Kraken Read online

  he word kraken conjures up visions of gigantic, tentacled, and deadly sea monsters, but it's an image born more of legend than reality. The oceans, however, do remain one of the last sources of profound mystery on earth, and they have been slow to give up the secrets of the creatures that sailors have mythologized and demonized for thousands of years.

  In Kraken, author Wendy Williams reveals the truths behind the squid, one of the most charismatic, enigmatic, and curious inhabitants of the sea, unfurling a wild narrative ride through the world of squid science and adventure. In addition to squid, both giant and otherwise, Kraken examines other equally enthralling cephalopods, including the octopus and the cuttlefish.

  Along the way, Williams examines

  • the riddle of just what constitutes intelligence via the octopus, an animal whose brain is wrapped around its throat;

  • the use of kaleidoscopic skin cells that allow cephalopods to instantly assume a range of colors, from neutrals to neon, for camouflage or communication;

  • the ways that squid have greatly helped scientists understand the inner workings of the human brain, despite their seemingly alien biology;

  • the squid's ability to survive the five major mass extinctions over the past half billion years.

  Accessible and entertaining, Kraken is the first substantial volume on the subject of squid in more than a decade, offering up the stories of the scientists who pursue these extraordinary creatures as well as the latest research and information about these fascinating and mysterious animals.

  KRAKEN

  ABRAMS IMAGE

  NEW YORK

  For

  BELLA JEAN THOMAS,

  who was fed by the ocean as a child,

  and who loved the ocean

  more than

  anyone else I know

  In our hearts, we hope we never discover everything.

  E. O. WILSON

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION From Vampire to Wallflower

  CHAPTER ONE A Wonderful Fish

  CHAPTER TWO A Saltwater Serengeti

  CHAPTER THREE Blue Bloods

  CHAPTER FOUR Architeuthis on Ice

  CHAPTER FIVE Fuzzy Math and Tentacles

  CHAPTER SIX Luminous Seas

  CHAPTER SEVEN Diaphanous and Delicate

  CHAPTER EIGHT Solving Frankenstein’s Mystery

  CHAPTER NINE Serendipitous Squid

  CHAPTER TEN Heure d’Amour

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Playdate

  CHAPTER TWELVE Fan Clubs and Film Stars

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN One Lucky Sucker

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Smart Skin

  EPILOGUE Curious, Exciting—Yet Slightly Disturbing

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  VIDEOS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  FROM VAMPIRE TO WALLFLOWER

  All animals are the same but different.

  —NEIL SHUBIN, PALEONTOLOGIST

  n the 1930s popular author and naturalist William Beebe cobbled together the world’s first real-life deep-sea expedition with the help of fellow explorer Otis Barton. The team’s exploration vehicle looked nothing like Jules Verne’s sleek Nautilus. Small and round and crudely engineered by modern standards, the vessel was in diameter less than the height of a man, with three-inch-thick observation portholes and a bolted-shut door that imprisoned the men inside. The steel globe leaked, and to circulate oxygen internally, the men waved palm-leaf hand fans. Without an engine, Beebe’s bathysphere dangled helplessly from the topside support ship like a ball of yarn suspended from knitting needles.

  Clumsy and dangerous, it nevertheless did the job. Over successive dives, Beebe and Barton sank deeper and deeper, descending eventually 3,000 feet into a miraculous, twinkling, watery universe never before seen by anyone. To Beebe, the eerie life-forms pulsating with energy and light were ethereal. One deep-sea animal looked to him like “spun glass,” another, like “lilies of the valley.” On one dive Beebe narrated his descent to an ardent North American and European radio audience. Listeners hung on every word, as avidly as they would decades later when American astronauts walked on the moon.

