Recently, somewhere in the Southern Ocean, a team of fishermen hauled this up from the deep: an adult colossal squid, an animal the size of a school bus and the biggest invertebrate on the planet. But despite its size, we've never found and filmed a fully grown one alive in its natural habitat. Why? For 100 years, people assumed we hadn't seen a big one in the deep because they were rare, elusive, maybe even close to extinction.
But we were wrong. Sperm whales constantly eat colossal squid. In fact, around 77% of the squid biomass in Antarctic sperm whale stomachs is colossal squid. And if you back-calculate to work out how many colossal squid must exist to sustain that many sperm whales, the answer is tens of millions in the Southern Ocean right now. So, we're talking about an animal the size of a school bus. There are tens of millions of them, and yet they're invisible to us.
I've spent the last few years dropping cameras into the deep ocean and the more I understand about this animal, the more I realize that this isn't really a story about an animal that's hard to find. It's a story about how we've been looking and why pretty much everything we've done in the past has been wrong, and what we could possibly do to fix it.
01:20 - The Mistake
03:17 - Invisible Light
04:37 - The Breakthrough
07:56 - So Many Secrets
09:53 - The Least Explored Place on Earth
13:14 - How to Find a Colossal Squid
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Source: BlackWater
@EverythingScience