Scientists Had Never Seen This Mysterious Squid Alive in the Wild—Until Now. See the First Footage of the Elusive Creature
A three-foot-long Antarctic gonate squid was spotted swimming 7,000 feet below the surface of the Southern Ocean
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/SarahKuta.png)
A mysterious squid found only in the frigid, deep waters near Antarctica has been spotted alive in the wild for the first time.
In December, scientists filmed a three-foot-long Antarctic gonate squid (Gonatus antarcticus) swimming around 7,000 feet below the surface of the Southern Ocean, writes Melissa Hobson for National Geographic, which first reported the story.
The scientists were aboard the R/V Falkor (too), the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel, studying a site they didn’t initially intend to explore. Icy conditions had prevented them from reaching their ideal location in the Powell Basin, so they released their remotely operated vehicle, called SuBastian, around the basin’s outer edge instead. That’s when they captured the landmark footage.
“It was a beautiful squid,” says Andrew Thurber, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was on the research vessel at the time, to the New York Times’ Alexa Robles-Gil. “You see beauty all the time in the deep ocean, and this was just one classic example of it.”
Kat Bolstad, an environmental scientist who specializes in cephalopods at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, reviewed the video and confirmed it captured an elusive Antarctic gonate squid.
“This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first live footage of this animal worldwide,” she tells National Geographic.
Biologists have known about the Antarctic gonate squid for more than a century. The species was first identified by Swedish zoologist Einar Lönnberg in 1898, based on specimens that had been collected during an earlier expedition to Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off the southern tip of South America, according to the World Register of Deep-Sea Species.
However, until now, no one had ever witnessed one of these squids in the wild. Instead, everything scientists know about the species has come from dead specimens captured in fishing nets or from beaks found in the stomachs of other animals.
“In the deep sea, there’s always a good chance you’re seeing something for the first time,” Bolstad tells National Geographic. “The potential for discoveries and exploration is pretty much limitless.”
As the remotely operated vehicle approached, the squid produced a cloud of greenish ink—possibly because it was startled. Scientists used the vehicle’s lasers to record the squid’s dimensions before it disappeared into the dark depths of the bathypelagic, or midnight, zone. Located 3,300 to 13,100 feet below the ocean’s surface, the midnight zone is completely devoid of sunlight.
The scientists were not able to deduce the cephalopod’s age or sex during the brief encounter, according to a statement from National Geographic. But they could clearly see the large hooks at the tips of its two longer tentacles, which the squid likely uses to restrain its prey while hunting.
The footage also appeared to show recent battle scars, including sucker marks on the squid’s mantle and scratches on its arms. Scientists aren’t sure which animal could have caused the injuries, but they suspect it might have been a juvenile colossal squid, per National Geographic.
Such discoveries of deep-sea species “can be really informative to how they live life at great depths,” Linsey Sala, a museum scientist who manages the pelagic invertebrate collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and did not participate in the expedition, tells the New York Times. “Videos like this get me really excited.”
Scientists recorded the Antarctic gonate squid during a “Perpetual Planet” expedition, an initiative spearheaded by National Geographic and Rolex that aims to “examine and document the impact of climate and environmental change on some of the world’s most critical yet fragile mountain, rainforest and ocean systems and to identify solutions to protect them,” according to the project’s website.
This is not the first time SuBastian has recorded a hard-to-pin-down creature. Earlier this year, the remotely operated vehicle captured the first footage of a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) in its natural habitat. The one-foot-long juvenile was spotted swimming 1,968 feet beneath the surface of the South Atlantic Ocean near the South Sandwich Islands, a century after the species was first identified.
In 2020, SuBastian also filmed a ram’s horn squid (Spirula spirula) for the first time in the wild. That cephalopod was documented floating vertically roughly 2,790 feet deep off the northern Great Barrier Reef.
The remotely operated vehicle has also previously found worms, snails and other marine invertebrates living in cavities under the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean—the first time animal life had been discovered inhabiting the ocean crust. It helped scientists identify four new octopus species off Costa Rica and revealed a previously hidden ecosystem beneath a massive iceberg in Antarctica.
