Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea Page 14

  The biggest one accepted by me was seventy-three feet long; by the time it washed up on a beach in eastern Canada, some of its arms had been eaten away, so it could not be accurately measured, but reputable scientists extrapolated from the substantial remains that the animal would have been seventy-three feet long.

  I’m prepared to believe, furthermore, that somewhere in the deep ocean there lives a giant squid more than a hundred feet long. While I was doing research for Beast more than a decade ago, I spoke by phone with one of the world’s two great teuthologists (squid scientists). He was ill then and would die soon thereafter, and though he was helpful and forthcoming, he insisted that I not attribute anything he said directly to him, for he didn’t want to risk his reputation or his place in the pantheon of teuthology. He told me that his lifetime of study had convinced him that the existence of a 150-foot giant squid was not only possible but probable.

  Imagine a squid half the length of a football field … a squid that, standing on end, would reach fifteen stories into the air … a squid longer than three locomotives … a squid … well, you get the idea.

  Giant squid seem to inhabit the oceans’ midwater range, between 1,800 and 3,500 feet; that, at least, is where most of the specimens caught recently in fishing nets have been found. There is practically no light at those depths except for what is generated by creatures that are themselves bioluminescent (like many squid), and giant squid have enormous eyes (the largest in the animal kingdom) that can attain a diameter of fifteen inches and, presumably, can gather in every available atom of light.

  Throughout history (all the way back to Homer) there have been stories of giant squid attacking and sinking ships. Many of these tales have been supported by witnesses and newspaper accounts, but none have been completely authenticated. Countless stories exist of monster squid assaulting fishermen and plucking hapless shipwreck survivors from lifeboats. None of those would stand up in court, either, though I’m convinced that several, though perhaps wildly exaggerated, spring from seeds of truth. There are, simply, too many accounts by too many rational people with too little to gain by fashioning silly fictions for them all to be fantasies or hallucinations.

  Certainly, giant squid have the equipment with which to wreak havoc on small boats and all humans. Although Architeuthis does not have (as I posited in Beast) claws within each sucker on its tentacles—claws that are present in many smaller, more aggressive species of squid—its suckers do possess rings of hard, sharp “teeth” made of chitin (the same stuff some mollusk shells are made of), which gnaw into prey and drag it toward the animal’s big, sharp beak. The beak, in turn, slashes the prey to pieces and feeds it to the squid’s studded tongue, which forces the flesh down into the gut.

  A lovely way to go, no?

  Among the many things not known about giant squid are how big they can grow, how fast they grow, how long they live, exactly what they feed on (it is known that sperm whales feed on them), where they hang out, whether or not they are aggressive, whether or not they are as immensely powerful as legend insists, and why they die. Every year, all over the world, a great many giant squid just seem to die. Because their flesh is loaded with ammonium ions, which are lighter than water, their bodies float rather than sink. Some are consumed by sharks and other fish, but some float all the way to shore more or less intact.

  My fascination with giant squid began in the late 1970s, when Teddy Tucker and I decided to try to catch one off Bermuda, where giant-squid bodies—and pieces of bodies—were found floating on the surface quite often. We went out at night and from the stern of his boat lowered two 3,000-foot lengths of cable woven of forty-eight strands of stainless steel. Each cable carried clusters of baited hooks of varying sizes, plus Cyalume chemical lights, which, we hoped, would attract the squids’ attention.

  We had visions of grotesque monsters in the Stygian deep, throbbing with the colors of excitement (all squid have in their flesh chromatophores that allow them to change color with the speed of a strobe) as they attacked our baits; of titanic struggles as the cables thrummed with strain and spat droplets of water from each stressed strand; of the stern of the boat being pulled down, down, until—perhaps—Teddy would decide that the only way to save our lives would be to sever the cables with the axe he had stowed by the transom.

  We waited all night, bouncing around in rough seas, and got nary a nibble on either cable. At dawn, morose with disappointment, we began to haul in the cables on giant spools.

