We've never seen this rare squid alive in the wild—until now
Reporting in this article is presented by the National Geographic Society in partnership with Rolex under the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions.
It was late on Christmas Eve and the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean's Weddell Sea weren't cooperating.
The scientists and crew onboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's ship R.V. Falkor (too), were planning to take the vessel's remotely operated vehicle to the Powell Basin—an unexplored abyssal plain, which plummets to around 9,800 feet deep. The expedition was led by the National Geographic Society as part of their Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions and leveraged the institute's ocean exploration tools.
'It was our mission critical,' says Manuel Novillo, a postdoctoral researcher at Instituto de Diversidad y Ecología Animal who was aboard the ship.
But the sea ice was so treacherous, Novillo and his fellow researchers had to postpone the launch. 'The ice blocks were moving so fast, it would put all the ships in danger, so we had to rearrange everything,' Novillo says.
Reluctantly, they chose a new site at the outer edge of the Powell Basin for the next day.
Yet those setbacks and that new location would soon lead to a world first—on Christmas Day, Novillo and his team witnessed a squid that had never been seen alive: Gonatus antarcticus, an elusive cephalopod found only in the frigid waters around Antarctica. Antarctic Squid 2 The team of scientists aboard the research vessel were able to observe key characteristics of this squid, such as its size and signs of engaging in a conflict. Video By Video by ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute
As the expedition's remote vehicle, SuBastian, slowly dropped 7,000 feet through the ocean's inky twilight zone toward the seabed on Christmas morning, Novillo watched a live video feed streaming into the ship's mission control room. with the NAT GEO KIDS or LITTLE KIDS subscription. Summer Sale: Annual subscriptions starting at just $24!
Suddenly, he spotted a shadow a few feet away. Intrigued, he asked the pilot to get closer. And 'voila, it appeared,' he says.
There, in front of the rover, was a three-foot-long squid, which released a small cloud of greenish ink—perhaps startled by the vehicle.
'What are the odds?' Novillo says. 'We were not supposed to be there and not at that precise moment.'
The team followed the squid for two or three minutes while it hung gently in the water. They used lasers to get an accurate measurement of its size, and the pilot turned down the lights so the team could get an idea of how this enigmatic animal lives in its natural environment.
Then, when the squid decided it had had enough, it shot away from the ROV and disappeared from view. Identifying Gonatus antarcticus
The team aboard the ship shared the footage with Kat Bolstad, head of the Auckland University of Technology's Lab for Cephalopod Ecology and Systematics—fondly known as the AUT Squid Squad.
'My very favorite thing is when someone sends me a clip and says, 'who's this squid?'' she says.
Bolstad identified the three-foot-long squid as Gonatus antarcticus—the Antarctic Gonate squid.
'This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first live footage of this animal worldwide,' she says.
Before now, the species was only known from carcasses in fishing nets or when the squids' beaks were found in the stomach of fished marine animals.
To confirm the ID, Bolstad was looking for a specific feature: 'On the ends of the two long tentacles, the presence of a single, very large hook,' she says.
Sure enough, there it was on video. 'It's not consistently visible,' she says, 'but it is definitely there.'
Finally visible alive and in its natural habitat, scientists could examine the squid's unique characteristics and form theories about its habits.
'The impressive tentacle hooks are probably used for grasping and subduing prey during ambush predation,' wrote Alex Hayward, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter in England, in an email. Hayward was not involved in the expedition.
Yet we still don't know much about the Antarctic squid.
'Daily life is probably a mixture of an active predatory lifestyle, trying to catch fish to eat, whilst avoiding voracious predators,' says Hayward.
Deep-sea squids have good eyesight and usually avoid the lights of a research vessel, making the chance encounter all the more remarkable.
'We want to see them, but they probably don't want to see us most of the time,' she says. The curious life of a deep sea squid
The squid had scratches on its arms and fresh-looking sucker marks on its mantle.
