How the Long Search For the Elusive Giant Squid Finally Came to an End in 2012

In a deep diving TED-Ed lesson, written by Anna Rothschild and directed by Vitaly Nebelskyi, narrator Susan Zimmerman (in animated form) explained the long historical search to find the elusive giant squid.

In 1873, fishermen glimpsed what they thought was a shipwreck. But when they probed the mass, it moved— and huge, serpentine appendages soon besieged their boat. One fisherman took an axe to the animal, and it disappeared in a cloud of ink, leaving behind definitive evidence that giant squids were more than mythical monsters.

The search proved successful in 2012, when scientists working the OceanX Explorer submersible, found a way to approach the giant squid quietly and in camouflage in the waters off the Ogasawara Islands in Japan.

Then finally, in 2012, scientists lured a giant squid and got it on video. They used a stealth camera system fitted with a device mimicking a bioluminescent jellyfish under attack. The system had no thrusters, keeping it unobtrusively quiet.And it only projected beams of red light— undetectable to most deep-sea dwellers.