Banner
    What Killed Florida's Giant Squid?
    By Danna Staaf | July 4th 2011 08:26 PM | 12 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
    More Articles
    All Articles
    About Danna

    Cephalopods have been rocking my world since I was in grade school. I pursued them through a BA in marine biology at the University of California...

    View Danna's Profile
    It never fails--I take some time off, and a giant squid shows up!

    A few years ago, it was a half-eaten carcass found floating in Monterey Bay. Every teuthologist dreams of a giant squid sighting in her backyard, but Fate's wicked sense of humor had me taking a summer course in Friday Harbor when my dream came true. So while I was playing with worms, my labmates back home were eagerly dissecting the largest giant squid ever seen in Monterey Bay.

    Not that I'm bitter or anything.

    Anyway, this time I went to camp in the mountains for a week, and missed a massive media flurry over an almost-perfect specimen captured by fishermen off Florida:


    Robert Benz, who was fishing with friends Joey Asaro and Paul Peroulakis, said they spotted the giant squid, Architeuthis dux, about 11 a.m. After realizing what it was, the men slid the dying squid onto the back of their 23-foot boat.
    Sources are uncertain as to whether the squid was dying or already dead when the fishermen collected it. The confusion is understandable, as Benz said:
    "The tentacles were still moving and it was sticking to you when we got it in."
    We tend to associate movement with life, but when you stop and think about it, postmortem movement is actually quite common--the famous "chicken with its head cut off" comes to mind as a prime example. It can be quite difficult to determine the exact moment of death.

    But even if the squid was still alive, it certainly wasn't healthy, as the natural environment of giant squid is the deep sea, not the surface. Anyway, having been injected with formalin and submerged in more of the same, the giant squid is most certainly dead now.

    Preservation with formalin could take weeks for something this size--the chemical has to work its way into all the tissues and cross-link all the molecules--and scientists are waiting until the process is complete before answering even such a seemingly simple question as the squid's sex.

    At first I was surprised that they didn't dissect it immediately (INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW) but, given the quality of the specimen, I can understand that the first priority would be to make sure it stays intact.

    When they do finally dissect it, they should be able to determine not only whether it's male or female, but also how sexually mature it was. This will be a pretty important piece of evidence for or against the hypothesis everyone's quoting:
    Giant squid only reproduce once in their lifetime, and then often die slowly, after becoming lethargic, Slapcinsky said. The animal was likely in that state when the fishermen found it.
    That's not a bad idea, but it's not necessarily true either. No one actually knows how giant squid reproduce, so we have to guess based on other species of squid.

    A lot of squids do reproduce only once, then fall apart--as in the famous mating aggregations and mass deaths of California market squid. But other species, like Humboldt squid, can spawn several times at the end of their lives, continuing to grow and eat between spawning events.

    Giant squid are (slightly) more closely related to Humboldt squid than to market squid, so why not hypothesize that they can spawn more than once?

    When they open up the squid, if it turns out to be sexually mature, that's fine for the hypothesis that the animal died a natural death after reproducing. However, if it isn't mature, then the cause must lie elsewhere. What then?

    Probably not death by predator, or there would be bites missing. Could it be disease? A change in the environment, like temperature or acidity? Every question answered only spawns new questions . . . oh, the many-headed hydra of science!

    Comments

    Perhaps you could take some more time off to ponder the question ; )

    Lee (not verified) | 07/06/11 | 08:52 AM
    Danna Staaf
    A splendid idea! But then, all five of my readers might give up on me entirely . . . ;)
    Danna Staaf | 07/06/11 | 19:31 PM
    Maybe first evidence of a sperm whale's sonic blast...this one was stunned but got away.

    Noble9 (not verified) | 07/08/11 | 16:56 PM
    Danna Staaf
    That's a really interesting idea! The best evidence for it would probably be in the statocysts--the balance organs that some scientists think can be "blown apart" by loud noises--but unfortunately even if the squid's statocysts are damaged, it wouldn't be possible to tell if the culprit was a sperm whale, an anthropogenic source, or something else entirely--like disease.
    Danna Staaf | 07/12/11 | 13:45 PM
    Bonny Bonobo alias Brat
    Danna, I find it amazing how little we seem to know about Giant Squid and their reproduction even though according to Wikipedia 130 specimens have been scientifically examined and
    In December 2005, the Melbourne Aquarium in Australia paid A$100,000 for the intact body of a giant squid, preserved in a giant block of ice, which had been caught by fishermen off the coast of New Zealand's South Island that year. 
    I'm surprised because they are also so widespread in our oceans at a depth between 300 and 1000 metres, which is an area that I imagine is constantly being trawled. Wiki says that :-
    Giant squid have a sophisticated nervous system and complex brain, attracting great interest from scientists. They also have the largest eyes of any living creature except perhaps colossal squid — over 30 centimetres (1 ft) in diameter.
    All of this information from Wikipedia implies that they are very good at keeping out of our way especially with such a high price tag on their heads and that maybe they are much more intelligent than we realise? Either that or they have such good eyesight that they can see us coming from miles away! Why can't we catch juveniles and allow them to grow in captivity? Surely they would be a huge drawcard for the commercial public aquariums?

