A creature known only from carcasses
For most of scientific history, everything known about giant squid came from specimens that were already dead or dying, carcasses washed ashore, remains found in sperm whale stomachs, or animals caught accidentally and hauled to the surface, none of which could reveal how the animal actually behaved in its own environment. Giant squid themselves are substantial creatures, with bodies reaching roughly 5 metres in length and feeding tentacles extending to about 10 metres, and they possess the largest eyes of any living animal apart from possibly the colossal squid, up to 27 centimetres across, an adaptation suited to detecting the scarce available light at the depths between 300 and 1,000 metres where they typically live. Despite this size and their wide distribution near continental slopes worldwide, no one had ever photographed one alive in its natural habitat before 2004.
Following the whales to find the squid
The breakthrough came from Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, working with Kyoichi Mori. Rather than searching randomly across the vast area giant squid might inhabit, the team used the behaviour of sperm whales, known predators of giant squid, as an indirect guide to a promising search location, ultimately positioning themselves roughly 970 kilometres south of Tokyo, off Japan’s Bonin Islands. On 30 September 2004, they deployed a baited line at a depth of 900 metres, and an eight-metre giant squid attacked it, remaining hooked and struggling against the line for more than four hours, during which time the camera captured over 500 images, the first photographs ever taken of a living giant squid in the wild, before the animal eventually escaped, leaving a severed 5.5-metre tentacle still attached to the line.
A four-hour struggle on a baited line
Kubodera continued pursuing further documentation in the years that followed, and on 4 December 2006 he achieved the first video footage of a live adult giant squid, extending the 2004 photographic breakthrough into moving images for the first time. That achievement held up as a genuine advance in its own right, since capturing motion revealed information about the animal’s movement and physical behaviour that still photographs alone could not, even though the 2006 footage still involved an animal that had been drawn toward the surface by researchers’ equipment rather than one observed entirely undisturbed in its natural deep-sea setting.
Video of an adult, then video in its own world
The most significant remaining gap, footage of a giant squid behaving naturally, unprovoked and undisturbed, in its own deep-sea habitat, was closed in July 2012, when Kubodera worked with Edith Widder and Steve O’Shea to capture the first such video from a submersible. Their approach relied on a bioluminescent lure engineered by Widder to mimic the light pattern of a distressed jellyfish, a signal known to attract predators looking for an easy meal in the deep sea, rather than any conventional bait. The resulting footage showed the giant squid actively hunting, a genuinely aggressive predator rather than the largely passive, drifting animal that prior indirect evidence and assumptions about its low metabolic needs had led many researchers to expect.
A lure built to mimic panic
The behavioural finding mattered beyond simply confirming that giant squid could be filmed at all. Prior assumptions about giant squid as slow, low-energy drifters had been based almost entirely on indirect evidence, stomach contents of predators, the condition of recovered carcasses, and general theoretical expectations about the energy costs of life at depth, none of which could actually settle how the animal hunted or moved when undisturbed. Direct observation of active, aggressive hunting behaviour overturned that picture with a specificity indirect evidence never could have provided, illustrating how much basic natural history about even large, striking animals can remain genuinely unknown simply because no one had yet managed to observe the creature alive in its own setting.
An active hunter, not a passive drifter
This is a satisfying and worthwhile story precisely because it shows how much patient, indirect reasoning, following whale behaviour to find a likely search area, engineering a lure around another species’ distress signal, went into achieving something as seemingly simple as photographing a large animal. Each of the three milestones, the 2004 photographs, the 2006 video, and the 2012 natural-habitat footage from a submersible, represents a distinct and separately hard-won achievement rather than one continuous discovery, and together they replaced decades of inference about giant squid behaviour with direct observation. Anyone curious how much of even prominent, well-known animal behaviour remains genuinely unobserved until someone works out how to actually look will find this well worth the time.