  William Beebe felt awe for most of earth’s species, but for squid and octopuses he often expressed revulsion rather than reverence. He described a small Galápagos octopus as possessing a “bulging mass” of head and body with a “horrible absence of all other bodily parts which such an eyed creature should have,—nothing more than eight horrid, cup-covered, snaky tentacles, reaching out in front.” The octopus’s tentacles seemed to wave at him “as if in some sort of infernal adieu.”

  His description of the vampire squid was graphically lurid: “a very small but terrible octopus, black as night with ivory white jaws and blood red eyes,” with “sinister arms” and webbing between the arms like a “living umbrella.”

  Let us try to forgive Beebe his prejudices. After all, his emotional responses reflected the spirit of the age. Long before Beebe’s time another scientist—who apparently thought of this particular species as some kind of monstrous, diabolic chimera—had already named the animal: Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the Vampire Squid from Hell.

  It’s not hard to see why these men, denied the benefit of our modern scientific tools, found this particular little squid so repulsive. Half octopus and half squid (it may be an evolutionary stepping-stone between the two closely related groups), the foot-long vampire is semitranslucent with a jellyfish-like body texture. It has eight arms like an octopus, but it also has two bizarre antennae-like appendages that sometimes float in the water like cast-off fishing line. Probably evolved from feeding tentacles, these strange extremities seem to detect prey. Vampyroteuthis’s usually blue eyes, the largest in the animal kingdom in proportion to body size, are capable of suddenly turning a devilish red, resembling the blazing coals of a Hadean fire. Hence, its hellish image.

  A vampire squid

  Today we know that Vampyroteuthis was misunderstood. The vampire squid from hell actually lives a rather humble, mostly slow-motion existence thousands of feet below the sea surface, often floating peacefully in the water column. It may not do much of anything most of the time.

  Tiny and not particularly powerful, it must sometimes even resort to self-mutilation as a defense. When threatened, little Vampyroteuthis bites off one of its eight arm tips, which are decorated with bioluminescent blue lights. As the severed arm floats away, its blue lights glow, luring the enemy in the wrong direction.

  Recent undersea videos show us a vampire that’s more like a wallflower or a shrinking violet than a demon from hell. Rather than fight, the beleaguered squid sometimes wraps itself up in its own arms so that it looks kind of like a deep-sea tumbleweed. It may cavort and tumble in the water until the confused predator gives up. If that doesn’t work, the squid might distract its enemy by ejecting clouds of ink filled with glowing particles. Undersea videos show an animal that’s often beautiful to watch. Were we to name this species today, we’d likely give it a kinder, friendlier name: maybe the wallflower squid, or the tumbleweed squid.

  The more we get to know about the weird beings that live in the ocean, the less we fear them. There’s very cool stuff in the deep sea, and some of that stuff, while worth knowing about in its own right, has also helped us live better lives. That’s what Kraken is about. It’s about how science and scientists work. It’s about how we have learned that we are, more than Charles Darwin knew, truly kin to and beholden to all the other creatures of the earth. Kraken is the story of how the most serendipitous discoveries from the most unlikely creatures have revealed these basic connections, and about how field research, lab research, and ideas generated through scientific teamwork have not only provided insights into human biology but also created medical br
eakthroughs that have improved our lives. Over the past seven decades, Beebe’s bathysphere has morphed into a myriad of manned and unmanned submersibles that have taken us all, as voyeurs if not as actual voyagers, into marvelous deep-sea universes. During those same years, we’ve also made remarkable journeys in genetic research and basic biology, aided, in part, by squid.

  It turns out that the vampire squid is our distant cousin, albeit many (many) times removed, and that, curiously, we share a lot of basic biology. Moreover, tantalizing clues hint that some species of squid may be intelligent and capable of learning from experience. We’ve seen that the Humboldt squid, like dolphins, hunt in well-coordinated packs. Cuttlefish communicate with each other in intricate code, using a language of flashing colors and skin patterns. Octopuses build themselves houses. (They also like cast-off beer bottles, but prefer brown glass to clear, and short necks to long necks.) Some octopuses can untie silk surgical sutures.

