TOKYO (Reuters) - A
Japanese-led team of scientists has captured on film the world's first
live images of a giant squid, journeying to the depths of the ocean in
search of the mysterious creature thought to have inspired the myth of
the "kraken", a tentacled monster.
The images of the silvery,
three-metre (10 feet) long cephalopod, looming out of the darkness
nearly 1 km below the surface, were taken last July near the Ogasawara
islands, 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Tokyo.
Though the beast was small by
giant squid standards - the largest ever caught stretched 18 metres
long, tentacles and all - filming it secretly in its natural habitat was
a key step towards understanding the animal, researchers said.
"Many people have tried to
capture an image of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat, whether
researchers or film crews. But they all failed," said Tsunemi Kubodera, a
zoologist at Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, who led the
team.
"These are the first ever
images of a real live giant squid," Kubodera said of the footage, shot
by Japanese national broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel.
[Slideshow: Tiniest animals on the planet] The key to their success, said Kubodera, was a small submersible rigged with lights invisible to both human and cephalopod eyes.
He, a cameraman and the
submersible's pilot drifted silently down to 630 metres and released a
one-metre-long squid as bait. In all, they descended around 100 times.
"If you try and approach making
a load of noise, using a bright white light, then the squid won't come
anywhere near you. That was our basic thinking," Kubodera said.
[Slideshow: NatGeo's 2012 photo contest winners]
"So we sat there in the pitch
black, using a near-infrared light invisible even to the human eye,
waiting for the giant squid to approach."
As the squid neared they began to film, following it into the depths to around 900 metres.
"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," he said. "It was stunning, I couldn't have dreamt that it
would be so beautiful. It was such a wonderful creature."
Until recently, little was
known about the creature believed to be the real face of the mythical
kraken, a sea-monster blamed by sailors for sinking ships off Norway in
the 18th century.
But for Kubodera, the animal held no such terror.
"A giant squid essentially
lives a solitary existence, swimming about all alone in the deep sea. It
doesn't live in a group," he said. "So when I saw it, well, it looked
to me like it was rather lonely."
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