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The Mysterious Giant Squid
By Wendy Tucker
 In the 1500s, what we now know to be the giant squid was then considered a monster of enormous size and terrifying temperament. Once sailors left sight of land, they knew the potential results of an encounter with the creature they called Kraken. While the reality is that the giant squid is a very large animal, it also seems to be rather benign and quite unconcerned with today's sailors.
In 1851, Herman Melville wrote the epic masterpiece Moby Dick. Melville described his monster as an oceanic eyesore of “vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length... with long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.” Other lurid, but unsubstantiated stories abounded; one had six French men-of-war and the four British ships that had captured them, all being dragged under by a gigantic cuttlefish!
The mystery surrounding these animals is not easily dispelled, especially not with the likes of Jules Verne and Peter Benchley creating and encouraging their own myths. In 1861, a French corvette attacked a 25-foot squid off the island of Tenerife with cannon and rifle fire. The crew then tried to haul it aboard, but got only the tail end. Verne altered some of the details of this incident and wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus is attacked by a “terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.” In addition to giving the giant squid a vicious and implacable disposition, Verne exaggerates most of its physical attributes. More than a century later, novelist Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, wrote Beast, which featured a vengeful 100-foot-long squid!
The earliest realistic record of Architeuthis is of an animal beached on Iceland’s shore in 1639. More sightings followed throughout the years. In the 1850s, Danish zoologist Japetus Steenstrup analysed these accounts and examined some recent specimens. He concluded that the alleged sea monsters were, in fact, nothing more fantastic than giant versions of squid.
Since no living giant squid has ever been maintained in an aquarium or research institution, they remain an enigma. The giant squid is a cephalopod (“head-foot”), the class of marine animals that also includes the cuttlefish, octopus and the chambered nautilus. Some squid are tiny, little more than an inch long. The giant squid, however, lives up to its name. The largest specimen ever measured washed ashore in New Zealand in the late 1800s, stretching 60 feet from the tip of its torpedo-shaped body to the ends of its two feeding tentacles, which are much longer than the other eight arms, and weighed approximately 1 ton. The mesmerising eyes of the giant squid, with prominent dark irises, are the largest in the animal kingdom, known to be as big as dinner plates. At the centre of the crown of arms is the creature’s mouth, with a strong parrot-like beak and a rasping, toothed tongue called the radula. The powerful arms, thick as a man’s thigh, bear rows of sharply toothed circular suckers, as do the club-like ends of its muscular tentacles.
Today, probably more is known about dinosaurs than about the giant squid because of its elusive nature, and many mysteries remain unsolved regarding this enormous creature.
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