    Also you said that the Florida Giant Squid's death was 'Probably not death by predator, or there would be bites missing. Could it be disease? A change in the environment, like temperature or acidity?' Sorry to keep mentioning Wiki but it also says that the only predator of adult Giant Squids are sperm whales (and possibly pilot whales) and I've often read about the amazing, long battles these creatures have deep in our oceans, as I have many books about whales. Could it have been dying of exhaustion maybe or from a sperm whale sonic blast as suggested above, and if so would the subsequent dissection and scientific analysis even be able to spot this? 

    There's a great picture here of the sucker marks left on the skin of a sperm whale by the Giant Squids tentacles, I imagine they would have had to been in situ, exerting an awful lot of pressure for quite a while, to leave such deep impressions on the thick skin of a giant sperm whale.
    —
    Make love not war
    Helen Barratt | 07/08/11 | 18:16 PM
    Danna Staaf
    Wikipedia's certainly not the worst source of information on giant squid. =)

    Good questions all! Here are some thoughts, hope they help clarify things:

    - 130 specimens may seem like a lot, but it's actually not. Most of the animal species that we can claim to really understand have been studied in the thousands at least. Also, of those 130 specimens, most were in very bad shape--like the Monterey giant squid, which was missing so many of its internal organs they couldn't identify its sex, maturity, or even find its stomach to see what it had been eating.

    - Giant squid may seem to be "widespread" because they have been found all around the world, but we actually have no idea how abundant they are. Giant squid live in all the world's oceans, but they may be very rare in all the world's oceans.

    - As for trawling, well, remember the ocean is enormous. At any given time, only a tiny fraction of the available space is being trawled. Squid have good eyesight and are fast swimmers, and we know that even small species of squid are pretty adept at swimming away from the mouth of a net. They don't need to see a net coming from "miles away" to still be able to escape.

    - On catching and raising juveniles--yes, everyone would love to be able to do that! Kiwi scientist Steve O'Shea has probably come the closest of anyone. Two big obstacles: finding the babies (when they first hatch, they're really tiny) and keeping them alive in tanks (even for shallow-water squid that are much better known than the giant squid, raising them in captivity is very, very difficult).

    - See above response for thoughts about blaming a sperm whale for the squid's death.

    - Giant squid sucker cups (like many other squid, e.g. Humboldt squid) have hard tooth-lined rings inside them, which is what marks the whale skin--it's not the suction exerted by the cup so much as an actual cut in the skin (albeit a shallow one) inflicted by these "sucker teeth".

    Thanks for the questions, and sorry it took so long to answer (I was away at a wedding).
    Danna Staaf | 07/12/11 | 14:01 PM
    logicman
    I see you are a 'fan' of Conrad Gessner.  Me too!  His Historiae animalium is a milestone in the history of science - a subject which I am currently researching in some depth.
    Patrick Lockerby | 07/10/11 | 09:19 AM
    Danna Staaf
    Yes, I love that old style of science art! Also a huge fan of Ernst Haeckel.

    I have been intrigued by what I've read in the history of science and I'm very appreciative of the work people do in that field!
    Danna Staaf | 07/12/11 | 14:03 PM
    Danna I know that if water is too warm for squids it will float upwards and may not be able to swim back down. Its very possible that depending on where it was and what time of year it was it was too warm for the squid and it died. P.S. I know all this and I'm 11

    Anonymous (not verified) | 06/14/12 | 18:10 PM
    Danna Staaf
    Thanks for your comment! Indeed, as I mentioned at the end of this piece, an environmental change like temperature could certainly have affected this squid. There are reasons to suspect that warmer water makes it harder for giant squid to breathe, and may even lead to strandings.
    However, a word of warning about what you "know"! One of the tricky things about science is that scientists will often find out that a thing MIGHT happen SOMETIMES, and then people misunderstand and think that it DOES happen ALL the time. This is one of those cases--we really don't know enough about giant squid to be certain exactly what happens to them when the water warms up.
    Danna Staaf | 06/15/12 | 00:41 AM
    Danna, I know that scientists aren't always sure of everything, but honestly, no signs of it being attacked. It seems like one of the most likely answers.

    Anonymous (not verified) | 07/05/12 | 16:14 PM
    Danna it seems like one of the most likely things. I mean there were no signs of it being attacked or anything.

    Anonymous (not verified) | 07/05/12 | 16:19 PM