The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long—or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.
Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters—but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. A paralarva is often the size of a cricket.
“Squid, you see, hatch thousands of babies,” O’Shea told me in early 2004, when I called him at his office at the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute, at the Auckland University of Technology. “Most of these will get eaten up by larger predators, but during periods of spawning the sea should be filled with an absolutely fantastic amount of these miniature organisms. And, unlike the adults, they shouldn’t be able to dart away as easily.”
Rival hunters once viewed his plan skeptically: if no one could find the animal when it was sixty feet long, how could anyone discover it when it was barely an eighth of an inch? Lately, though, many have come to see O’Shea’s strategy as a potential breakthrough. “It offers several advantages,” Clyde Roper, an American who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on squid, told me. Roper is a giant-squid hunter himself, who once descended underwater in a steel cage, in search of his quarry. “First, you could find the juvenile at shallower depths. That makes it a lot easier to catch. Furthermore, there are more of them around, because at that stage, even though mortality is high, the adult female will release up to four million eggs. That’s a hell of a lot of baby giant squid running around.” He added, “It’s a matter of a numbers game, pure and simple.”
In 1999, O’Shea studied what few had ever seen—the corpse of a baby
Armed with this rare expertise, O’Shea had spent the next five years mapping out where to find a baby giant squid and puzzling over how to catch one and grow it in a tank. Finally, he told me, he would venture out during the summer nights of the Southern Hemisphere, when giant squid released their babies. “Come on down, mate,” he said. “We’ll see if we can’t find the bloody thing and make history.”
The bodies of dead giant squid have been found in nearly every ocean: in the Pacific, near California; in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Newfoundland and Norway; and in the Indian, south of South Africa. But no place is considered better for hunting giant squid than the waters around New Zealand. It is here that currents from the tropics and Antarctica converge, and the resulting diversity of marine life creates an abundance of plankton for squid to feed on. And it is here that, in recent years, more dead giant squid have been recovered than anywhere else.
I arrived in Auckland on a morning in late February, 2004, and O’Shea greeted me at the airport. He looked much younger than his age, thirty-eight. He wore khaki pants and a khaki-colored shirt, a uniform that evoked a safari ranger. He is small and trim, and has brown hair, which was sticking up as if he had just run his fingers through it. Peering through spectacles that made his eyes seem abnormally large, he confessed with some embarrassment that he had come for me the previous day. “I’ve been preoccupied with everything that’s happening,” he said.
He spoke in a soft yet intense murmur, and whenever I addressed him he would turn his head sideways, so that I was talking directly into his right ear. (Later, he told me that he had damaged his left ear in a diving accident.) He reached into his wallet and pulled out his business card; beside his name was a picture of an iridescent squid. While I was looking at it, he grabbed one of my bags and hurried to his truck, which, as soon as he opened the driver’s door, exhaled a strange, pungent odor. “I do apologize,” he said, as he rolled down the windows. “You’ll find that everything around me smells of dead squid and ciggies.” In the back seat was a metal pole that was three feet long, with a net on the end. I soon discovered that he carried it with him wherever he went, often slung over his shoulder, as if he were a butterfly hunter.
Over the next few days, we began making preparations for our maiden voyage. At one point, we were speeding down the highway, heading to the store for supplies, when he slammed on the brakes and reversed, in the middle of traffic. “I almost forgot,” he said, parking in a lot that overlooked a harbor. He leaped out with the net and darted down a wharf, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He leaned over the edge, the winds buffeting his face, and held the net high over his head. For a moment, he didn’t move or breathe. “There,” he said, and lunged with the net, slashing at the water. As he pulled the net in, his pant legs wet with spray, I glimpsed a dozen silvery sprat—a minnow-like fish—dancing in the mesh. “I know I look a bit like a bugger,” he said. “But these things are rather important.”
After he had flung the net into the water several more times (“Believe it or not, there is a technique to this,” he said), he returned to his truck and tossed the sprat into a white bucket in the back seat. We travelled farther down the road, the sprat jostling behind us, and eventually stopped at an aquarium called Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World. (In its brochures, O’Shea was hailed as the “world-renowned squid man.”)
He grabbed the bucket, and we headed inside. “This is where I keep them,” he told me. He led me into a damp room with fluorescent lights, in which there was a round glass tank; inside, darting from side to side, were seventy baby squid, each an inch long. O’Shea explained that these squid, which are found in coastal areas, were a smaller species than
O’Shea is one of the few people in the world who have succeeded in keeping not only coastal but also deep- sea squid alive in captivity. Unlike an octopus, which, as he put it, “you can’t kill, no matter how hard you try,” a squid is highly sensitive to its environment. Accustomed to living in a borderless realm, a squid reacts poorly when placed in a tank, and will often plunge, kamikaze-style, into the walls, or cannibalize other squid.
In 2001, during a monthlong expedition at sea, O’Shea caught a cluster of paralarval giant squid in his nets, but by the time he reached the docks all of them had died. He was so distraught that he climbed into the tank, in tears, and retrieved the corpses himself. “I had spent every day, every hour, trying to find the paralarvae, and then they died in my grasp,” he told me. For two years, he was so stricken by his failure that he refused to mount another expedition. “I knew if I failed again I would be finished,” he recalled. “Not just scientifically but physically and emotionally.”
He couldn’t stop wondering, though, about what had happened in the tank. His wife, Shoba, a computer scientist who was born in India, told me that sometimes in the middle of an unrelated conversation he would suddenly say, “What did I do wrong?” O’Shea became determined to correct what he called “my fatal mistake,” and began a series of painstaking experiments on other species of juvenile deep-sea squid. He would subtly alter the conditions of captivity: tank size, intensity of light, oxygen levels, salinity. He discovered that the tank in which he had stored his paralarvae during the expedition had two lethal flaws: it had a rectangular shape, which, for some reason, caused the squid to sink to the bottom and die; and its walls were made of polyethylene, a plastic compound that, it turns out, is toxic to deep-sea squid. “Knowing what I know now, I feel like a fool,” he said. “It was like walking them to their execution.”
In the mid-nineteen-seventies, Clyde Roper managed to keep ocean-dwelling squid alive for fourteen days— then a record. O’Shea, using cylindrical tanks made of acrylic, had kept his latest coastal specimens alive for eighty days. Earlier, he had maintained a batch of deep-sea squid for more than seventy days, which he then returned to the wild, satisfied that his experiment was a success.
He held up his white bucket. “Watch this,” he said, and dumped the sprat into the tank. Though the fish were bigger than the squid, the squid shot toward them, with their arms curved over their heads, hiding their tentacles; they looked metallic, except for their bulging green eyes. Then the squids’ arms sprang open, and their tentacles exploded outward, lashing their prey. The fish squirmed to break free, but the squid engulfed them in a web of arms. They drew their frantic prey into their beaks, and the squids’ stomachs turned bright red as they filled with the blood of the fish. Staring into the tank, I imagined what a full-grown giant squid might look like swallowing its
