Monster of the Deep

But a half-ton squid was no laughing matter to Bennett and his crew. Getting it aboard took nearly two hours. It was slippery, Bennett said, much more "gelatinous" than his previous squid quarry. Though he says he never felt threatened by the creature, Bennett did get a close-up view of its massive beak, which he believes could have easily crunched his forearm. "Being alongside a creature like this is just awesome," he says. "It's easy to see why outlandish stories about them get stretched out."

Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. "It really didn't put up much of a fight," he says. "Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea."

As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about Antarctic toothfishing for a New Zealand TV station (that's Chilean sea bass to you and me). He was able to capture a good bit of footage of the squid being hauled in. Bennett confirms that a production company in Auckland bought the footage, though he declines to specify what he was paid. An official with the Ministry of Fisheries told NEWSWEEK that offers to buy the footage had been pouring in and that some were "longer than a telephone number." Bennett said that a documentary featuring the coveted footage should be released sometime in April.

Once aboard, the squid was lowered into the ship's cargo hold and put on ice for the next two weeks as Bennett and his crew chugged 1,700 miles back to the southern coast of New Zealand. The squid remains frozen solid as preparations are being made to hand it over to the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. That should happen on March 11, O'Shea says. But first, museum officials have to figure out how to store the thing. "The problem is we haven't seen it yet," says museum spokesperson Jane Keig. "We need to get it here to see how we'll preserve it."

That won't be easy, says O'Shea. "We're dealing with a 450-kilogram frozen lump of flesh. We've got to have a specially designed tank constructed." O'Shea estimates that it could take up to four days for the squid to completely thaw out, a delicate process that will leave him and his colleagues only a small time frame in which to take samples and examine it. Still, those precious minutes could prove more valuable than years worth of colossal squid research. "The scientific value is enormous. It'll more than double our knowledge," says O'Shea, who hopes the research will shed light on the species' hunting and mating behavior, its age and its intelligence (which O'Shea already suspects to be fairly negligible). The brain of a 275-kilogram giant squid is only about 20 grams and shaped like a doughnut, he says, "There's not a lot of comprehension going on up there." Might the colossal squid be brighter than its smaller cousin? "Doubtful," says O'Shea. "In all likelihood, it's one of the stupidest creatures in the sea."

As O'Shea prepares to study the half-ton specimen, he remains convinced there are bigger squids still to be found at sea. "There's probably a female out there that's a full ton," he says, noting that females tend to be half again as large as their male counterparts. Until Bennett sails again, it seems, the half-ton specimen will just have to do.

© 2007