Over the next several days, as the Tiburon descended as deep as two miles, we saw hundreds of squid: blue-eyed ones, translucent ones, polka-dotted ones. Observing these squid in their natural habitat, Robison said, provided clues to the behavior of their giant relative. When a camera zoomed in on an individual squid, we could see water entering the muscular sac, or mantle, that contains the squid’s internal organs; it then inflated and contracted, shooting the water out through a funnel and propelling the squid like a bullet through the ocean. Watching the animals outrace the robot, I had a sense of why Clyde Roper once said of squid, “The only ones you catch are the slow, the sick, and the stupid.”
Another reason for their elusiveness is their unusually large eyes, which enable them to discern predators in places where light is nearly absent. (The giant squid’s eyes are thought to be the largest of any animal.) Squid also have highly developed brains for an invertebrate, and have nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those in human beings-allowing them to react in an instant. (For many decades, neuroscientists have relied on squid neurons for their research.) “By observing squid in their natural habitat, we have discovered that they are much more intelligent, much more complex than anything we suspected,” Robison said.
As we watched, the squid seemed to be using light patterns, colors, and postures as a means of communication. They didn’t just turn red or pink or yellow; ripples of color would wash across their bodies. And they would contort their arms into elaborate arrangements-sometimes balling them together, or holding them above their heads, like flamenco dancers. Robison explained that they use these movements and color changes to warn other squid of predators, to perform mating rituals, to attract prey, and to conceal themselves.
Several times, when the Tiburon got too close to them, the squid ejected streams of black ink. In the past, scientists assumed that it served solely as camouflage or a decoy. Robison told me that he and other scientists now believe the ink contains chemicals that disable predators; this would explain why he has seen deep-sea squid release black nimbuses in depths where there is no light. “As much as we know about squid, we still don’t know that much,” he said.
Robison noted that the behavior of giant squid, in particular, was poorly understood. No one knows just how aggressive giant squid are, whether they hunt alone or in packs, or whether, as legend has it, they will attack people as well as fish. After Robison caught the tentacle and descended in a submersible to the same spot, he said, “It occurred to me that there was a pissed-off squid out there with a grudge against me.” (Other scientists suspect that the giant squid’s violent reputation is undeserved; O’Shea, for one, contends that Architeuthis is probably a “gentle beast.”)
The expedition ended without a glimpse of Architeuthis, but, at one point, several jumbo squid did appear on the ship’s screens. They were only a fraction of the size of a giant squid-between five and eight feet in length and a hundred or so pounds-but they looked frighteningly strong. One night, several of the ship’s scientists dropped a jig, a device specially designed to lure squid, over the side of the boat. They caught two jumbo squid. As they reeled each squid in, screaming, “Pump him up!,” the weight and strength of the animals nearly pulled the men overboard. Several minutes later, Robison and I went to the ship’s laboratory, where a scientist held up one of the jumbo squid. The creature was nearly as long as Robison is tall, and its tentacles were still lashing and writhing. “Now imagine a giant squid with a tentacle thirty feet long,” he said.
After the squid was dissected, part of it was given to the cook. The next day, it appeared on a silver platter. “From beast to feast,” the chef said, as we sat down for supper.
“Shall we take a peek?” O’Shea said, leaning over the stern of the boat. It was after midnight, several hours since we had dropped the traps in the water; the rain had stopped, but a cold wind swirled around us. As the boat rocked in the waves, O’Shea pulled in the line, hand over hand, because the boat didn’t have winches. The traps weighed at least fifty pounds, and he climbed up on the side of the boat to get a better grip, his bare feet spread apart. As the first net emerged from the water, O’Shea shouted for Conway and me to haul it in, and we laid it on the deck, as icy water spilled around our feet. “Hurry, chappies,” O’Shea said. “Get the torch.”
Conway shined the flashlight into the net. There were no squid, but there were swarms of krill, and O’Shea seemed buoyed by the discovery. “We’re definitely in squid eating country,” he said.
He dropped the nets overboard again, anchoring them in place, and began the next phase of the hunt-towing a third, larger net behind the boat. “We’ll trawl for fifteen minutes at about one and a half knots,” O’Shea said. The maneuver was a delicate one, he explained: if he trawled too deep or not deep enough, the paralarvae would escape the net; if he trawled for too long, the net would suffocate what he caught. We drove the boat around for precisely fifteen minutes, then pulled in the net and dumped its contents-a thick, granular goop-into a cylindrical tank filled with seawater. The tank instantly lit up from all the bioluminescence. “There’s plenty of life in there, that’s for sure,” O’Shea said.
He found no Architeuthis in the tank, but he was undaunted. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” he said.
By all accounts, O’Shea is tireless and single-minded: he works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and he no longer watches TV or reads newspapers. He never attends parties. “I’m not antisocial,” he said. “I just don’t socialize.” His sister told me, “We’d love him even if he chased mushrooms, but we just wish he’d spend the same emotion on people as he did on squid.” Shoba, his wife, who often calls him to remind him to eat lunch, said, “I don’t want him to stop. I just wish he could temper it a little bit and see that there are other things out there.”
People inevitably compare O’Shea’s quest to that of Captain Ahab. But, unlike Melville’s character, O’Shea does not think of the creature he pursues in grand symbolic terms. Indeed, he is constantly trying to strip the giant squid of its lore. He considers books like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” to be “rubbish;” his studies of dead specimens have led him to believe that the longest recorded measurement of a giant squid-fifty-seven feet-is apocryphal. “Now, if someone really wanted to prostitute the truth all they have to do is take the tentacle and walk and walk and walk,” he once told me. “The bloody things are like rubber bands, and you can make a forty-foot squid suddenly look sixty feet.” Unlike some other hunters, he thinks it is ridiculous to imagine that a giant squid could kill a sperm whale. He thinks of the giant squid as both majestic and mundane- with a precise weight, diet, length, and life span. He wants it, in short, to be real. “We have to move beyond this mythical monster and see it as it is,” O’Shea said. “Isn’t that enough?”
After a while, he stood and dropped the trawling net back in the water. We worked until after sunrise. When we still hadn’t found any squid, O’Shea said, “An expedition that begins badly usually ends well.”
At the cabin, Conway and I took a brief nap while O’Shea plotted our next course. In the afternoon, we ventured into town for supplies. O’Shea warned us not to use his real name; he had recently campaigned to shut down a nearby fishery in order to protect the wildlife, and he said that he had received several death threats. “This is quite dangerous country for me,” he said.