In 2004, DavidGrann wrote about the “squid squads” who invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines in a struggle to be first to encounter a living specimen.
He burned another hole in the net, filling the room with an acrid smell. He said, “After I graduated from the university with a doctorate in marine biology, I went to work for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. In 1996, I got a phone call saying that a fisherman had found a giant squid down in Wellington, and did I want it. I’d never seen one, so I raced down to the jetty, and took one look at it, and it was the biggest bloody thing I’d ever seen.
He spent the rest of the day building a second trap, then announced that it was time to go hunting. The worst of the storm had blown out to sea, but the weather remained volatile, with gusting winds and dangerously high waves. Two surfers had drowned. “We’ll have to do some reconnaissance,” O’Shea said. Before sundown, we took a drive with the trailer, trying to find a safe place to launch the boat. We pulled into an inlet surrounded by volcanic cliffs. “This will have to do,” O’Shea said.
As we left the harbor, it began to rain, and the smooth channel gave way to swells. The boat leaped over the crests, its aluminum hull vibrating.“She’s sturdier than she looks,” O’Shea said of the vessel. He glanced at the forward berth. “Underneath those cushions are the life jackets. You don’t need to wear them, but just so you know where they are.”
The currents were pulling us toward the rocks, and I could hear the massive waves crashing into them. I was holding a flashlight, and I shone it in front of us: there was a twenty-foot wall of water. I turned around, and discovered that another enormous wall was pressing down on us from behind.For a moment, I wondered if O’Shea was fully in command of his faculties. But we made it through the gap in the rocks, and he skillfully steered the boat into a protected inlet.
The voyage gave rise to the field of oceanography, but it also exposed the twin obstacles that would impede underwater exploration for generations: prohibitive costs and primitive technology. Even when scientists could finance expeditions, their equipment allowed them to study animals only after hauling them on deck—the equivalent of looking at a human corpse, then trying to imagine it alive.
According to one recent study, as much as ninety-five per cent of the oceans remains unexplored. It is believed that the seas contain as many as ten million species, of which fewer than half have been identified. By the nineteen-sixties, the giant squid had become, for oceanographers, an emblem of all that was still unknown about the seas.
Last January, before I ventured out with O’Shea, I joined the squid squad of Bruce Robison, one of O’Shea’s leading counterparts. Unlike other hunters, Robison has two underwater robots, which have superior imaging capabilities and speed through the water more quickly than divers or most submersibles. The robots belong to Robison’s employer, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which was founded, in 1987, by David Packard, the billionaire technology guru.
He led me around the rest of the ship, which had a dining room, a computer room, a laboratory, and a freezer for preserving specimens. On the upper deck, along with the bridge, were quarters equipped with televisions, which displayed the Tiburon’s live feed. “The dirty secret is that you never have to get out of bed,” he said. He left me to settle in my own private room. I soon realized that the boat had already set sail: it cut so smoothly through the water that I hadn’t noticed it moving.
Strange gelatinous creatures began to appear, which gave off dazzling displays of bioluminescence. There was a crustacean that walked through the water like a daddy-longlegs spider, and fish with jaws that were unhinged. There was a, a red balloon-like jellyfish that Robison and his squad had discovered and named for the R.O.V., and that was one of hundreds of new species that the squad had uncovered.
Several times, when the Tiburon got too close to them, the squid ejected streams of black ink. In the past, scientists assumed that it served solely as camouflage or a decoy. Robison told me that he and other scientists now believe the ink contains chemicals that disable predators; this would explain why he has seen deep-sea squid release black nimbuses in depths where there is no light. “As much as we know about squid, we still don’t know that much,” he said.
Conway shined the flashlight into the net. There were no squid, but there were swarms of krill, and O’Shea seemed buoyed by the discovery. “We’re definitely in squid eating country,” he said. After a while, he stood and dropped the trawling net back in the water. We worked until after sunrise. When we still hadn’t found any squid, O’Shea said, “An expedition that begins badly usually ends well.”
Before long, another villager stopped by and was offering his own advice. “I’d try over here,” he said. “Billy Tomlin said he once found a big dead one out in these parts.” O’Shea took in the information. Fishermen sometimes embroider the truth, he said, but they also know the local waters better than anyone else.
The less he found, the harder he seemed to work. He is not a big man, and his childhood illness had left his body somewhat brittle, yet he never slowed down as he pulled the net in with all its weight, then returned it to the water. His fingers were covered in blisters, his clothes were soaked through, and his glasses were stained with salt from the seawater.As the cold nights wore on, we worked in a kind of fog.
He held the cylindrical tank in the air, his arms shaking from exhaustion, as the waves pounded the side of the boat. “Steady!” he yelled. It was hard to see in the darkness—there was no moonlight—and as he poured some of the contents into a strainer, struggling to balance against the violent waves, something happened.“Jesus Christ,” O’Shea said.
That afternoon, O’Shea was sitting on the cabin porch, sipping a glass of whiskey. “Want a spot?” he asked.He spoke in a whisper, and much more slowly than usual. He said he had pinpointed a new location to search, but I told him I thought I would stay behind and catch up on my work. He looked at me for a long moment. “That’s what always happens,” he said. “People get bored and give up. But I can’t pay any attention to what’s going on around me. I just have to stay focussed.
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