Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [122]
Giant squid, also known as Architeuthis, are the largest invertebrates in the world. Until the 1860s when the first partial specimen was brought back to land, giant squids were thought to be creatures of myth—sea monsters that haunted sailors' nightmares. Though more than a hundred specimens have since been recovered (either washed up on beaches or caught in fishing nets), to this day no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its undersea habitat. From dead bodies and other evidence (undigested giant squid beaks as long as six inches have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales), it's known that giant squid can grow to a length of fiftyfive feet, possibly longer. Their two long tentacles and eight arms are lined with round, toothed suckers that they use to grip their prey. Their beaks are used to hack up prey before swallowing, and their eyes (hubcapsized, growing as large as fifteen inches in diameter) are the largest of any animal in the world. They're preyed on by sperm whales—which themselves reach a length of sixty feet and ninety thousand pounds—and in whale-on-squid battles, the giant squid sometimes leave circular sucker scars on whales' heads.
Some of the first reports of the giant squid's existence came from whaling vessels. We thought about Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's mid-nineteenth-century account of a monomaniacal whaling voyage to the South Seas. In one chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, and the crew of the Pequod encounter a giant squid while sailing toward the island of Java:
A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing creamcolor, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters, where it had sunk, with a wild voice ex-claimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
“What was it, Sir,” said Flask.
“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.”
The first known sighting of a giant squid in the Southern Hemisphere (documented by the French explorer François Péron) was off the shores of Tasmania in 1802. And over the past twenty years, three giant squid have washed up on Tasmania's east coast beaches, suggesting they might frequent waters only a few miles from the island's shore. The most recent stranding was in July 2002 when a female giant squid weighing 550 pounds washed up on Seven Mile Beach, less than ten miles from Hobart, the island's capital. When the squid was examined, biologists found she had sperm packets embedded in her mantle.
Giant squid are believed to have a bizarre and violent method of breeding. The male's penis, which can be more than three feet long, is like a hydraulic nail gun. And rather than directly fertilizing the female squid's eggs, the male injects packets of sperm (as long as eight inches, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter) under high pressure into the female's long arms. The sperm packets are stored in the arms until the female is ready to spawn, or deposit her eggs. How the sperm gets to her eggs isn't known. Scientists have suggested that the sperm packets might migrate through the female squid's body until they reach the area near her oviducts or that the female may tear open her own flesh with her tentacles. It's also possible that the sperm