We first heard about the giant squid video captured during an expedition for the Discovery Channel’s show Curiosity last month and now there are finally more details along with footage of the squid to share. According to recent reports, the encounter happened during an expedition near Chichi Island off the coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean.
Tsunemi Kubodera, a Japanese Museum of Nature and Science Zoologist who led the endeavor, told the tale his team went through to capture the footage. By using a human-piloted sub, the team descended over 600 meters with cameras and a camera man to film the expedition. With a one-meter squid as bait, the crew was able to capture the angry squid encounter using near infra-red light that is invisible to both human and cephalopod eyes, but enough to illuminate the squid on film. When things were all said and done, they dove as far as 1 km below the surface and had to sift through more than 400 hours of film to get this short snippet.
“I’ve seen a lot of giant squid specimens in my time, but mainly those hauled out of the ocean. This was the first time for me to see with my own eyes a giant squid swimming, it was stunning, I couldn’t have dreamt that it would be so beautiful. It was such a wonderful creature,” noted Kubodera. “A giant squid essentially lives a solitary existence, swimming about all alone in the deep sea. It doesn’t live in a group, so when I saw it, well, it looked to me like it was rather lonely.”
The squid is non-too-friendly, appearing like that grumpy old man living at the end of a lonely street when encountering the sub. [via Gizmodo]
