They keep getting washed up on Australian beaches: giant squid up to 12 metres long that seem to have died of old age.
In the last decade or so, scientists have had the chance to examine 40 of these monsters – great big white blobs – from the deep.
The latest find, washed up near Hobart, was a female weighing 250 kilograms that had recently mated.
”There were packets of sperm on her body deposited by a male, and sucker marks — and something that might have been a lovebite on her head,” said David Pemberton, a zoologist at the Tasmanian Museum.
An earlier find, also netted in Tasmania, has been pickled and put on display at Melbourne Museum.
All we know about giant squid is what we divine from the dead specimens washed up in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
There are sometimes scars from sperm whales, their only predators. The whales have to submerge for up to an hour to have a chance of gulping one down.
Giant squid live at a depth of 1 500 metres, where the water is icy cold and there is barely any light.
”They are strange, almost mythological creatures of the deep,” said Melbourne Museum marine scientist Mark Norman.
The giant squid has a small brain: ”They are not very good at problem-solving,” Norman admitted. ”They haven’t got the right sort of tentacles to manipulate things
or sneak up on things”.
Cuttlefish and octopus, in contrast, are clever. They hide, they sneak up, they even hypnotise their prey by generating bands of colour that move up and down their tentacles.
The giant squid just waits for things to come by. It then locks its tentacles around its prey.
The squid are increasing in size. George Jackson, from the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies, reckons this is because of global warming.
The higher temperatures have given them bigger appetites and faster breeding cycles.
Another clue to their lives is that over-fishing may have left them with no natural competitors.
Jackson: ”If places have been over-fished, or the squid have been removed, squid have often moved into those areas and established themselves very quickly.” – Sapa-DPA