It has eight arms, two longer feeding tentacles, a beak, a large head, and
two eyes larger than basketballs! These soft-bodied cephalopods are
fast-moving carnivores that catch prey with their tentacles, then poison it
with a bite from beak-like jaws. They move by squirting water through a
siphon, a type of jet propulsion. They have a long, torpedo shaped body.
Just past the mouth are the eyes. Eyes that are the largest in the animal
kingdom, getting as big as eighteen inches across.
Adults are found deep in the ocean, 200 to 1,000 meters (700 to 3,300 feet)
(These are called the "epipelagic" and "mesopelagic" zones). Also found at
the bottom in the bathyal zone - which can be 4,000 meters (13,300 feet)
deep. They are found in the northern Atlantic, from Labrador to the Gulf of
Mexico; northern Norway to the Azores; northern Pacific from the Bering Sea
to the Sea of Japan: southern Japan, Hawaii and California. It is also found
in the Southern Ocean.
All squid move through the ocean using a jet of water forced out of the body
by a siphon. Giant squids are streamlined for speed, and they propel
themselves, often to great depth, by undulating the fins that run down the
sides of their bodies. If danger approaches, expelling a powerful jet of
water produces more rapid movement. A further aid in avoiding predators is
to release ink into their jet stream, which acts as a "smoke screen” that
congeals into a squid-like shape that holds the enemy's attention while the
squid turns pale and jets away.
Their normal diet is sperm whales. Oddly enough sperm whales also eat them.
The male giant squid impregnates spermatophores (packets of sperm) into the
arms of the female. These structures, resembling parasitic worms, must
remain viable in her tissues for some length of time. She is likely to
become fully mature only after mating (quite a few specimens appear to have
mated prior to being fully sexually mature, or at least mature enough to
produce an egg mass), and to store these spermatophores in her arms prior to
egg-mass formation and release. If a mated female were to be accidentally
caught aboard a commercial fishing vessel, then someone could remove from
her both mature eggs and sperm. Egg, sperm and a special female squid jelly
could then be mixed in something equivalent to a petri dish (this has been
done before, for different species of squid), and the young raised from then
on (I'm simplifying the procedure somewhat, but this is the essence of the
technique). Like everything, there will be all manner of obstacles to
overcome — but it's no fun if it's easy.
Sperm whale feeds on giant squid in the dark depths of the ocean.
- Giant Squids have developed hiding to a fine art. They can change skin
color and texture (in most cases) in a split second using pigment cells
called chromatophores. Their survival depends on it!
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