  They came in easily. Too easily, in fact. Strange.

  The five-hundred-foot marker passed, then the thousand-foot, and with every turn of the spool the cable seemed lighter, much lighter, weirdly light. The fifteen-hundred-foot marker passed, and now the cables felt too light. Definitely.

  Over the stern the cables popped. The lights were gone, the baits were gone, the hooks were gone. The final thousand feet of cable were gone.

  The cables had been severed. They hadn’t popped from weight or stress; the strands were all still tightly wrapped. They had been cut. Bitten off.

  Gloom gave way to excitement. What could have done this? Not a shark; no gigantic fish had swallowed the baited hooks and tried to run with them. We would have felt it; the boat would have moved. And no shark tooth was hard enough to cut through an eighth of an inch of stainless steel.

  We couldn’t have foul-hooked a whale. Sure, the weight of a whale would have been enough to break the cable, but the cable ends would be splayed, the strands all askew.

  Whatever had bitten through our cables, we decided, had a beak as hard as Kevlar. (How, you ask, could we make that leap of logic? Easy: we wanted to.) And what had such a beak?

  Why, nothing—nothing, that is, except a giant squid.

  Clearly, this was an animal worth pursuing.

  We tried the next year, and the next. We’ve tried, in fact, every year since then. Always we’ve been teased; never have we been successful.

  We’ve hung cameras down to two and three thousand feet and focused them on baited hooks. We’ve seen creatures bizarre and wonderful—vicious little squid that savaged our bait till all that was left were scales; curious, unknown sharks that live only in that particular part of the deep—but never a sign of Architeuthis.

  One day we set a baited line half a mile down and buoyed it with three rubber balls, each designed to float five hundred pounds. We left the line for a couple of hours while we went to set others, and when we returned, the balls were gone.

  For fifteen or twenty minutes we searched back and forth. There was no question that we were in the right place; Teddy has an uncanny ability to locate himself in the open ocean, especially off Bermuda, where he can pinpoint his position by triangulating landmarks.

  The balls were gone. Simple as that.

  Just as we were about to abandon them—yet another mystery never to be solved—there was a roaring, whooshing sound off the port side of Teddy’s boat, and one by one—Pow! Pow! Pow!—the three balls burst through the surface, still connected together, and bobbed placidly on the calm sea, as if they’d never been gone at all.

  When we pulled in the half mile of line—heavy-duty polypropylene rope, to be precise—all the hooks were gone, as were all the baits, and, once again, the strands of the rope were still tightly bound. Something had pulled and pulled and pulled, with a force great enough to sink three quarters of a ton, and then bitten through the rope.

  In the early 1990s, when I was host of an ESPN series of shows called Expedition Earth, produced by the enterprising and indefatigable John Wilcox, we spent nearly three years putting together an hour on giant squid. Because we knew that the chances of our being able to film one in the wild were close to nil, we filmed some of the animals closely associated with Architeuthis.

  We traveled again to Canada, this time to dive—in January, no less, and in falling snow—with the squid’s fabulous cousin, the giant octopus. Documented as large as sixteen feet in diameter, but averred in legend to grow to great
er than twenty feet from tentacle tip to tentacle tip, giant octopuses are shy, reclusive, and, when they can be coaxed out of their dens, fascinating to watch as they scurry across the sea floor, changing color and pattern to camouflage themselves to match the bottom they’re on or over.

  We swam with Caribbean sperm whales in the deep waters around Dominica and Martinique, hoping—against all odds—to catch some interaction between whale and squid. The only squid I saw, however, were ex-squid, former squid, squid that (like the famous Monty Python parrot) were no more; as I snorkeled beside a fifty-foot-long adult sperm whale, she sounded, and left me, as a parting gift, enveloped in a thick red cloud of eaten, digested, and excreted giant squid.