'Maybe there's been some kind of recent predation attempt that this squid has managed to survive,' says Bolstad, although it's unclear exactly which species was involved in the epic battle.
Hayward wonders if the culprit was a juvenile colossal squid, which has an overlapping range and depth.
(See the first ever video showing the colossal squid alive and in its natural habitat.)
The researchers couldn't confirm the squid's sex from the footage but, if it's female, 'she's nearly twice as big as some other females that have completed their lifecycle,' Bolstad says.
Towards the end of their lives, squid in this family become pale and their tissues break down. 'They're getting kind of puffy,' she says. 'Kind of ragged.'
But this squid seemed to be 'in pretty good shape,' says Bolstad. 'The coloration is still really strong.'
Could this be a male, suggesting that older males don't deteriorate like females do? Or is the animal we know as Gonatus antarcticus made up of more than one species? The experts don't yet know.
This exciting discovery highlights how much there is to learn about the ocean, particularly in the relatively unexplored polar regions.
'In the deep sea, there's always a good chance you're seeing something for the first time,' says Bolstad. 'The potential for discoveries and exploration is pretty much limitless.'
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'By using computer simulations of what such a shower of particles would look like if it had behaved like the ANITA anomalous events, they are able to generate a kind of template for similar events and then search their data to see if anything like that appears.' Gorham, who was not involved with the new research, designed the ANITA experiment and has conducted other research to understand more about the anomalous signals. While the Auger Observatory was designed to measure downward-going particle showers produced in the atmosphere by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, the team redesigned their data analysis to search for upward-going air showers, Vandenbroucke said. Vandenbroucke did not work on the new study, but he peer-reviewed it prior to publication. 'Auger has an enormous collecting area for such events, larger than ANITA,' he said. 'If the ANITA anomalous events are produced by any particle traveling through the Earth and then producing upward-going showers, then Auger should have detected many of them, and it did not.' A separate follow-up study using the IceCube Experiment, which has sensors embedded deep in the Antarctic ice, also searched for the anomalous signals. 'Because IceCube is very sensitive, if the ANITA anomalous events were neutrinos then we would have detected them,' wrote Vandenbroucke, who served as colead of the IceCube Neutrino Sources working group between 2019 and 2022. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' Wissel said. Oddly enough, a different kind of neutrino, called a tau neutrino, is one hypothesis that some scientists have put forth as the cause of the anomalous signals. Tau neutrinos can regenerate. When they decay at high energies, they produce another tau neutrino, as well as a particle called a tau lepton — similar to an electron, but much heavier. But what makes the tau neutrino scenario very unlikely is the steepness of the angle connected to the signal, Wissel said. 'You expect all these tau neutrinos to be very, very close to the horizon, like maybe one to five degrees below the horizon,' Wissel said. 'These are 30 degrees below the horizon. There's just too much material. They really would actually lose quite a bit of energy and not be detectable.' At the end of the day, Gorham and the other scientists have no idea what the origin of the anomalous ANITA events are. So far, no interpretations match up with the signals, which is what keeps drawing scientists back to try to solve the mystery. The answer may be in sight, however. Wissel is also working on a new detector, the Payload for Ultra-High Energy Observations or PUEO, that will fly over Antarctica for a month beginning in December. Larger and 10 times more sensitive than ANITA, PUEO could reveal more information on what is causing the anomalous signals detected by ANITA, Wissel said. 'Right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries,' Wissel said. 'I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should be able to better understand these anomalies which will go a long way to understanding our backgrounds and ultimately detecting neutrinos in the future.' Gorham said that PUEO, an acronym that references the Hawaiian owl, should have the sensitivity to capture many anomalous signals and help scientists find an answer. 'Sometimes you just have to go back to the drawing board and really figure out what these things are,' Wissel said. 'The most likely scenario is that it's some mundane physics that can be explained, but we're sort of knocking on all the doors to try to figure out what those are.'
