NUS Module Blogs

National Geographic News, 22 Dec 2006 — Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures.

Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo. His team snared the animal using a line baited with small squid and shot video of the russet-colored giant as it was hauled to the surface.

The squid, a young female, "put up quite a fight" as the team attempted to bring it aboard, Kudobera told the Associated Press, and the animal died from injuries sustained during the capture.

Giant squid, the world's largest invertebrates, are thought to reach sizes up to 60 feet (18 meters), but because they live at such great ocean depths they have never been studied in the wild. Kubodera has spent three years searching for the creatures, and his team scored a coup in 2004 when it used a remote underwater camera to take the first-ever photographs of a live giant squid.

The capture may be a sign that giant squid are more plentiful than had been thought, Kubodera said, and the event could help open up more fruitful research into the poorly understood animal. "Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future," he said. —Blake de Pastino

See also National Geographic Fast Facts: Giant Squid (Architeuthis dux).

Z. Hogan, I. G. Baird, R. Radtke & M. J. Vander Zanden, 2007. Long distance migration and marine habitation in the tropical Asian catfish, Pangasius krempfi. Journal of Fish Biology, 71(3): 818–832. Highlights are reported here: "Pangasius catfish is anadromous," by Ng Heok Hee. Practical Fish Keeping, 28 Aug 2007.

For the story behind the collaborative research, read "The Imperiled Giants of the Mekong," by Zeb S. Hogan, Peter B. Moyle, Bernie May, M. Jake Vander Zanden & Ian G. Baird. American Scientist, 92(3): 228.

Excerpt - "...most interesting was the presence of large (meter-long) silver-toned catfish (Pangasius krempfi) in many fishmongers' stalls. Why were silver-toned catfish a surprise? A few years before Hogan arrived in Thailand, Baird had reported that this species could be found in the South China Sea and also in southern Laos. Baird surmised that this migratory catfish might be anadromous, traveling from the marine waters of the South China Sea up the Mekong through Vietnam and Cambodia and into Laos, where they presumably spawned.

His basic theory, along with Hogan's later observation of this species in Nong Khai, Thailand (about 1,600 kilometers upstream of the Mekong Delta), provided impetus for a study of the silver-toned catfish that could better document its travels. [Hogan and Baird]began by carefully examining, of all things, small structures in its ears [the otoliths]"

"Radtke and Kinzie found that otoliths can also indicate events that take place as the animals mature. In particular, the ratio of strontium to calcium in an otolith records whether the fish had been living in salt water or fresh water, because strontium concentrations in the ocean are one to two orders of magnitude greater than in rivers or streams."