17 hours Ago By Julia Baird
For centuries, fuelled by stories of mythical, serpent-like monsters, people have been fearful of the deep sea. James Joyce described it as “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening”. In truth, while less than five per cent of the deep sea has been explored, we now know it is a place of both marvel and mystery, of sparkling lights, vivid colour and extremely odd-looking, ugly fish.
Colossal squid caught on video in the wild for the first time. Credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute This week, the discovery that a baby colossal squid has been spied for the first time in its own habitat, in freezing cold water, was particularly startling. There it was, a wee thing at only 30 centimetres, pulsing through the far South Atlantic Ocean with a transparent body, so delicate it looked like it had been spun by a glassmaker, with bright, luminous eyes and elegantly curling arms.
Squid biologist Aaron Evans said he “started hyperventilating” when it became clear that the footage he was sent of a wriggly creature with fins and tentacles, was indeed a colossal squid. Once, these invertebrates were simply the stuff of legends which claimed their tentacles were large enough to toss ships into the air. Then, a giant squid was first spied in 1925, a hundred years ago – or at least parts of it were, in the belly of a sperm whale.
Since then, there have been only eight reported sightings, mostly of their indigestible bits, like beaks, inside whales. As the name might suggest, colossal squid are enormous, growing to seven metres long, weighing as much as half a tonne. Their eyes are as big as basketballs, large enough to detect the flashing lights of organisms disturbed by their predators, big whales.
They have sharp, curved hooks on their arms. Marine biologists were delighted. Kat Bolstad, from the Auckland University of Technology, said: “We get to introduce the live colossal squid to the world as this beautiful, little, delicate animal.
[This] highlights the magnificence of a lot of deep-sea creatures without some of that monster hype.” This colossal squid was caught in Antarctic waters in 2007 and weighed about 470 kilograms. Credit: Getty Images But the significance of this footage goes far beyond the sighting of a pretty puntilla.
It should alert us to the importance of the depths we know so little about yet are increasingly willing to plunder. The ocean represents 99.5 per cent of the biosphere, of all the living space on the planet, and is a vital carbon sink.
There are hundreds of thousands of undiscovered species. We don’t know what most of them even do down there. But we do know that marine litter lies on the sea bed, and that the deep ocean acts as a sink for microplastics, where they lie in sediments and pool in trenches, even in the most remote places.
In 2020, the CSIRO estimated that the ocean floor holds about 14 million tons of microplastics (though a 2024 study puts the figure slightly lower). Plastic has been found at 10,000 metres deep, at a depth we have barely explored and barely understand. What will this come to mean? The ecosystems are wildly diverse, but fragile.
Now, a burgeoning “blue economy” has resulted in mining in the deep sea for precious metals and non-renewable minerals such as copper, cobalt and nickel that we use in phones and batteries, as well as offshore mining for coal and gas. The potential is immense. Bacteria and sponges are the source of important cancer-fighting medicines and antibiotics.
Scientists have found bacterium in sea microbes that produces chemicals which may slow growth of melanoma and colon cancer cells, as well as AIDS and herpes. Oceanography professor William Fenical, director of the Centre for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography is doing incredible research into marine medical possibilities. He recently found a jellyfish bacterium that can kill some human cancer cells and could temper inflammation related to arthritis and asthma.
There is much promise, for cures for diseases, new kinds of food or energy in the deep ocean, but caution is crucial. A glowing, deep sea jellyfish called Chrysaora pacifica. Credit: iStock Deep-sea explorer Edie Widder, senior scientist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association says: “We are, by nature, explorers.
Humans have a history of exploration followed by exploitation. But in the ocean, weirdly, we reversed it. We’ve actually exploited the ocean before we’ve explored it.
” The deep sea is an almost inexhaustible source of awe. I’ve always loved it, the flashes of bioluminescence in the darkness, the glowing jellyfish, the ugly angler fish using a light to lure prey, the blobfish that is svelte in the depths but becomes flabby and shapeless when pressure eases in shallower waters, and all the canny techniques the fish use to survive. I love the neon colours of the creatures who live under Arctic ice.
I spent years pushing strollers around the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and would sit for hours in the Hall of Ocean Life as my babies slept, under the model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling, soothed by the unearthly sounds of marine depths piped through the sound system. In the back left-hand corner on the bottom level is an eerie diorama of a giant squid and a whale in a mighty struggle; the squid’s tentacles wrapped around the snout of the whale, barely visible due to the desire to remain true to the blackness of the sea, where sunlight cannot penetrate. I’ve written and thought about awe a lot, and its pursuit has shaped my life.
But there is a responsibility to relishing awe – making sure that future generations will also be able to be buoyed by the same sights, the same beauty, the same wonders. Just in the past few weeks, an intense marine heatwave has led to significant bleaching of coral at the magnificent Ningaloo Reef, which is heartbreaking. But we cannot afford despair.
Australians have salt water in their veins: surfers at Shelly Beach on Good Friday. Credit: Sam Mooy We Australians have salt water in our veins, we don’t need academics to conduct studies to tell us we care about the ocean. That baby squid, waving tiny tentacles in remote, cold waters should remind us, too, that we are intrinsically connected, that we rely on the sea and need to protect its depths as well as its surfaces.
Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything . Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own.
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