I found this while looking up info on the the giant squid, archeteuthis duxis. It purports to be a series of photos taken from a National Geographic video of a “giant squid” attacking a large shark. Clearly it’s a large squid, but unless it’s a juvenile, it’s almost certainly not an a. duxis. Anyone know what this alleged video is?
According to this National Geographic page, there weren’t any giant squid to be found when they filmed in the Kaikoura Canyon in 1997 and 1999 (I think they would have mentioned having filmed one in 1998, the year givenin your link, in that article.)
If there is anything, it would have come from the Kaikoura expedition.
While there are plenty of videos of large squids, as far as I am aware there exists no video at all of a living “giant squid.”
Seeing as that site has sections for vampire, aliens, and demons, I would be very wary of what it has to say. Odds are, it’s a series of photos they found of a regular squid atacking a small fish. To me, it does not look like a shark, just a smaller fish, like a salmon or so forth.
I’m especially warry, since the page title proclaims “Squid Attacks Whale” but the photo caption says “shark”. It does look like a shark to me (there are small sharks that are well within the grasp of ordinary squid species), but at the same time, that part of the photo montage looks faked somehow. I was hoping someone could locate the video this was taken from, if it exists. I was always highly dubious that this was an actual archeteuthis, but I was curious about what it was.
I have no cite, but I had always been under the impression that no living giant squid had ever been seen. Only dead ones washed up on the shores of New Zealand (generally).
There have been several sightings of giant squid, though usually from uneducated (in a scientific/icthyological sense) sailors or fishermen… there seems to have been quite a few in the late 1800’s. Then again, I do believe there have been even more sightings of Bigfoot, so even a “sighting” doesn’t carry much weight scientifically, especially when by someone without a background in what they’re looking at.
The images of the fish being attacked aren’t very good, and I’d say that it may not be a shark. The head on the two small images on the right looks rather broad for a small shark, and it appears as though the opercular plates on the side of the head are flared out like a more advanced fish rather than a shark - most of which have gill slits rather than highly moveable opercula. The tail on the big left fish image looks all wrong for a shark, which should have a heterocircle tail whereas this fish has an indented tail fin. The bottom right fishes tail looks more like a shark, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a tail or some other smudge.
And if that blob of stuff at the top of all the pictures is chum used to lure fish near, then the size of these critters is most likely pretty small; unless the crew is laddling it out with a 50 gallon spoon. Everything just looks too tight and close together for a typical underwater camera to fit in it’s view if they were big. I’d guess that nothing there is over about 5 feet in length, and possibly smaller.
They had a discovery channel thing on this. Apparently they captured some spawn/larvae on their catch-a-squid mission, but they all died.
So if the documentary was true, they did see some live giant squid, albeit well-nigh microscopic baby ones.
Really? Did they…film any of them for the documentary? Even after they died?