  We acquired old woodcut prints of beached giant squid, amateur video footage of giant squid killed in fishing nets, and some extraordinary footage shot by Howard Hall of a hundred-pound Humboldt squid—considered by Mexican fishermen to be more dangerous to man than any sharks—ripping apart a big tuna being hand-fed to it by Bob Cranston. (One of Howard’s other colleagues was later attacked by three Humboldt squid and was lucky to escape with his life.)

  In the end we put together a good hourlong show that was, I believe, informative and entertaining—all, of course, without once succeeding in finding a single giant squid.

  Over the past decade, more and more dead and dying giant squid have been caught by net fishermen, particularly in the waters off New Zealand. The reason is not a sudden population increase in giant squid but relatively recent technological advances that have given deep-sea trawlers access to fish in water two thousand to five thousand feet deep. There, evidently, the squid spend a good deal of their time feeding on, among other things, a species of midwater fish called orange roughy.

  Orange roughies are amazing fish, only about a foot long, that can live for more than a century. Ellis says that “there are documented records of individuals that have reached 150.” They don’t mature until they’re about thirty years old, and because they tend to gather in tight schools, they’re easy prey for deep trawlers. A five-minute trawl, according to Ellis, “can fill a trawl net with 10 to 50 tons of fish.”

  Consequently, orange roughies are being wiped out at an alarming rate. The fishery is only twenty-three years old, and already catches have declined drastically. Some scientists believe that orange roughies may eventually set a record for the speed with which any species (of anything) has gone from initial discovery to commercial extinction.

  Meanwhile, though, the presence of giant squid among the orange-roughy populations has lured legions of passionate teuthophiles (squid lovers)—scientists, writers, divers, and filmmakers—to embark upon multimillion-dollar expeditions to find giant squid by using submersibles, fifty-thousand-dollar-a-day ships, and the highest of high-tech locating gear.

  None has ever seen a giant squid—let alone caught one or filmed a live one swimming in the sea—and, I confess, I’m glad.

  Architeuthis is one of the few true mysteries left on earth, an animal of mythic stature that we know exists but we cannot find, a real creature that is at the same time an ancient, enduring legend, a spur to scientific quest and an inspiration to mankind’s imagination.

  It is the last dragon. We need our dragons, for they help our fancies soar beyond the boundaries of grim reality.

  I hope that the giant squid successfully eludes us for years to come, for to find the dragon will be to kill it, and to make it disappear forever.

  14

  Even More Creatures to Avoid … and Respect

  Among the immense citizenry of the sea there are innumerable other living things that appear to be immobile, inert, innocuous, inanimate, or sentient and even friendly … but that can, in fact, be dangerous to the uninitiated, the careless, or the unlucky.

  Many corals are poisonous to the touch; they possess stinging cells that are used both for defense and to paralyze prey. The most common of the toxic corals—at least as far as swimmers, snorkelers, and divers are concerned—is fire coral, which looks like mustard that has been painted onto parts of a reef. Slick, motionless, and innocuous-looking, fire coral can deliver a thoroughly nasty sting to an inquiring hand.

  Sea anemones are poisonous, too. Their beautiful, waving tentacles present themselves as harmless because colorful little fishes swim all around them with no ill effects. In fact, each tentacle is armed with nematocysts that fire toxic harpoons into anything that touches them—except the colorful little fishes (usually clownfish), which are coated with a mucus that renders them immune to the anemone’s poison. The relationship is pure symbiosis: the anemone protects the clownfish from other predators; in return, the clownfish removes food particles and other debris from the anemone, keeping it clean and healthy.

  Several species of mantis shrimp can grow to more than a foot in length, including those that live in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Australia, where they’re known as “killer prawns.” If that sounds melodramatic, consider: each has a pair of limbs that fold like the forearms of a praying mantis (hence the name). The limbs unfold like a jackknife, at the speed of light, and the blades are so strong and sharp that they can amputate a human finger with a single stroke. Mantis shrimp are fearless and aggressive, and I know several underwater photographers who are seriously afraid of them; when a photographer is concentrating on getting a macro shot of an infinitesimal creature hiding in a reef, he isn’t thinking about what might be burrowed in the sand beside him, ready to pounce and slash his flesh to ribbons.

