What happened
The giant squid, considered the source of kraken legends and of some sea serpent reports, was for centuries known mainly from dead specimens washed ashore or found in the stomachs of sperm whales. Zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association spent nearly two years trying to photograph one. Knowing that sperm whales hunt it in the waters around the archipelago, about 970 km south of Tokyo, they lowered from a small fishing boat a line baited with squid and shrimp, together with a camera and flash. On September 30, 2004, at a depth of 900 meters, a giant squid attacked the bait and wrapped its arms around it, and the camera captured a series of photographs. They were published in September 2005, and in July 2012 the first video of a live giant squid in the deep was shot in the same area.
Witnesses
Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori with the boat's two-person crew; the photographs were taken by an automatic camera.
Explanations and hypotheses
This is a case in which legend met science: an animal long regarded as semi-mythical turned out to be a real, if exceptionally hard to observe, inhabitant of the deep. Giant squid reach lengths of a dozen meters or more including their feeding tentacles and have some of the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. Zoologists believe they lie behind many kraken stories and some of the old descriptions of sea serpents. The 2004 photographs also showed that the giant squid is an active predator.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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