Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “A Mystery Squid Found Luring at Ocean Bottom” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (©2001 by The New York Times Company).

In a finding that has thrilled deep-sea scientists and put squid experts in a tizzy, researchers have reported the discovery of a bizarre squid reaching 23 slimy feet in length lurking the oceans’ depths all across the globe. In Science magazine, an international team of researchers documents eight sightings of the creatures. At rest, the beasts look something like a pair of elephant ears stop bent, threadlike arms resembling moon-landing gear. Scientists still have not captured the animals, which were seen near the sea floor in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico at crushing depths, one to three miles below the surface.

“It occurred to me that these things were showing up all over the place in deep water,” said Dr. Mike Vecchione, a squid biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the lead author of the Science paper. “For this large, highly visible animal to be common in the largest ecosystem on earth and for us to know nothing about it seems fairly remarkable.”

Unlike the 60-foot-long giant squids, however, these new squids have never washed up on shore or been found in the stomachs of whales. Researchers say that is not surprising because they are probably too delicate to survive such passage without disintegrating or being eaten. Not even the giant squid, Architeuthis, has been seen alive in its natural deep-sea habitat.

Scientists calculate that the deep sea—the lightless zone of the ocean that includes everything below 3,000 feet—encompasses more than 90 percent of the earth’s biosphere. The skin of habitat on land is miniscule in comparison. Yet because the ocean’s depths are dangerous and expensive to explore, very little is known about the deep sea—so little that even a big, common creature can go undetected.

“It's just a fantastic finding,” said Dr. J. Frederick Grassle, the director of the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. "I've made a lot of dives in submersibles and never seen anything like these. It's remarkable that there have been so many sightings recently.”

Perhaps most remarkable is that researchers could piece the sightings together at all. Dr. Vecchione said all the squids were spotted incidentally, by scientists or oil company workers looking for something else on the ocean floor. The chance observations occurred over the last 13 years . Dr. Vecchione said the first videotape he saw of one of these animals was made not for science, but for love, by a man aboard an oil exploration vessel using a remotely operated submersible. When the submersible came across the squid, the man filmed it, because his girlfriend was interested in marine biology. “It was just pure luck,” Dr. Vecchione said. Once aware of the new squid, he begun learning of the other observations.

The squids are unusual in a number of ways, including their excessively long arms held in a unique bent stance, their large fins and their apparent lack of concern with the proximity of the submersibles. When observed, the squids were mostly hanging in the water, gently waving their fins to hold their position, arms dangling beneath them. Unlike most squids, which have two long tentacles and eight shorter arms, the new squid’s name and tentacles are indistinguishably long.

“It’s a very exciting animal,” said Dr. Clyde Roper, a zoologist at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. “This animal probably doesn’t weigh more than 25 to 50 pounds. Most of its length is in these very, very thin, tendrilous appendages.”

Without specimens in hand, it is impossible for scientists to say whether the squids represent one or more species. The animals remain unnamed. The mystery squids are most similar to small, young squids discovered several years ago near Hawaii and California that had large fins and long ,slender arms. Dr. Vecchione speculated that the new squids might eat suspected were sticky arms. “One of the squids actually got its arms stuck on a submersible, and it had trouble letting go,” he said. “I think what it has are many really tiny suckers on it.”

Dr. Ron O’Dor, a senior scientist at the Census of Marine Life, says the new finding proves how far biologists have to go in understanding the deep sea. “We’ll be exploring essentially unknown territory,” Dr. O’Dor said. Even as scientists undertook more detailed studies, he said much would remain unseen because any animal too fast or too smart to be caught in the lights of submersibles would remain out of view.