  Spiny sea urchins, black, bristly balls that live on the sea bottom, are harmless—until you happen to step on or bump into one, at which point one or more of the hundreds of spines spear you and break off in your flesh. Some species have poisonous spines and some don’t, but any urchin spine is amazingly painful, difficult to extract (they keep breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces), and a potential infection.

  Some oceangoing critters are obviously dangerous and to be avoided at all costs: saltwater crocodiles leap quickly to mind. Years ago, during one of my futile attempts to translate Roger Caras’s book Dangerous to Man to television, I worked with a researcher from the National Geographic Society to assemble a list of the ten most dangerous animals in the world. We found it impossible not to include saltwater crocodiles.

  They live all over the western Pacific, in freshwater rivers and brackish swamps as well as in the sea. They eat virtually anything they can catch, and they stalk and catch almost anything: birds, monkeys, turtles, fish, crabs, buffaloes, and—documented many times—human beings. They’re known to grow to at least twenty-three feet long (Ellis says they’re the largest of all the living reptiles), and they regularly swim hundreds of miles out into the open ocean.

  A friend of mine was once contemplating a trip around the Pacific in a collapsible kayak, and one part of his journey would take him across the Torres Strait, which separates northern Australia from New Guinea. He asked me about the chances of his encountering aggressive sharks. I told him I wouldn’t be half so afraid of sharks as of the “salties,” which have been known to attack and destroy boats much more substantial than collapsible kayaks.

  A version of the saltwater crocodile lives in the mangrove swamps around Cuba (and, I assume, elsewhere in the Caribbean), but it is much smaller. I believe that it’s technically a caiman, which means it’s a closer relative to an alligator than a crocodile. David Doubilet was introduced to one while we were doing a story on underwater Cuba, and he found it to be quite docile.

  Still …

  Other sea creatures have completely surprised me when, over the years, I’ve discovered in them a dangerous trait. But in every case I’ve come to realize that it’s the human that has gotten in harm’s way, not the animal that’s suddenly turned mean.

  I’m speaking here specifically of groupers, bluefish, and, believe it or not, certain species of dolphins.

  The one dicey moment I’ve witnessed with a grouper happened in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a
small archipelago south of the Bahamas. A woman in our crew had decided to go for a swim during the heat of the day, and she dove off the boat without giving a thought to the fact that she was in a very active phase of her menstrual cycle. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, the bottom half of which was brief but not scandalously so.

  She had been in the water for perhaps twenty or thirty seconds—she had surfaced from her dive and wiped her hair back from her face—when she felt something bump her, very hard, in the thigh, and then bite her.

  She shouted and lashed out with her feet, trying to back away. She wore neither mask nor fins, so she couldn’t see what had bitten her, nor could she escape with any speed. It pursued her, bit her again, and kept coming. Again she shouted.

  Those of us on board heard her shout, ran to the side, and looked overboard. Through the gin-clear water we could see everything: a small (eight- or ten-pound) Nassau grouper had, we assumed, scented blood in the water and, following its instinct, attacked the source. Never mind that the animal it was attacking was more than ten times its size: that animal was bleeding, and blood meant injury, weakness, and vulnerability.

  It took us a few seconds to realize that what we were watching was not funny. Then two of us jumped overboard, one right behind the swimmer, one right on top of the grouper, which—startled to find that the sky had fallen on its head—shot away to the safety of the reef below.

  We escorted the woman to the back of the boat, helped her up onto the dive step at the stern, and were astonished at the damage wrought by the small, young, normally placid fish: the inside of one of her thighs had been torn, and blood was flowing from ruptured veins. Fortunately, the fish had not bitten deep enough to slash through the femoral artery, which could have caused serious, even mortal, damage.