and move at the same time

so the two systems are tied together if

that's respiration then what about

locomotion

the animals have one primary means of

locomotion which is a big Escape jet

there you saw that he's just he's just

gotten excited and put out a big jet

there how fast would it have been moving

when it was using jet propulsion though

for the animal this size two or three

meters a second now that's for for this

particular species what about an

educated guess as to how fast a giant

squid might be able to move using the

same method but these are a very

powerful squid and I would guess that

although the giant squid are much bigger

they they have less muscle in their in

their mantle and they probably

don't travel any faster than that in

fact they might even be slower slower

than sleeping yeah but that's just a

guess

we did a calculation once that if they

were as muscular as other smaller squid

they could do Around the World in 80

Days

so I'd seen squid in the wild and they

were amazing animals fast and highly

maneuverable but these decidicus are

hunting at night and giant squid live in

the darkness of the deep ocean so the

next question has to be how do they find

their prey

in California I met Dr Eric hochberg to

talk eyes the Museum's life-size model

confirms that the eye of the giant squid

is the size of a dinner plate which to

me suggests that it's all the better to

see with

the giant squared have the largest eyes

in the animal kingdom

the larger the eyes the more light they

can bring in and capture in their

surrounding environment

their eye is very similar to a human eye

in that they have a lens to the eye

which allows them to see things at

distance to resolve images or shadows in

the waters surrounding them in this

mid-depth range why don't we encounter

more giant squids probably because of

the Acuity in their Vision they are

monitoring everything that's going on

around them and so they're able to avoid

a net they can sense it or see it and

swim away before the net would actually

capture them

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but in fact they don't always get away

this is Marine biology's most

tantalizing tentacle torn from a living

giant squid at 600 meters snatched from

its domain and brought into ours

the man who caught it is Dr Bruce

Roberson of Monterey Bay aquarium's

Research Institute

we had a deep mid-water trial working at

600 meters depth

what happened was as the mouth of the

net closed it

chopped off the feeding tentacle of an

archet toothus and brought it back to

the surface

that turns out to have been the first

depth record that we'd ever been able to

come up with

Albert's Claire and open the D Samplers

all right belly packs engaged and

bypasses engaged

this is in charge of a dynamic program

of research using rov's remote operated

vehicles to study the ecosystem of the

deep ocean these robots are at The

Cutting Edge of technology and using

them we can explore the abyssal Lair of

the giant squid

and if we can see where it lives then

maybe I can better understand how it

lives

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through some human terms this deep sea

environment is just about as alien as we

can get isn't it what's it really like

down here well for you and me

creatures that live up up in the

sunshine it's a pretty inhospitable

place the temperature drops off rapidly

the light is extinguished very rapidly

the pressure increases as you go deeper

the oxygen content diminishes as you go

deeper all in all it's very

uncomfortable and difficult place for

Sunshine loving animals to to live

so what sort of animals we've got living

down here

there's a whole range of different types

fishes and Squids and Crustaceans and

the like but I think the biggest

surprise has been how many jellies there

are at this Dent different kinds of

jellies most of them predators