  I came by my appreciation for cephalopods—squid, octopuses, cuttlefish, and the nautilus—quite by accident. On Cape Cod, where I live, squid are generally regarded as either restaurant food or fish bait. But when I spent a summer as a science journalism fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, several biologists told me that squid deserved the Nobel Prize for their contributions to human medicine. Bypass the scientists and go directly to the animal that’s made the science possible, they told me. They were only half joking. That we can learn so much about our own bodies by studying such animals was, for me, a revelation.

  Squid have even helped us understand the workings of our own brains. Without squid, neurosurgeons would be a little less well trained, obstetricians a little less well informed, and geriatricians much less knowledgeable about the aging process. In the near future, squid may help us cure Alzheimer’s disease, improve camouflage for soldiers on the battlefield, and boost the health of babies born by cesarean section.

  But cephalopods also deserve to be studied just because of their own uniqueness. “When you look into their eyes, you know there’s something there,” squid expert and Smithsonian scientist Clyde Roper told me.

  I knew what he meant. When the animals stare so intently into our human eyes, they are seductive. With eight or more dangling arms and tentacles encircling their mouths, with the ability to change color and shape in milliseconds, with suckers as dexterous as our fingers and thumbs, and with eyes that are better than ours in some ways, they are enticingly, bewitchingly, exotically alien.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A WONDERFUL FISH

  If you believe such things, there’s a beast that does the bidding of

  Davy Jones. A monstrous creature with giant tentacles that’ll

  suction your face clean off, and drag an entire ship down to the

  crushing darkness. The Kraken…

  —PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

  n October 26, 1873, Theophilus Piccot and an assistant known to history as Daniel Squires rowed out for herring over the icy-cold surface of Portugal Cove in Newfoundland’s Conception Bay. Piccot knew the bay well. He had fished these waters hundreds of times. But on this trip, he and Squires saw something unusual floating in the distance below the Newfoundland cliffs.

  It was quite large.

  It looked, at least from a distance, something like an abandoned sail or debris from a wreck.

  Hoping for valuable salvage, they rowed over. The two men found a quivering mass unlike anything they’d ever seen. They poked the mass with a gaff. It was a living creature. It reared its beak at them, which the men later said was “as big as a six-gallon keg.” The animal’s beak rammed the bottom of their skiff. From its head shot out “two huge livid arms.” The animal then began to “twine” its arms around the boat.

  The two feeding tentacles, several times the men’s height and covered with serrated rings inside the suckers, shot out over the gunwales of the skiff, seeming to move with the speed of a lightning bolt. Fortunately, Piccot had a hatchet on board. He hacked away. He severed both tentacles, as thick as his muscular wrists, from the rest of the creature. The animal shot out gallons of ink which “darkened the water for two or three hundred yards.” Then it sped away as the men watched. It was never seen again.

  Piccot and Squires returned to port in St. John’s, bringing with them what might well be one of the world’s best-ever fish stories. They also brought back both severed organs, which had begun to stink almost unbearably. One they destroyed, not knowing its scientific value.

  The other was saved by the local rector, who received the flesh as though he had received the stone with the Ten Commandments. Moses Harvey, like so many educated Victorians, was an amateur naturalist. He had followed the decades-long scientific controversy over the existence of a fabled sea monster. He may well have read, only months earlier, a paper by A. S. Packard published in The American Naturalist arguing for the existence of a very large animal, Architeuthis, in the North Atlantic. The animal had been given its scientific name years earlier by a Danish scientist, but there were still those who contested its existence.

  Harvey understood the importance of having a genuine specimen. He had the 19-foot-long lump of flesh exhibited in the town’s museum. He coiled the tentacle like a snake and had a drawing made. He also had a photograph taken. He sent a written report across the sea to the British Annals and Magazine of Natural History. The journal published the package under the title “Gigantic Cuttlefishes in Newfoundland.”

