Last year, a group of scientists trying to capture footage of the colossal octopus, Earth’s largest invertebrate, in its natural habitat may have won their prize when one of their underwater cameras caught a baby glass squid swimming by.
Colossal squids are members of the glass squid family, which is why they appear transparent to the eye – not that any eye has ever been laid on in its daily life. However, in the high-resolution images captured by the researchers, vermilion tentacles and faint blue bioluminescence greatly narrow the list of potential species.
In the epitome of an anti-climactic phrase, the “colossal octopus” was a 12-centimeter-long juvenile, but because the expedition was privately funded, it gave the team the immediate impotence to return to Antarctic waters and search longer. at greater depths.
Kolossal expedition leader Matthew Mulrennan worked on an Antarctic tourist ship Ocean Endeavour where 200 tourists shared accommodation with him and his team between December 2022 and April 2023.
Hakai Magazine reports that the tourists’ curiosity and support was needed as motivation to prevent the team from endlessly watching the frigid waters below their vessel.
“We put the camera in the water at midnight or 1 a.m., were up until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., and then had to get up at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m.,” Jennifer Herbig, a doctoral student at Memorial University in Newfoundland, told Coastal magazine.
In total, marine biologists captured 62 hours of footage, broken up by constant efforts to detect camera lines from the sea ice around the South Shetland and South Georgia Islands.
Then a paydirt floated by – a small candidate for their colossal quarry, although it might have been another large glass squid called Galiteuthis glacialis. The footage was sent to New Zealand’s Auckland University of Technology, the country in whose territorial waters the only living adult colossal octopus was fished from the depths — in 2007, a female that was over 12 feet long and weighed 1,000 pounds.
“The two are familiar. Cranchiidae taxa observed in Antarctica are Galiteuthis glacialis and Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni’ Dr. Aaron Evans, who studies Cranchiidae family and was peer reviewing records, IFL Science said.
“The octopus seen here could belong to different life stages of both of these taxa – and it’s an exciting example of wild cranchiid behavior, as I can’t think of any existing video footage of either of these octopuses in their natural habitat.”
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Without bones or cartilage to support its massive bulk, the colossal octopus relies on the intense oceanic pressures of its bathypelagic home to hold itself together, and simply disintegrates at the sea’s surface. Almost everything known about the animal before its discovery in 2007 came from bits and pieces recovered from the stomachs of sperm whales, the squid’s natural predator.
For this reason, studying them in their natural environment is the only chance to unravel the mystery of the animal, which is both the largest cephalopod and the largest invertebrate on Earth.
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Little, if anything, is known about the colossal octopus. They are believed to be ambush predators, like most hunters in the depths without light. They have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom – 12 to 16 inches in diameter, or the size of a volleyball, which are believed to give them best-in-class abilities to see through darkness, identify bioluminescent creatures, and detect sperm. whales from afar.
Kolossal and Mulrennan plan to return in November to continue the search. They plan to bring more cameras and longer camera cables, and possibly equipment to take DNA samples in the water, so they can be sure of their discovery if they make any bigger, potentially colossal ones.
WATCH the octopus swim at 2:23 seconds in the video below…
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