What is a giant sea monster?

On November 30, 1861, a giant sea monster appeared in the waters of the Canary Islands, witnessed by the crew of the French gunboat HMS Aleckton, which was sailing in those waters. They also attempted to capture it, but failed. After chasing it for a long distance, the gunboat gradually approached the monster, close enough to slam a fishing fork into its flesh. A lasso was then attached to the monster's body, but the lasso slipped all the way to the tail fin before stopping. As the crew struggled to pull the sea monster into the cabin, it broke free of the lasso and slid back into the water with all but a small portion of its tail.

After the Alekhine anchored in Tenerife, the gunboat's commander approached the local French consul and presented a specimen of the sea monster's tail. He also wrote an official report, which was read at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on December 30th. But the response was not favorable, and Arthur Mangin, representing the Academy of Sciences, said that no one studying science would report the existence of such a strange creature because its existence was contrary to the laws of nature.

In other words, the crew was lying or fabricating the story. In the case of the Alekton, it took several years for officials to admit that what the witnesses saw was indeed a strange but real animal. What the crew saw was a giant squid - a squid that wasn't really that big, measuring about 24 feet from the tip of its tail to the tip of its tentacles. There are known squid bigger than this, but its immense size makes it suspect.

There is one early introduction of the animal described from the 18th century, when Bishop Erik Puntopidan mentioned the North Sea Giant Siren in one of his major zoological books, The Natural History of Norway. Though Puntopidan exaggerated a bit (he said the Giant Siren was "four and a half miles long and its tentacles could drag the largest warship ...... to the bottom of the sea"), he was pretty accurate in his description of the giant squid.

Most of the early descriptions of the giant squid were dismissed as mere fantasy or folklore. So when the account of the stranding and massacre of a giant squid in Ireland's Dingle Bay in 1673 was published, it attracted little attention. But now, because the existence of the giant squid is known in the mind, it makes a lot more sense to read those bizarrely detailed accounts again. The report describes the creature as having "two heads, ten horns, ...... about 800 buttons on the horns, ...... a row of teeth in each button, 19 feet long, a body larger than a horse, ...... and a body that is more powerful than a horse. a horse and ...... has two very large eyes." Of course the squid has only one head, but that "little head" refers to the body tubes that the squid uses to suck up water to propel its body forward. The "horns" are the squid's tentacles, and the "buttons" are the jagged suction tubes on the tentacles.

The 19th-century Danish zoologist Johan Gepeters Steenstrapp was the first scientist to conduct a comprehensive study of the North Sea siren. He found records of what appeared to be giant squid strandings as early as 1639 (off the coast of Iceland). He also collected specimens and gave a lecture on the subject to the Scandinavian Society of Natural Scientists in 1847. Six years later, Stingstrap obtained the pharynx and rostrum of a specimen from fishermen who had already routinely cut it up to use it as bait (for them the North Sea Giant was not only real but also practical). 1857, Stingstrap published a description of the animal and gave it the scientific name "Archaeopteryx". scientific name "Arctiades".

Steinstrup's work was still not taken seriously, and the collective testimony of the crew of the Alekhine did not help him at all. Zoology textbooks made no mention at all of the new animal named by Stainstrup -- it wasn't until the 1870s, after a series of consecutive animal strandings off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, that it prompted some open-minded scientists, including Packard, the editor of the American Naturalist, to investigate.

In October 1873, a fisherman named Theophile Picot and his son came across a giant squid in the waters of Great Bell Island near St. John's, Newfoundland, and cut off one of its tentacles. Picot told Geological Council of Canada investigator Alexander Murray that there was still about 10 feet of tentacle left on the squid, and that the tentacle they caught was about 25 feet long. Picot claimed the squid was huge, about 60 feet long and 5 feet to 10 feet wide.

From there, as the mystery of the giant squid unraveled, a number of other questions arose. For example, what do they eat? How do they live? How do they reproduce? People have never been able to capture a live animal for scientific study. The most pressing of all questions is how big can a giant squid get?

The fact that the giant squid's main enemy is the sperm whale (a male can be up to 70 feet long) may tell us something. A rare fight between two giant marine animals, the squid and the sperm whale, is said to have taken place late one night in 1875 at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca (which connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea). Frank Bullen described the scene from an eyewitness perspective in his book The Parade of the Sperm Whales (1924).

"A vicious fight broke out on the surface of the sea. ...... I stretched my night telescope out of the skylight of the cabin, ...... and I saw the very large sperm whale engaged in a deadly struggle with a cuttlefish, or squid, nearly as large as it was. fighting to the death, the seemingly endless tentacles of the cuttlefish or squid wrapped around the entire body of the sperm whale. In particular, the whale's head seemed to be a web of twisting tentacles - a natural thought, as the sperm whale appeared to have swallowed the tail of the cuttlefish or squid into its mouth and was methodically chewing on it as if it were going to be torn apart. Next to the black columnar head of the whale appeared the head of a large squid, which looked more horrible than one could imagine in one's wildest dreams. ...... The diameter of their eyes was at least 2 feet, and they looked absolutely grotesque and terrifying as ferocious."

Even without such wonderful eyewitness testimony, we can know about the squid-whale tussle from the following two sources: the squid found in the whale's stomach and vomit and the suction cup scars found on the whale. These can help us guess how big the squid can get at maximum.

The largest recorded specimen of squid was found on the New Zealand coast in 1880 and was about 65 feet long. The two scientists who conducted the investigation said a large portion of the large squid's length (about 30 feet to 36 feet) was "made up of tentacles. But the scientists also noted that "dead whales are remarkably elastic and easily stretched," which makes their measurements not entirely accurate, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the squid was giant. Other eyewitnesses have recounted seeing specimens of squid that were about 80 feet to 90 feet long.

While direct sightings of giant squid are rare and incompletely documented, many whalers say they have seen sperm whales vomiting up amazing things as they were dying. Bullen saw a "huge cuttlefish limb - tentacle or claw - as thick as the body of a stout, stumpy man, with six or seven suckers, the size of a saucer, and its inner edges densely covered with hooked claws, as sharp as needles, and as large as the size and shape of a needle". sharp as needles, and of the size and shape of a tiger's claw."

Scientists were baffled by the strange circular markings found on sperm whales until they were sure the giant North Sea demon was real. Eventually they learned that the markings were sucker scars left by the giant squid after they lost a fight to the death against whales that tried to eat them. The sucker scars that have been found are about 18 inches in diameter.

Some cephalopod zoologists who study species such as squid, cuttlefish and octopus don't think it's credible to judge the size of squid from their sucker scars, which, in the words of Clyde Robb and Kenneth Boss, "get bigger as the whale grows." But some other zoologists do not share this view. Bernard Heuvelmans, a founding father of cryptozoology, found that "female whales have very few scars of this kind on their bodies," and that "young whales are protected from such vicious animals, and it would be very difficult for young whales to survive such an attack." In other words, giant squid are most likely to leave marks on fully mature male sperm whales.

In any case, there are many instances of mega-squid residue being found in the stomachs of whales.

Giant squid spend most of their lives in generally deep or very deep water Most of the time when strandings occur, it is because the squid has died of disease and surfaced, and the water has washed up on the shore. However, the actual scientific and comprehensive investigation of ocean depths has only just begun, and it is said that only one-thousandth of the ocean's depths have been studied so far. Scientists are hoping for even bigger breakthroughs in order to discover giant squids or even bigger and more amazing undersea creatures.