For the first time ever, a giant squid has been photographed alive and in the wild (the underwater wild, I mean), near Chichijima Island in the North Pacific Ocean.  Using crushed shrimp as a lure, Japanese scientists baited a line and sunk it deep--2,950 feet (over half a mile!)--armed with a light and a camera.  Soon they found what they were looking for.

Architeuthis, or the giant squid, is the largest known invertebrate ("without a backbone") in the world.  More than 500 giant squid carcasses have washed up on shores over the last 400 years, inspiring fears and speculations of ship-eating sea monsters.  Well, the Japanese researchers didn't get eaten, but they did discover a monster.  An aggressive one.

Once the squid discovered the bait, it enveloped the meaty package like a snake with its two long tentacles (it also has eight shorter arms) and struggled for four hours to capture the tasty prize.  Meanwhile, the underwater camera was clicking away, taking over 500 photos of the event.  When the squid made a hasty retreat, one of its tentacles severed and remained on the line.  The researchers brought it aboard and found it to be 18 feet long.  The tentacle was lined on the underside with barbed suckers that still gripped whatever touched them.  Assuming the tentacle was severed at the base, that would make this squid about 26 feet long.  The longest (dead) giant squid ever documented was 59 feet long.

Emory Kristof, a National Geographic photographer who has made similar attempts to document a giant squid in the wild, seemed genuinely happy for the Japanese researchers who beat him to it.  "It's always been presumptuous to say you're hunting the giant squid when we know so little. It's great that they got it."  Part of the key to success was lowering the bait deeper.

The researchers chose the area near Chichijima Island because of the deep-water rock crevices--presumed to make a nice habitat for the squid--and because of the sperm whales that routinely gather there in the fall.  Sperm whales are known to eat giant squid.

Yet we still know terribly little about these creepy cephalopods.  How do they find prey?  Where do they live and how far do they travel?  How do they reproduce?  Another amazing thought is how long it took us to find this thing. Other weird carcasses have washed up on shores before.  Couldn't there be another huge species in the deep ocean just waiting to be found?  Emory Kristof thinks so:  "I'm convinced there are even bigger animals than the giant squid down there. There are monster sharks, for example, being born, breeding, and dying deep in the ocean, and we know next to nothing about them."  After all, the giant squid is the largest invertebrate in the world, and it took us until 2004 to find live evidence.

Which brings us to another weird thing about this story.  The Japanese researchers taped this squid in September of last year.  Now, it doesn't take months to get a message from the North Pacific to New York nowadays.  What took them so long to report it?  Were they waiting to publish a paper?  Constructing their theories first?  I'm not sure if I like this trend of discovering things, and waiting months and months before mentioning it to anyone, simply because you want to create the right climatic "moment."  (Remember the "Santa" planet discovery, which went unreported for more than a year before internet hackers allegedly threatened to release the information to the public themselves?)  After all, other scientists are spending tax dollars conducting their own research in good faith that they have the latest evidence.  If a discovery is kept secret, it could cause other scientists to build theories and conduct research based on false premises--such as, "Giant squid bait should be kept near the surface in order to be effective."  Isn't science and discovery supposed to be altruistic?