First-of-Its-Kind Video Shows How Giant Squid Hunt Their Prey Deep in The Ocean

There is a silent predator in the twilight.

Rarely is the giant squid seen in its natural habitat. In the first videos of their kind, unveiled in 2021, marine scientists caught its hunting behavior in the wild and revealed for the first time how these monsters of the deep stalks attack their prey.

Thanks to the wonders of robotic technology, we have slowly but surely been learning more about the depths of the ocean. Slow or immobile organisms are best studied by most of our underwater vehicles.

The bright lights mounted on underwater vehicles can make giant squid uncomfortable for their low-light eyes, which can grow to the size of dinner plates, and the sound and vibration can scare off more mobile animals. Giant squid will not record their behavior in their natural environment.

A team of researchers led by Nathan Robinson of the Oceanographic Foundation in Spain came up with a different solution. Because giant squid eyes are designed to see shorter-wavelength blue light, they used longer-wavelength red lighting to see the animals on video.

The fake jellyfish, called E-jelly, was equipped with lights that mimicked the blue flashing bioluminescence emitted by the atolla jellyfish. It's possible that giant squid are attracted to the distress lights of the atolla jellyfish because they want to eat it.

The only thing left was to wait. In the Gulf of Mexico and Exuma Sound, the platform recorded encounters with large squid.

In 2004 and 2005 there were two large animals that may have been a species only previously known from small juvenile animals.

The team continued to update their platform and captured Pholidoteuthis adami with a mantle length of less than one meter. They filmed the giant squid at a mantle length of 1.7 meters.

The encounters show that the squid are visual hunters, ignoring olfactory bait that had been placed nearby.

The hunting behavior of the giant squid was interesting. It is thought that it was stalking its prey before moving in for the kill.

It's not true that giant squid are ambush predators. The animal seems to be an active and engaged hunter that uses visual clues to find a meal.

New information about the range and distribution of the species was provided by each encounter.

The researchers said that this suggests that passive platforms could be useful for observing these elusive creatures.

They wrote that future studies should assess the value of using low-light systems or optical lures in a more scientifically-robust manner.

While the bioluminescence-mimicking E-Jelly appears to be an effective tool for attracting cephalopod species, future studies could assess whether lures of differing intensities, colors, or light patterns vary in their capacity to attract different taxa of deep-sea cephalopods.

The research was published in the oceanographic research papers.

The first version of this article was published in May of 2011.