Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

A colossal squid, a 33-foot-long adult male weighing half a ton, was captured recently in the Antarctic Ocean. Because International law requires that anything caught in Antarctic waters must be taken onboard and documented to guard against overfishing, the captain had no choice: haul it aboard.

What captain John Bennett and his crew pulled in that day turned out to be the largest colossal squid ever recovered -- cause for considerable excitement aboard his ship, the San Aspiring, and around the world.

Including Bennett's catch--and a 20-foot female he found floating dead in 2003--only a handful have ever been recovered. Most of them were just damaged fragments--a tentacle here, a dorsal fin there. The species wasn't even identified until 1925, when pieces of one were found inside the stomach of a sperm whale.

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Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. "It really didn't put up much of a fight," he says. "Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea."

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Once aboard, the squid was lowered into the ship's cargo hold and put on ice for the next two weeks as Bennett and his crew chugged 1,700 miles back to the southern coast of New Zealand. The squid remains frozen solid as preparations are being made to hand it over to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington.

There's probably a female out there that's a full ton," says Steve O'Shea, director of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute at the Auckland University of Technology and one of the world's leading squid experts, noting that females tend to be half again as large as their male counterparts.

Cited story.

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