Giant squid are a set of species of decapod cephalopods belonging to the genus Architeuthis. In their vernacular name the word giant is reserved for species of the genus Architeuthis, while gender is assigned Mesonychoteuthis the vernacular name is the colossal squid.

We know today that the giant squid live at depths exceeding 500 meters and can be found on the surface or undergo stranding on a beach on very rare occasions. At times remote testimony relating a meeting with such strange animals was questioned in the often disbelief. Though it also may have been the source of belief in some strange mystical creatures such as the kraken of Scandinavian mythology. Yet during the nineteenth century with the development of the hunt for sperm whales and especially with the increasing number of scientific expeditions, evidence increasingly became concrete (in the form of specimens found in stranding or in the form of leftover food from stomachs of sperm whales caught) that have come to firmly prove the existence of such creatures.

The Danish Johan Japetus Steenstrup established the genus Architeuthis in 1857 with the first scientific description of giant squid. Four years later, in 1861, the crew of the French Aviso Alecton, sailing off the coast of Tenerife, on the surface saw a giant squid which tried to climb on board, fortunately for the crew without success. It is based on the discovery of that Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea described the Nautilus’s run in with “a squid of colossal dimensions with eight meters in length.” In 1958, Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of Crypto zoology, traces the history of the discovery of deep-sea animals (”In the wake of sea monsters”, reprinted and expanded in 1974). This reference deals half with the giant squid and super-giants that have failed to be caught or proven to exist throughout the world for centuries until more recent times showing that animals that are believed to be mythical may in fact be real but we may simply be missing evidence right now of them.

The maximum size that these giant squid can achieve is not exactly known, but specimens of a total length of about 18 m, of which more than 11 m is tentacles have already been studied. In July 2002, a giant squid was found weighing over 500 pounds (with a body of 7.50 m and tentacles measured 15 m long) was found on the beaches of Tasmania. A giant squid eye measuring 40 centimeters in diameter was found in the stomach of a sperm whale which suggests the existence of specimens measuring up to 25 meters long, with tentacles, still found in the stomach of a sperm, suggesting a specimen from 45 to 50 meters long, suckers traces of a large broad base support the hypothesis that this species can reach 60 meters. No complete specimen with such measurements has yet been discovered to date.

Works Cited

Kubodera, T. & K. Mori 2005. First-ever Observations of a live giant squid in the wild. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 272(1581):2583-2586.

Soto, N.A., M.P. Johnson, P.T. Madsen, F. Díaz, I. Domínguez, A. Brito & P. Tyack 2008. Cheetahs of the deep sea: deep foraging sprints in short-finned pilot whales off Tenerife (Canary Islands). Journal of Animal Ecology.

Ellis, R. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid. Lyons Press (London).