In fact, it was unlike anything Vecchione had ever seen or heard of before: A squid suspended by undulating fins much larger than its body, with long, spindly arms bent sharply before draping down into the darkness like ghostly gossamer. Credit: Michael Vecchione et al, Science, December 21, 2001īut the grainy footage was not of a giant squid. The first video Vecchione received, filmed in January of 2000, unveiled an unusual squid with a craned arm posture when it was first encountered in the Gulf of Mexico. He thought, “That’s got to be a giant squid,” an elusive species that biologists had been trying to capture alive on camera for decades. But in 2001, he received a call that immediately grabbed his attention.Ī woman in Louisiana described an odd, large squid-more than 20 feet long-that her boyfriend had filmed while remotely operating an oil company vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: © 2001 MBARIĭo you want to go back in time with SciFri? Sign up for the Science Friday Rewind newsletter to get more never-before digitized stories and audio bites from our archives!Īs curator of cephalopods at Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Mike Vecchione is no stranger to the occasional inquiry about unknown creatures dwelling in the deep sea. It was one of the eight videos cephalopod curator Mike Vecchione came across in trying to identify the creature. This individual was estimated to be four to five meters long. A long-armed “mystery squid” observed by MBARI’s ROV Tiburon off the coast of Oahu at a depth of 3,380 meters in May 2001.
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