  The animal was, of course, not a cuttlefish (a small kind of cephalopod) but a huge squid. The misidentification is not surprising, given the mystery that then surrounded the species. Harvey’s submission ended a scientific controversy that had existed for centuries and grown increasingly personal and even bitter as the nineteenth century progressed. Seafarers had long claimed that a massive, vicious animal lived in the deep sea. They said that the animal sometimes attacked ships and could tear a man to pieces. Whalers claimed the monster was as large as—if not larger than—a whale. They believed these monsters attacked whales. They had seen six-foot scars, made by what they thought were huge claws, on the skin of the sperm whales they took out of the sea. When they opened the whales, they found what looked like prodigious parrot beaks in the whales’ stomachs. The whalers’ stories were part of an eons-old tradition regarding an animal called by various names—“Kraken,” “the Sea Monk,” “the Great Sea Serpent,” and even “the Great Calamary”—that lived in the sea. Odysseus’s six-headed Scylla may have been part of that tradition, according to author Richard Ellis.

  Reports of the animal had been sporadic and confused. The tales told by the frightened people who saw the animal were so varied that it was difficult to tell whether they were seeing the same species all over the world, or a wide variety of animals with only a few characteristics in common. Classical Greeks told of a hydra, a nine-headed serpent. The New England Pilgrims said they saw in the 1630s a “coiled sea serpent” on the rocks on the Cape Ann shoreline. In 1734, the Bishop of Greenland insisted he had seen a “web-footed serpent” during an Atlantic crossing. In 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick described “the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, … curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.”

  Throughout the nineteenth century, as people increasingly plied the sea, reports of “a wonderful fish” in the globe’s oceans multiplied. Scientists remained skeptical. These confident—sometimes overconfident—men of the Victorian Age scoffed: How could the earth or the sea contain an animal so large that remained unknown to science? At that time, science theorized that no life could survive in the cold and lightless ocean depths, so the creature should have lived near the surface and been easily seen. No hard evidence existed to prove the sailors’ claims. With little more than fishermen’s tales, the scientists said, there was no reason to believe in the beast’s existence.

  Sailors and fishermen took umbrage. Th
ey knew very well that life existed deep down in the ocean. They had firsthand knowledge: Harpooned sperm whales often dove thousands of feet below to escape their fate and whalers routinely paid out thousands of feet of line to keep the animals from escaping. They also knew that the stomachs of these whales contained all kinds of unusual species that were rarely seen at the sea’s surface. These strange beings had to live somewhere in the ocean.

  Nevertheless, despite the specific knowledge provided by sailors and seafarers, science stuck to its dogma: Nothing could survive the water pressure deep below. No such thing as a giant squid could possibly exist.

  In 1848 the matter came to a head. Peter McQuhae, captain of the British HMS Daedalus, reported seeing a 60-foot sea monster, nothing like a whale, floating on the water near the Cape of Good Hope. McQuhae wrote that he and his officers saw the thing at such a close range that, had it been a man, they would have seen his facial characteristics quite clearly. The animal moved at a speed of about 10 knots, the captain wrote.

  Richard Owen, a paleontologist and a gifted scientific giant of his age who had coined the word “dinosaur,” ridiculed the captain. Owen, not well known for his pleasing personality, may have felt some righteousness regarding the naming of cephalopod species, as he was the first scientist to describe the nautilus, the cephalopod that lives inside the beautiful pearly shell. Many sea peoples knew about the shell, which could float for hundreds and even thousands of miles once the animal inside was dead, but until Owen came along, no European scientist knew the detailed natural history of the animal that lived inside.

  Owen was unwilling to believe in the existence of a humongous animal so closely related to the tiny nautilus. He did not just publicly disparage McQuhae’s claim. He hacked away at the sea captain’s personal credibility, implying in print that McQuhae was either a liar or a fool. According to Owen, the captain had seen nothing other than a very large seal or sea elephant (what we would today call an elephant seal).