I know, I know… it’s consumed your every waking moment for years now. “When, oh when, will the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto finally get footage of a colossal squid?!” you cry out, every single morning. (Same, girl, same.)
Well, everyone can relax, because the intrepid sea boffins of the Peninsula just remote-controlled their SuBastien underwater robot (he has arms and everything!) directly into the path of the elusive, be-tentacled rave bag.
This is, of course, a giant deal. No one’s ever filmed one of these things alive and in their own habitat before, even though we’ve known about colossal squid for a whole century. Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni as a species was first identified and named only because scientists found remnants of one inside the stomach of a sperm whale. We’ve come a long way, baby!
SuBastien was roaming nearly 2,000 feet under the South Atlantic Ocean’s surface, in the vicinity of the South Sandwich Islands, when the foot-long squid appeared. One foot might not sound very colossal — but, it turns out, this little guy could eventually grow up to 23 feet long.
Let us now marvel at the alien baby in all of its weird glowing wonder:
Thank you, persistent Schmidt Institute science people!
